China has wealth of data on what individuals are doing at a micro level

    > Google allowing apps to read
    > phone IMEI in Android

Personally I don't trust Android (or the hardware companies that sell Android devices) or iOS but picked an Android 6+ device because in principle I'd rather have an operating system that's more open. AFAIK all the Apple privacy stories have been about US cases so as a non-US person I'm also not sure they'd apply the same standards to me.

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.

I'm admittedly not well informed on the subject but I assume this has been going on for decades, are there any consumer privacy laws around this? While I find Google data collection activities worrisome, I at least have some faith in their technical ability to keep that data safe. And unless I'm mistaken Google only sells targeted access but not the actual data which is what the credit card companies and bureaus do.

There is a significant difference between this and extensive government data with your name attached, though I agree it's not great from a privacy perspective.

Typically (as has been said) you can opt out of this sharing.

And while it's fun to either wave our arms around and say "But everybody's doing it!" or talking about wild dreams of a better tomorrow, the crap we've created is right here, right now. As a technical person, if you're looking for somebody to blame, there's the mirror.

When I was in the armed forces and you needed something desperately that you did not have, somebody would always say "Well, you'd better grow one"

We technical folks do not have the moral underpinning we need to help there be a brighter tomorrow. We're lacking the social and political theory and the historical grounding to understand what kinds of things might help and what kinds of things might hurt. Instead we just imagine how what we're making might help mankind along. News flash: imagining isn't cutting it any more.

We may not have the tools we need to responsibly create the tech we're creating, but we'd better grow some.

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.

As an instrument of control and coercion, however, there is a massive difference between a government collecting data and not telling you, and a government collecting the data and telling you they use it to calculate your worth to society. The latter seems utterly tyrannical.

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.

It has to be easy to build a new railway when you can just send the police to evict everyone in the way.

But you can't so easily dissentangle the one from the other. A lot of their development is so quick because they ride roughshod over property rights, safety standards, environmental concerns and individual liberties to push them through.

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.

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.

Can you elaborate on why is it?

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...

Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

Please elaborate instead of making a blanket statement :)

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/

No it isn't.

> when we have clear documents showing that they do.

We have claims and vague overview documents, but no actual direct evidence. For China, it's so rampant that direct evidence is everywhere.

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

Financial data can only be sold in non-personally identifying anonymized forms. Now either you know this and you're willfully trolling, or you don't and you have no idea what you're talking about. I live in the UK so modulo Brexit, my social media data is protected by EU rules. At least the US does have some controls.

China has no controls whatsoever, the government blatantly ignores the law, completely owns the courts and exploits the data directly right now for censorship and persecution. It also sells it for the personal gain of officials. No innuendo, no supposition, no conspiracy theories required, they're doing it in plain sight on a massive scale.

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

:)

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.