Do they do the same spying on the models/units produced for sale in EU? It’s not actually a necessary part of the operation of the device, so it makes sense they’d be able to sell them without it.

HN on average is a little behind on the general EU "privacy" stance (though I saw some recent topic about that here). EU was about privacy, a few decades ago. Nowadays it did a complete U-turn and legislates mandatory anti-privacy union-wide laws every year.

- Chat Control law, now all messaging must be intercepted and monitored.

- eIDAS law, mandating that web-browser vendors must now accept state issued root certificates, so that states can selectively and without any legal procedure deploy MITM attacks at will.

- ADDW law, mandating that all new cars must a permanent mandatory camera and microphone surveillance module inside a car, which can't be disabled by law (bye-bye insurance if you will). There also other fun things in it like mandatory autobraking, mandatory auto lane-assist etc.

- ProtectEU laws, demanding backdoors to emails and such (maybe it's the same as Chat Control, not sure).

- AI Act legalizes AI surveillance over CCTV recordings without any judicial approval.

- European Media Freedom (duh) Act legalizes deployment of shit like Pegasus against journalists.

I'm pretty sure I'm missing a lot here too. You get the picture. EU is getting fast track into Stazi 2.0, everyone is fine with it, "because children" /s