Reject Convenience did a pretty thorough rundown on what they're doing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iX3JT6q3AxA

It's been a minute since I watched, but my key takeaways were that they just reach out to one type of broker which barely scratches the surface of the Data Economy iceberg, and since there's no legal precedent outside of California and the EU, it's purely up to the brokers to decide whether or not they want to comply.

So I think it's probably more likely they really are just private companies preying on people's anxieties about privacy and relative ignorance about the topic, rather than some kind of governmental conspiracy