But zooming out, I think a society/government's job is preventing destruction and growing. That may not be in a way that's dangerous to other governments, but high relative growth can make other governments irrelevant. I'm claiming that the value from unabashed large scale data surveillance that CCP gathers is very large, and that might be a significant enough factor moving forward that privacy-first countries might simply not be able to keep up with it, and become irrelevant.
From this viewpoint, if the EU is doing this, we have no large diverse conglomerate that can serve as an experimental control any more. We can't even tell if privacy "is a good thing", for the final metric of growth. Not US, not EU, not India. Africa is still not in the same league.
Every single one of them have basically succumbed to privacy vs. security false dichotomy (https://signal.org/blog/private-contact-discovery/). Every single one thinks the way forward (at least for now) is mass surveillance.
Maybe they think the gain from not having public crime is big enough to justify the cost. In which case CCP was "right" - convergent evolution means something (for now).