Yeah. However wild some of the "America is the land of the free, China is a hellhole" takes are, there is a difference between a tracking system designed to try to sell you holidays and a tracking system used to identify political dissidents.
Background checks on visa applicants is a farcry from digital surveillance to identify political dissidents. Although, I would agree with the notion that the US government has been increasingly becoming a surveillance state, but not nearly as pervasive as China.
People ought to be most interested in the final outcome of each example.