Hacker News Reader

Comment by sneak | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

Source? Data that supports this? There are certainly means of surveillance, but not likely to the same level or accessibility that is shown in the article.

Please elaborate instead of making a blanket statement :)

> 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/

> 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.

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

HIPAA is actually pretty terrible in terms of protecting your privacy from government agencies (or from insurers). It can require covered entities (health care providers, plans, or clearinghouses and buisness associates) to hand over medical information to law enforment officials without patient consent, and can even ban covered entiities from informing patients about disclosures under some cirumstances.

The EFF has a lot more detail here: https://www.eff.org/issues/medical-privacy and more specifically: https://www.eff.org/issues/law-enforcement-access

>It is precisely the same in the United States..

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com