The largest tech companies (think Meta, Apple, Google to some extent) currently have most of your private data, and have largely made the decision to encrypt it

The largest tech companies (think Meta, Apple, Google to some extent) currently have most of your private data, and have largely made the decision to encrypt it. Presumably they’ve decided that they have enough user data to suit their advertising needs, and this private stuff (DMs etc.) is both a legal liability and a threat to their reputation with customers. Even Mark Zuckerberg is pretty militantly pro-encryption now and is risking a lot of political blowback to encrypt Messenger and Instagram DMs. My unsubstantiated theory is that some corporate interests are aware of this, and this data continues to be valuable to them, even if its current custodians don’t want it. That means there is presumably a pool of tech companies and government contractors who see this data being under-exploited and want access to the revenue from mining it. Promoting new laws like anti-CSAM scanning regulations provide them with an “in” to that data they wouldn’t otherwise have: at very worse they can sell scanning solutions. And maybe as the laws metastasize they can use them to perform even more sophisticated data mining on private texts, and even produce byproducts that they can monetize in other ways.