I don't like this kind of surveillance any more than anyone else on HN, but we get this here all the time. People make these posts that X leads to Y and jump way over the details. Sometimes X does lead to Y. Other times, it's the Underpants Gnomes: There's a big "???" step between X and Y that people don't like to take the time to articulate. This is how conspiracy theories take hold--you ignore the ??? and just assume "Of course X leads to Y! We all know it!"

HN should be above that. When we make a claim that X leads to Y we should be ready to show how X leads to X1, which leads to X2, which leads to X3, which leads to Y.

Almost all articles in the press about data collection and privacy are very poor and only focus on what data gets collected, not how it's used, nor how the circle completes and it comes back to harm the source of that data. To its credit, your second link at least lists a single vague example of how it's used, "data can be misused in ways such as fraudulent insurance claims or fake medical histories" but nothing about how that results in harm to the end user. We should expect better from reporters.

We should expect better from HN though, too. Let's not make conspiratorial claims here. I'm going to call them out, even though I am an opponent of this kind of data collection, too.

This is a false premise that we don't hold Chinese companies accountable.