The photo editor on my Sony phone keeps telling me it wants to send data to Sony and refuses to open when I decline. So the Chinese are no worse than the Americans and, apparently, the Japanese in this regard.
Wow, so because of this one example you conclude "So the Chinese are no worse than the Americans and, apparently, the Japanese in this regard."
You are saying that if you can find a single example of X happening in domain A and a single example of X happening in domain B, then "apparently" A and B must be "no different" with respect to X. People are murdered in Japan. People are murdered in Brazil. Thus Japan is no different than Brazil with respect to murders.
Please please tell me that you are just being inflammatory and that this "find one example" criteria isn't how you go about making assessments of things.
You're right; our natural bias would be to distrust the Chinese more, because culturally and politically they are so far removed from us. So actually we should be suspecting the Americans and Japanese more than China to counter our biases.
Could China possibly have infiltrated as much of global communications networks as the NSA & Five Eyes have for the past decade and a half? Not likely! If we didn't have such successful digital espionage programs, would we instead rely on our corporations to spy on our behalf? Very likely, seeing as we've already done that too.