
China has wealth of data on what individuals are doing at a micro level - breitling
http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/china-data-for-sale-privacy-1.3927137
======
baybal2
This is what comes out of Google allowing apps to read phone IMEI in Android.
I have no concrete proof, but the reason why all major Chinese apps snoop
after phone IMEI is said to be that the commies have secretly demanded Chinese
dotcoms to collect and report phone IMEIs.

For example if you have a 6.0 or later Android, Alibaba app will block you if
you disabled the permission to read IMEI or it detects spoofing.

[https://postimg.org/image/m5u0nmdxd/](https://postimg.org/image/m5u0nmdxd/)

It is easy to see how they also use it for their own purposes: open a new
taobao account, search for some items, do factory reset, install taobao and
see that you are being shown same stuff you been searching before. This way
they also clearly violate Google store rules that prohibit using IMEIs as
tracking IDs for marketing purposes. It was reported over so many times, and
Google clearly knows of this. I guess, they are afraid of antagonising "the
premier Chinese dotcom" or still considering going back to China.

~~~
peteretep

        > Google allowing apps to read
        > phone IMEI in Android
    

An unpopular sentiment, but this is why I love iOS. I genuinely don't think
any of my apps can meaningfully spy on me without my having told them they
may. I even get reminders if I've let an app read my location in the
background, to check that's what I want to do.

~~~
bad_user
Even though I like Android more, I have to agree that iOS has had a better
privacy story.

But even iOS has problems. For example I cannot force apps like Waze or Uber
to only use my location while using them, you have to either disable location
for them completely, or to allow them to take your location while running in
the background.

It's an either/or proposition and the result is that Waze and Uber users do
_have their location tracked_ , because the apps are not usable with the
location completely disabled and enabling location on demand is too painful.
While in traffic, imagine sitting at a red light, wanting to turn on GPS
navigation to take you home or something and having to enable location in
iOS's settings.

And you may have given them permission, you may know about it, but are you
going to stop using Waze and Uber if you don't agree? I think I know the
answer for most people. And also, even with your permission, as a matter of
fact it's still irresponsible to let them track your location in the
background, even if you currently trust those companies.

~~~
robinson-wall
I don't think iOS is to blame for the binary choice that you get with Uber /
Waze. I have some apps which have three choices in the location services
settings (Always, While using the app, Never) so it seems like a choice by the
developer.

~~~
masklinn
Well Apple could have made the list unmodifiable so that application can't
"opt out" of the "while using the app" setting.

~~~
zimpenfish
But then every app would just go for "Always" in case they ever wanted to
change it in the future and we'd all lose.

~~~
e_proxus
You misunderstand. The list is for the user to choose, not the app developers.
As it is now, Apple allows app developers to disable the middle choice for
users, instead of forcing them to support it if the user so chooses.

~~~
zimpenfish
Ah, you mean apps should always have to support the options of "Never", "While
using", and "Always" rather than the app specifying which it supports? Sure,
makes sense, and I would be on-board with that.

~~~
masklinn
Removing "always" could make sense for an application not needing it, but that
aside yes, the "never" and "while using" choices should always be present.

------
yueq
Many people might not know, in US, credit card transactions/payments are on
sale by various sources. There's a very active market for this and some
fintech startups are solely based on this kind of data. Since most of our
financial life is based on credit card, we are under surveillance at a micro
level in a similar situation.

The issue is we not only use 'services', we handle data to the service
providers. Data under their custody is usually stored and transferred with
less secure protection, like on a thumbdrive or sent by email attachments. I
don't see this situation will get any better soon.

~~~
schuke
The thing in China is that so many trivial daily activities require
government-issued ID. Buying a coach/train ticket. Buying a SIM card. Every
website/mobile app registration require a mobile phone number, which means any
account is easily traceable to your government-issued ID, too.

Hell, even _visiting your friend_ in a hotel requires recording your ID before
hotel staff will let you go upstairs (strictly enforced in cheap hotels).
Internet cafes' administration system had been linked up to government ID
systems more than a decade ago.

This is the Polizeistaat that Hitler could only dream of. It's a whole other
level over any credit card surveillance.

~~~
monksy
When going overseas, all of those are required anyways:

1\. The DB wants to see id (that they can verify) for Eurorail passes. The DB
or the Belgian rail people require seeing the purchasing CC.

2\. Buying a sim in europe requires a passport.

3\. Most things you sign up for in the US requires a phone number. Loyalty
programs certianly do.

    
    
       3.1 Walgreens requires your ID in hand to scan it to verify that you're "over 21" (Really they just want to rip the info)
    
     4. Hotels require passport details (England, Belgium, Germany, Netherlands, France, carrebian, etc)

~~~
rconti
1\. Yes, I've always had to use my passport with my Eurail passes; though
often it's to prove I'm an American who is eligible for the cheaper pass.

2\. No, only in certain countries. I've bought SIMs from vending machines in
Iceland and Denmark. In Italy the merchant made me _seriously promise, I
really mean it_ to send him a photo of my passport as soon as I returned home
with my SIM. He gave me his personal gmail address to do so (probably because
he certainly didn't want that info going to his work email where it would be
obvious he ignored the rules). In Germany, rumor was you basically had to be a
German citizen to get a SIM; that turned out to be untrue but I cannot
remember if I gave them my (EU but not German) passport. IIRC I could not buy
a SIM in Sweden as a non-resident though. UK was no problem to buy a SIM.

3\. Yeah, but that's just an identifier. You could use any number, and a
different number for every merchant, and nobody would know. Though there was a
case of a fireman convicted of arson, partially on evidence of firestarters
bought using his wife's Safeway loyalty card number.

4\. I can't really ever remember being asked for my passport in the 5 of those
6 countries, but of course it's not unreasonable to be expected to show ID so
I cannot say for sure I never produced ID. Though I remember in Poland and I
think the Czech Republic they actually hold your passport, which made me very
uncomfortable. When you leave the room for the day you swap key for passport,
and vice versa on your return. Whether this is government or business policy,
I do not know.

~~~
stpe
> IIRC I could not buy a SIM in Sweden as a non-resident though.

You can definitely buy a SIM-card in Sweden without any kind of
identification. However, if it is a SIM-card with a (non prepaid)
subscription, THEN you have to ID yourself and be credit worthy (since you can
potentially run up a huge bill that is invoiced afterwards).

~~~
rconti
Right, I'm an idiot. I have a Swedish SIM somewhere. It was Germany I was
thinking of (and then, 3mo later, on a subsequent trip, easily bought a SIM
anyway). So much misinformation out there -- and I suppose I'm not helping.

It's amazing how hard it is (as a foreigner) to come by solid information on
the legal situation around SIM card purchases. It seems every company is
different, and the more restrictive ones have an incentive to make it sound
like a legal issue rather than a business decision.

~~~
fornever
This is the wiki you want: [http://prepaid-data-sim-
card.wikia.com](http://prepaid-data-sim-card.wikia.com)

------
delegate
> Now every picture posted, every comment made, every driving infraction could
> go into a central database to produce a person's 'trustworthiness' score.

How is this China-only ? Can't Facebook do the same ? Can't the government
force Facebook, Microsoft, etc to give out all the information that we
generate in their networks ? Can't they compute such a "trustworthiness" score
and sell it to your (potential) employer ?

Of course they can and they will if they don't already.

I've agreed to countless "license agreements" which I haven't read - I might
have given some company my exclusive permission to monitor my every move...

What if _your_ agreement contained a special clause not present in other
user's agreements ?

There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that what is going on in China will
become the status quo in a lot of other countries and this will accelerate as
shit gets tougher due to all the global problems that we now face.

What's even more disappointing is that these surveillance systems are most
probably built on top of open source software and libraries - which have been
ideologically released in order to increase the user's 'freedom', yet who
would have thought ...

Unfortunately the dream of a better, closer, freer world is now passing
through a nightmare phase - we've built the perfect tools for crazies to do
their crazy thing...

~~~
3pt14159
1\. Secrets that are widely known don't stay secret for long. Snowden leaked a
lot of documents and none of them said the government was doing this already.

2\. The data that is out there is _very_ messy. If you have a unique name and
you use it as your twitter handle, sure, this is already happening. It's
called Klout. But most companies just use it to figure out what image to put
on their coupons.

3\. I've never heard of employers asking for someones "trustwrothiness score".
We as a society get pretty pissy about this type of thing. We've banned IQ
tests, and needlessly asking for credit reports / scores. If a metric like
this came out in wide use we'd ban it.

4\. License agreements are generally unenforcible. You don't get the right to
someones car just because you put it in a license agreement. If you could do
that there would be lots of scams trying to get old grandpa to install a new
photo app to see his grandkids.

5\. What is going on in China is overblown in the media. It's not a episode of
Black Mirror. The people that are most impacted by it are politically loud
young adults online, but the vast, vast majority of Chinese don't worry about
it. There are much more important human rights concerns in China that need
addressing like freedom of the press.

6\. We're not in a nightmare phase, we're in the same phase we've always been
in. The telegraph cables were tapped by every major government, the radios
listened to, the phones tapped, we even put recording equipment into
televisions we sold overseas, our major hotels have always been tapped (or
easily tapped given a court order if a foreign national was in town). This has
been happening for over a hundred years.

I agree we should know about it (thank you Snowden) and in some cases I don't
like it, but the solution isn't to wish it away, it's to use encryption and
not say or do stupid things around computers.

~~~
paulmd
> 3\. We've banned ... needlessly asking for credit reports / scores.

No, it's perfectly legal for employers to run a credit report on you and make
a hiring decision on that basis. You're outright incorrect here.

[http://www.forbes.com/sites/kerryhannon/2013/03/16/has-
your-...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/kerryhannon/2013/03/16/has-your-credit-
report-cost-you-a-job/#21383887102d)

> 4\. License agreements are generally unenforcible.

Good luck proving that in court. Especially when you just also agreed to
mandatory binding arbitration instead of a court hearing.

It's not even a situation of you not being able to mount a defense against a
billion-dollar corporation, you will literally never have the chance to have a
lawyer in the room with you in any sort of hearing.

~~~
3pt14159
3\. It's banned almost everywhere in the western world except for America.
California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland,
Nevada, Oregon, Vermont, Washington, and NYC have banned it unless it's needed
for the job (i.e. they give you a credit card) and even the states where it is
legal it's still not used for non-sensitive positions or responsibilities, and
if it started to become widespread there they'd ban it there too.

4\. It has been proved in court countless times when the terms have been ruled
out of scope. You need to have meeting of the minds in contracts. You cannot
unknowingly agree to binding arbitration either. This is just FUD. Show me the
court case or the media storm when little Sally lost all her money because she
unwittingly agreed to some completely unreasonable ToS. The infringing company
would get countersued by an attorney working on commission.

Not that you can't get fucked by the courts and contracts in America, you most
certainly can, but not by these unenforceable / unreasonable ToS.

~~~
DashRattlesnake
> You cannot unknowingly agree to binding arbitration either.

I'm pretty sure that's not true. Hasn't Wells Fargo managed to use binding
arbitration clauses to successfully dodge lawsuits about the accounts they
fraudulently opened?

[https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/06/business/dealbook/wells-f...](https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/06/business/dealbook/wells-
fargo-killing-sham-account-suits-by-using-arbitration.html)

Those contracts are large, rarely read, often use lots of technical jargon,
and are subject to being unilaterally changed by the issuing party. Hardly
anyone understands everything they're "agreeing" to.

------
dcposch
China is fascinating.

On one hand...

\- China has done better than any other country on Earth at poverty reduction.
Chinese policy since Deng Xiaoping lifted hundreds of millions of people out
of subsistence poverty. Free markets were a big part of this, but so were
Special Economic Zones starting with Shenzhen, a culture of sharing IP,
massive govt investments in infrastructure, research and education.

\- China are also the most successful urbanists today. Many of those 100s of
millions of former rural poor are in cities now. In the time it took
California to debate building a single High Speed Rail line from SF to LA,
China connected their whole country with trains that are much faster, much
more useful (because they go directly into urban centers and connect to fast
local transit), and much cheaper. Ours still isn't done.

\--

And yet, at the same time, China also seems to be prototyping some kind of
grim meathook future.

\- Extremely aggressive surveillance. Near zero respect for privacy. Govt
deputizing the tech sector to spy and censor on their behalf.

\- Cities with toxic air. Check out this glorious ad in Beijing right now:
[https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C1JrMsKUAAAopPT.jpg](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C1JrMsKUAAAopPT.jpg)

\- A closed, censored alternate internet

\- "Social Credit" Scores based on surveillance, which look like a
frighteningly powerful way to neuter dissent

China moves faster than we do, both for better and for worse. I guess our
challenge is to emulate the things they're doing right (eg the vastly more
efficient and effective way they build transit), while stopping our own
governments from repeating China's mistakes and acts of authoritarian
overreach.

~~~
loeber
> China has done better than any other country on Earth at poverty reduction

This is only true if you're applying a ludicrous double standard. China has
done better than most other countries at this because China was _extremely
poor_ just a few decades back. Nowadays, much of China is still very poor. Of
course it's much easier for China to slash its poverty rates than for an
already-developed nation. The real thing to ask about is how long it will take
China to bring a western middle-class style quality of life to its citizens.

~~~
dcposch
Im comparing China to other countries that were similarly poor in 1980-- much
of the world, including the second biggest country, India. China did much
better than them.

I don't think any other society in history has lifted as many people out of
poverty in as short a time.

~~~
mistermann
Did American corporations not gift China with a massive amount of free,
working out of the box technology to get them going?

~~~
agentcoops
"History is like a grandmother; it loves the younger grand-children. To the
latecomers it gives not the bones but the marrow, while Western Europe has
hurt her fingers badly in her attempts to break the bones."

~~~
Tarq0n
That seems ignorant of the cumulative advantage that Europe enjoys to this
day. If anything it illustrates how technological development is shared on a
global scale, allowing anyone to catch up to the latest standard of
industrialization if they can find the necessary investment.

------
TaylorAlexander
Oracle maintains a database of personal information for billions of people.

The US corporate surveillance web is rich in complexity.

Before we judge China, lets make sure we know what we're comparing them to.

I highly encourage anyone interested in the subject to watch this talk from
last month's Chaos Computer Club Congress.

"Corporate surveillance, digital tracking, big data & privacy: How thousands
of companies are profiling, categorizing, rating and affecting the lives of
billions"

[https://media.ccc.de/v/33c3-8414-corporate_surveillance_digi...](https://media.ccc.de/v/33c3-8414-corporate_surveillance_digital_tracking_big_data_privacy)

[https://youtu.be/kd6NKvwQVbM](https://youtu.be/kd6NKvwQVbM)

You say the Chinese system is sinister because they force you to use ID cards.
In the US corporate surveillance system, they can track you without ID cards.

~~~
simonh
The concerns about US/Western surveillance is that it could lead to routine
direct abuses and active intrusions into daily life. It's important that we
use the political and legal protections we have to limit the risks this
raises.

In China they have routine direct abuses and intrusion into daily life right
now and are expanding it as fast as they can. There are no legal protections
and the risks are already happening.

If you can't see there's a difference there, I can't help you.

~~~
TheRealDunkirk
I'm not sure what sort of legal protections you think Americans have, as it
would seem that any 3-letter agency can get an order to force private
companies to hand over any data they have about any number of individuals
based on the rubber stamp of a secret court which forces the company to stay
silent about the activity. I'm absolutely certain that the NSA has precisely
the same granularity of data on US citizens as described in this article. The
US government is just smarter about hiding that fact, lest there be a second
revolution. Another decade or so, and it will be so prevalent everywhere else
that they'll start operating in the open, just like the Chinese.

------
contingencies
What a silly article: "download the controls to the private sector" indeed.
The government already owns the telcos, half the banks, the only domestic
interbank transfer system and the only domestic travel reservation system so
they have your IMEI, real time location and history, network traffic, bank
balance and payment and employment history and travel plans anyway. And that
of your friends/relatives. They certainly don't need help from an app. That
said, after 16 years in and out of China, I still feel safer here than the US.

~~~
idra
What a silly comment, complete with the mandatory "it's worse in the US"
passage that mysteriously appears in half of the comments to China-related
articles on HN.

Yes, the governments owns telcos etc. Yes, they probably have files on people
they consider a threat, such as human rights activists. But to think that all
that data is accessible in some kind of coherent manner is ridiculous. This is
China, where banks cannot even access information between physical branches of
the same bank because of its bizarrely inefficient IT infrastructure. The
telcos have been trying to enforce the "real-name" policy for SIM cards for
months, yet you can still easily buy and use a SIM card on the street.

They definitely need help from an app, because private Chinese tech companies
are somewhat competent compared to the government IT sector.

Do you really feel safer in a country where you can get jailed without trial,
where you can jailed, deported and banned from re-entry based on a urine test
at the whim of some provincial government official that you crossed paths
with? In China, the biggest threat is the government.

~~~
pyrale
> Do you really feel safer in a country where you can get jailed without
> trial, where you can jailed, deported and banned from re-entry based on a
> urine test at the whim of some provincial government official that you
> crossed paths with? In China, the biggest threat is the government.

Being foreign to both countries, the difference is not obvious. Formally, this
could happen to me in both countries. Even culturally, the "They only do it on
strangers, so that's fine" argument before and during the Snowden files makes
me doubt of the support I would get as a foreigner (and I'm on the good side
of being a foreigner, not being a visible foreigner).

------
suprgeek
This our terrifying future in America - the incoming administration has very
scant regard for civil liberties, and is filled with business insiders who
worship money above all else.

Add to this the fact that both legislative chambers are controlled by the same
party who is "tough" on crime.

For profit or to ostensibly address Terrorism expect surveillance to get much
worse.

~~~
velodrome
> the incoming administration has very scant regard for civil liberties

Sorry, they were eroded long before. This is why people must remain vigilant
whether it is the person they voted for or not.

[http://images.dailykos.com/images/330962/story_image/1249.pn...](http://images.dailykos.com/images/330962/story_image/1249.png?1479837787)

~~~
ricardonunez
That's actually a problem. Most people defend the people they voted like is
part of themselves just so they don't have to admit they made a mistake.

------
sneak
It is precisely the same in the United States, it is just somewhat deniable
there due to things like the FISA court.

It allows peoples' inherent belief in American virtue to doublethink
themselves into believing that the NSA doesn't collect this high-res data in
bulk from Facebook and Google and Amazon and Apple and the mobile
carriers—when we have clear documents showing that they do.

LOVEINT is real. The large social networks and communications providers are an
official arm of the surveillance state, with all of the unfettered access to
high resolution data that entails.

Your doctor or hospital hosts data in AWS? Pretty sure HIPAA doesn't count in
this case when they're just sucking up all of the traffic in bulk.

Your social media and financial data are already being aggregated and sold—we
know this, too.

~~~
rosser
> _Your doctor or hospital hosts data in AWS? Pretty sure HIPAA doesn 't count
> in this case._

False. I work for a company in the education space that uses AWS. We're
unambiguously bound by FERPA. It is inconceivable to me that a _stricter_ law
like HIPAA wouldn't also bind cloud-based companies.

EDIT: Moreover: [https://aws.amazon.com/compliance/hipaa-
compliance/](https://aws.amazon.com/compliance/hipaa-compliance/)

~~~
privong
> False. I work for a company in the education space that uses AWS. We're
> unambiguously bound by FERPA. It is inconceivable to me that a stricter law
> like HIPAA wouldn't also bind cloud-based companies.

I think the GP was asserting that the NSA doesn't care about HIPAA, not
asserting something about HIPAA and Amazon & companies using AWS.

~~~
rosser
Yeah, after the shadow-edit. The rest of the paragraph I quoted wasn't there
originally.

------
xja
Pretty terrifying. I'd love to see a more detailed analysis of the datasets
they received. It sounds like both governmental and private surveillance
systems in China may be pretty leaky.

I wonder if the information is leaked through hacks or compromised
individuals.

~~~
electic
The article says they are through the government. This includes immigration
records, telecom GPS information, financial transactions, etc. Most of it is
not coming through social media sites.

~~~
maxander
The government collects and organizes the data, but presumably there's no
Chinese government website offering citizens access to this database. Who
exfiltrates the data and sells it?

Corrupt officials is an obvious answer. Or hackers- given all the terrifying
hacks of U.S. government databases that are reported, its likely as not
Chinese databases are just as vulnerable, and they're much less likely to
inform the public of breaches.

In either event, its potentially an example of China's government stability
efforts coming around to bite them- how many incriminating details of
government officials are tucked away in this database, for sale to the highest
bidder?

~~~
res0nat0r
This is a good video about the subject:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lHcTKWiZ8sI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lHcTKWiZ8sI)

------
chj
The lesson is: even if you have nothing to hide, you are surely getting
someone very rich.

~~~
velodrome
It's been around for ages. Better known as "Knowledge is Power."

 _Scientia potentia est_ \- Sir Francis Bacon

 _Knowledge is power and it can command obedience. A man of knowledge during
his lifetime can make people obey and follow him and he is praised and
venerated after his death. Remember that knowledge is a ruler and wealth is
its subject._ \- Imam Ali, Nahj Al-Balagha, Saying 146

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientia_potentia_est](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientia_potentia_est)

------
throw2016
The big difference is China is openly undemocratic and the citizens know what
they are up against. Here its posturing, misdirection, propaganda, nebulous
lists, secret process and the exact same thing only under cover and pretense
all working like clockwork to lull the citizens into complacency.

Dial back 10-15 years and try to imagine the response to a news item like
this. Hysteria about totalitarianism from the media, endless interviews with
academics, ngo and human rights organizations. Grandstanding by politicians
and citizens. Where are all these noisy vocal folks? What is orchestrated and
what is real?

------
HillaryBriss
Even though this article is about data on Chinese citizens, I kinda wonder if
the Chinese government doesn't keep a big database of what American folks are
doing, too.

I mean, why not?

They've the got the hackers. They've got the big DB. They've got the absence
of laws preventing such a practice.

------
jilljennV
I was really surprised to see my Chinese friend pay the restaurant bill using
WeChat, just by flashing a QR code. Which means they know all the data a
typical social network can handle, but also how much you are paying where.

~~~
plaguuuuuu
I keep voicing concerns about Google Wallet in that respect but nobody takes
it seriously.

~~~
arjie
That's because everyone knows that nobody really uses Google Wallet.

~~~
rconti
sshhhh, if parent keeps voicing their concerns, sooner or later they're bound
to be within earshot of someone who uses Google Wallet.

------
pjtr
I often wonder what's missing to create and simulate a detailed economic model
down to the individual level for and entire country or even the world.

There are only 7 billion people to simulate, that doesn't actually sound like
that much anymore.

Obviously one would not simulate every individual with realistic human-like
AI, but with a statistical economic model.

How much and what kind of data would one need for this to be useful, for
example to predict if a certain new political initiative will actually work?

Or is this already being done? Or is it not needed? Or just still too
expensive?

~~~
shalmanese
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychohistory_(fictional)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychohistory_\(fictional\))

~~~
pjtr
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large-
scale_macroeconometric_m...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large-
scale_macroeconometric_model)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computational_economics](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computational_economics)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Living_Earth_Simulator_Project](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Living_Earth_Simulator_Project)

~~~
rconti
Damn. No offense meant to the parent (because I wasn't even smart enough to
come up with this on my own in 2017, much less the 1940s), but it's humbling
to see someone having such insight 70 years ago.

~~~
simonh
I read Asimov in my teens back in the 80s, but the fact that Chaos Theory had
already pretty much killed a lot of those ideas as a plausible possibility
took the edge off a bit.

------
est
And it was leaked to telecom scams. It was rampant in China.

------
nunez
As if this system didn't exist within the US. Credit and bank account spending
records have long been a treasure trove of analytics on how people go about
their day to day. Social media extends on this even further since there are
_many_ people who post EVERYTHING about them on these platforms.

------
xena
If people are being tracked by the IMEI number, can't you patch android to
just return a random IMEI number unique for every day or hour? The parts of
the phone that actually use that number have it hardcoded in, the rest is just
for display.

------
notliketherest
As an American, I would never download a Chinese app like WeChat or use a
digital service based in China.

~~~
verst
I'm German and (as stereotypes would have it) extremely privacy conscious.
Having lived in the US for over a decade I've reluctantly come to terms with
the lesser privacy standards here.

For a long time I refused to keep a lot of information on Facebook as Facebook
seemed to only consider privacy as an afterthought after users expressed
outrage (I appreciate transparency about the use of data so I can make my own
decision). I refused to use the sign-in with Facebook functionality as I had
no interest in giving third parties access to my FB data. Eventually I just
gave up and now use Facebook sign-in everywhere because it simply is much more
convenient.

When I traveled to China a year ago the utility of using WeChat or Baidu Maps
was simply too great. I was well aware that using these applications almost
certainly would surrender information to the Chinese government. Interestingly
enough, because I assumed that this would happen one way or another during my
3 months stay I felt more inclined to use these applications.

WeChat is the only viable way to keep in touch with all of my Chinese friends
in China and in the US.

~~~
FabHK
I wish everyone would just install Signal and Wire - it's not that hard :-/

~~~
kuschku
Signal is not intended to protect from government surveillance, nor is it able
to.

~~~
kijiki
You have the source code to Signal. You can see exactly how it protects you
from government (and other) surveillance.

To be clear: it does better than anything else you can find in an app store.

~~~
kuschku
I can do the same with Telegram.

I can’t verify the source code of the server, or run my own federated server
(Moxie doesn’t do federation), and I can’t trust that Moxie’s server doesn’t
relay metadata to a government.

> To be clear: it does better than anything else you can find in an app store.

Wrong, proof by counterexample: Conversations.im is also in appstores, is also
open source, but, because it’s an XMPP client, I can run my own servers, and
federate, and ensure the servers are also secure.

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coconutoperator
The big problem is black market for data/identities. Not only in China but in
the world. Identity theft is quite huge. And a lot of those data weren't even
stolen but was sold by those corrupt officials or staffs in some firms.

~~~
baybal2
How much do they pay for a post these days?

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gersh
Does the data include high-ranking government leaders and leading businessmen?

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FabHK
Truly dystopian. Reminiscent of the Black Mirror episode "Nosedive" (Season 3,
Episode 1), but worse.

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throwaway99128
Much the same as in The Netherlands, where the police is proud to be able to
track any move of any citizen through big cities (using installed cameras) and
which is the country with the most telephone taps per citizen.

Really, many countries in Europe are basically run like Singapore.

