Really?
"Yes sir, we have entirely expunged your data and you have the US government's solemn promise that we didn't make a copy of the files we're not telling you about."
Effectively, there is no such thing as expunging digital data. There's always probably some extra copy somewhere.
There's no silver bullet, just a long battle of attrition.
And as the leaks have fallen off the news cycle, along with an interesting rise of misinformation in social media, you gradually see people beginning to understate what was revealed and to show ever less concern over it. It's actually a phenomenal demonstration for how a secret agency should handle a leak to avoid any meaningful consequences of what is ostensibly ground-breaking information on programs that are, at best, in legally grey areas, all being released to the public en masse. Snowden no doubt felt that his leaks would change our approach to intelligence if not our entire nation. In reality, next to nothing changed.
[1] - https://theintercept.com/2016/08/14/nsa-gcsb-prism-surveilla...
If the government is not allowed to gather certain biometric data then that is relatively easy for the public to monitor. If the government collects and then promises it is going to delete the data there is a real chance that it won't get done.
Its not an assumption, its a fact that has been proven time after time in every case for the last 15 years.
>Laws give you a way to win a lawsuit, at the very least you have that.
That's just not true. Not only can the government spy on you with impunity, the court has ruled that the government can kill you, without any due process whatsoever, and you are entirely powerless to challenge or even discover if you are on their "kill list" as long as they invoke the "state secret privilege".
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20190924/20182043065/dc-co...
The unfortunate fact is that our legal system has failed. Instead of enforcing the law and upholding The Constitution - its most core and precious mandates - our legal system has consistently deferred to government claims about the need for absolutely secrecy and legal impunity to do whatever they deem necessary.
In my own stuff, I'd feel obliged to make a disclaimer: "Yes, I've deleted your stuff, and the backups of the data (which I still have), will rotate out of existence in nnn days." I would also need to keep the deletion request handy for nnn days, just in case I needed to restore data (& so that I could re-delete their data).