Yes, it's a common feature of malware.

I'm sick of corporations and bootlickers who claim you cannot do games without anticheats. Even if I am not personally running that software, all the users are still normalizing spying on our devices and networks.

If your business model relies on violating the privacy of others, your business deserves to die.

As someone from the EU, could I not use the argument to argue that for me it's both an adversarial country?

Wouldn't having an adversarial country to be spying on you be the better option for you personally? At least privacy wise, not using your machine as some infiltration point, as the country you reside in has many more opportunities to abuse the data

Like US saying EU is its adversary and spying on it? Trump had been pretty clear that he sees EU as a threat while China and Russia is not.

And don’t forget that ICE sees both non-citizens and citizens as the enemy if they don’t agree with Trump.

Yes, in the headlines the agencies playing adversaries to the common folk are definitely mainly chinese... /s

we have routers that you can monitor traffic on

Most traffic is encrypted with HTTPS unless you can root every single device you own

we have microphone use indicators on mobile, and I would imagine it would be pretty clear if an app was uploading audio with even very basic monitoring tools.

Complicated smartphone OS, firmware, drivers might have bugs allow overrides of visual indicators.

Companies have also been known to secretly eavesdrop and not tell users before (Apple + Siri https://www.courthousenews.com/judge-approves-95-million-app...)

How confident or certain are you of what CSME or PSP or some code in TrustZone is doing? How certain are you that not a single piece of software on your machine, be it in the kernel, userland, drivers, is performing some type of surreptitious communication with CSME or PSP or program running in TrustZone?

Do you know for sure whether PSP or CSME has ever done DMA, or fingerprinted stack/heap allocation patterns and timing, or inspected the contents of your disk (after FDE was done being decrypted, of course), to evaluate whether common packet capture software is installed, or even whether it's currently running?

Detecting spyware is one thing. Detecting surreptitious nation-state spyware that behaves differently when it's being observed is a different challenge entirely.

I recall there were quite a few experiments where people use certain keywords heavily just to get closely related ads later on. I can totally relate my experience with it as well. Of course it is inconclusive - but if there is an incentive, management of big companies will venture into it. And chinese management is no different from western ones to that matter.

Perhaps because foreign governments with a known antagonistic stance would happily sell or hand over your data in order to cause large-scale economic instability via account attacks, political instability via fostering the prosecution of minority groups (as identified by said data)... get creative. Large-scale data on your enemy's citizenry is a new weapon in the modern arsenal, and we haven't seen anyone really try to use it yet, but I suspect the results when they do will be ugly.

The consensus is usually "well the government only targets you when you probably deserve it" whereas china is spying on everyone regardless of your opinion of the actions of the current administration.

To address your last paragraph - it’s not unlikely the latter use all powers to divert attention to the former as it conceals shenanigans of the latter

I am not sure where hyperbole is - if your believe it is "fake news", it's your choice.

Do chinese apps make use of all data they can access? Absolutely. Do western apps make use of all data they can access? Absolutely.

Both concepts are evil. Talking one is evil while dropping off the other is skew of discussion towards vilifying one side and omitting the subject.