That's because it's surveillance.
Reference to “communist states” refers to real (as “existing in the real world”, not “adhering to real communist ideology”) states that have claimed Communism as the end-goal of their ideology (all of which have embraced a totalitarian state-capitalist praxis for all or most of their existence.)
It is true that the surveillance is more related to the totalitarian, state capitalist praxis than either the claimed Communist ideology or any other actual ideology the praxis may have sought to realize.
What ideology has had a significant number of states claim to adhere to it in the modern age and not seen many of those states adopt intrusive widespread surveillance?
Seems to me that blaming one particular ideology for a near-universal feature of modern states is not helpful.
True Scotsmen
> ...wouldn’t necessarily thrive on a lack of privacy
Apart from the (eternal) "true communism has never been tried" yarn [1] it is actually true that a total lack of privacy is the only way in which something resembling communism can work. The closest thing to communism - and that is saying a lot because it is not actually communism but does fit the "to each according to their needs, by each according to their abilities" motto - is the family. Depending on where you are this can be anything from the nuclear family to the extended family but central to this is that everyone knows everyone and nobody can really hide their assets and (lack of) contributions from the others. That is what makes it work, the fact that leeching of the rest of the family is easily noticed and dealt with. The fact that this becomes impossible when the community becomes too large is also one of the (many) reasons why it does not work at a larger scale. This is doubly true for the Marxist-Leninist variety of communism which intentionally creates an upper class of "party members" who get to lead the rest of the plebs towards utopia. These "party members" unfailingly end up creating a two-class society where all animals are equal but some are more equal than the others. This two-class society means the ideal of "true communism", that being the classless society, will never be reached since the upper class (i.e. "party elite") depends on the continuation of the "struggle" for their continued existence as an upper class.
[1] yes it has and it has always led to the same disastrous results as it will again once the next Chavez or Maduro or whomever gets to play that game again
Never stake your identity to a political ideology as that is a sure-fire way to become a 'useful idiot' (to paraphrase Lenin).
