Rule of law doesn't imply strong privacy. In fact, I'd argue that privacy and rule of law are fundamentally in tension. Privacy favors scofflaws, particularly those trying to corrupt the law, so in any social system with privacy there's going to be a tendency toward asymmetry of privacy in favor of the corrupt.
The ideal scenario for rule of law is no privacy. However, privacy has intrinsic value of its own so we're stuck trying to maximize privacy while minimizing the corruption. It's an ongoing balancing act; every society will do it differently and it will change over time.
If we can assume Facebook's apps aren't lying (i.e. E2E is properly implemented - this seems to be the case with WhatsApp) then this is better for those exact purposes.
Even the star child Signal [1] has to store metadata...
E.g. Middle East countries