People are being a little naive. The US gets its "grubby" hands on every little thing you do, as does China. The question is not, "Which 'grubby' hands do I wish to allow to do my deep body cavity search?" But rather, "Why, exactly, do I need to submit to deep body cavity searches by 'grubby' hands at all?"

two clains were made:

* that the NSA as compromised all major tech

* the us gets it's grubby hands on all your data

in support of which no evidence was presented. a user kindly linked me to a Wikipedia page on PRISM. However, that program is only ISP data, requires a warrant for domestic purposes.

Meanwhile, Qualcomm has several programs running below the OS level that track users "anonymously" in various ways. Such systems can much more easily be co-opted by other parties such as governments.

That's a very poor assumption. One very common method is to get some dirt on someone, then blackmail them into getting a job with access to data they want. That doesn't have to be classified data, they're also interested (probably more so) in corporate espionage so they can make products better and cheaper.

Then there's economic disruption. Where you're not a target as an individual, but as a group. E.g. everyone using their device with Verizon's service might have their service go funky, people think it's Verizon and switch. Or certain websites appear slow/unavailable so you buy something from a different one.

Of course there's lots of other ways they could use it to their advantage, but the point is, civilians are very likely to be targets too, for a multitude of reasons.