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I don't see how a jail term can be even compared to losing a job and tracking by Facebook to government surveillance programs. You can opt out of it just by not using FB or by using a fake name. Go try to opt out of chinese censorship program.

Regarding Snapchat - the company that cares about privacy wouldn't require so many permissions (including a permission to receive SMS messages).

First, I'm not directly comparing losing a job to going to jail, I'm saying that things are not so different here. Of course going to jail is much worse than losing a job but when you consider all of the negatives of losing a job (for an average person, not someone in tech) I'd still say it's one of the worst things that can happen to you aside from being the victim of a crime or natural disaster, losing a close family member or friend, and going to jail/prison.

Also, you can opt out of Wechat just as you can opt out of FB, so I'm not sure I see your point. Sure you can't opt out of chinese censorship in general but the chilling effect in both cases is where I see the analogy. It's bad for online platforms to do that whether by coercion or direct force.

Not that I disagree with you on the overall direction, but I guess the question here is how easy it would be to opt out of this sort of thing in China, given the extent of their "great firewall".

At present, in Western nations, it is somewhat easy to, say, self-host certain social media platforms (from Wordpress to Mastodon) for friends and family and whatnot that could be used for more private, less advertiser-monitored social media interaction. Assuming you get buy in among your friends, this pretty much avoids issues with advertiser and employer snooping that you have on large social media sites. You can then keep your Facebooks and Twitters for your "public face" (or ditch them entirely).

I don't know if the same applies in China.

To host a website in China you need to get a permit [1]. You can host the site outside, but I am not sure if it will be always accessible.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICP_license

Losing a job might in some cases be worse than going to jail. At least in jail, someone might be feeding you something. And you could opt out of WeChat just as you opt out of Facebook.

It is unlikely that you will get quality food in a totalitarian country's prison.

This is totally nonsense.

Is it a guarantee that you will get quality food in a democratic country's prison, like prisons of US?

How likely it is that you will get quality food in a democratic prison like Guantanamo?

>I don't see how a jail term can be even compared to losing a job and tracking by Facebook to government surveillance programs.

Losing a job can be just as catastrophic as a jail term.

Especially if it brands you for future job positions too, as "that person that was fired because X".

Not everybody has it as good as in-demand developers, job wise.

And employer blacklists (e.g. of union types) have been a thing for ages, and can wreck havoc to a person's life (killing their economic prospects) in the way that a jail sentence might not.

Sorry to be the party pooper, but Advertisers can and do target individual users on Snapchat by simple means of uploading mobile Ad IDs.

So while Snap takes the high road here and tells people they're not bleeding or collecting information on their users (which is true), what they don't say is that still all the info that has been bleeding from mobile users through any other of their weather and emoji apps can and will be used against them in Snapchat Advertising campaigns.

If they didn't play along, they'd be quickly out of any media planners' heads, and they're already struggling hard against Facebook in the ad ecosystem.

Source: I do this stuff for business. Throwaway obviously.

Thank you for sharing! That is disheartening to hear, but it is still miles better than what other social media companies do. It's more the mass collection, analysis, and potentially sale of data that concerns me about social networks.

I already can't do anything on social media which could piss off my employer.

Well, the thing is that FB may have a real names policy but they really only occasionally enforce it.

Plus I think it's possible to just not be FB friends with anyone in your company or even use FB's permission system to hide controversial opinions. And I haven't heard of advertisers putting people in jail or firing them for their opinions. Here, it seems like you're confusing "creepy" and "actually has the ability to harm you".

But most people or many people, indeed connect their FB profile to their employer and wind-up censoring themselves accordingly. But that actually seems like the ordinary censoring of "peer pressure" that has always happened in among with the people who someone chooses to associate with.

If I went to the company picnic and hung-out with co-workers and boss, I would be self-censors like heck - fortunately, I'm able to avoid such situations which I find miserable experiences on all levels. God help me if I have to spend a lot of my social time like that.

It's easy to summarize this as "really what you mean is you're too lazy to set up communication which you're employer can't see" but I wouldn't want to imply the situation isn't a problem. That the medium requiring least effort broadcasts to people's employers, that is a problem, just a slightly different problem.

I used the advertising and employer situations separately. I think you're noticing that I mentioned being fired when talking about advertisement - by "advertisement" I meant by proxy all of the related data storage / exchange / leaking that accompanies it. What if Google gets hacked or sold and the new owner of their data sells a background check service on your searches? Or what if an advertiser tries to target to suspected drug addicts, then turns around and uses that info unethically?

I understand what you're saying about your employer, but there are different levels of self-censorship. My level of self-censorship for friends who work at the same company as me would be very different compared to acquaintances at the company and my boss. I'm ok with the first one because it's what I would do for my friends anyway. I know there are ways to toggle privacy/whatever to affect what people can see but at the end of the day I'm always going to assume my employer can see any regular post I make on Facebook through one means or another.

One big difference between government snooping in china and Facebook and google having tons of potentially compromising data is that in the US and EU and other countries, you have some level of protection from harmful misuse of that data in the form of regulations, lawsuits, and public goodwill. Not saying that either of those are perfect but they are real protections.

Regulations are slow and won't necessarily protect the first people who are harmed (see subprime crisis) but they can make it much harder to do similar things in the future

Lawsuits don't always work and are heavily weighted against consumers but do provide some protection

Public goodwill is huge. If lots of people got really hurt from a Facebook or google data compromise, id bet people stop using them. Seems crazy now but there are alternatives and Facebook is not essential. All these companies (and many other non tech ones, like banks for example) are strongly incentivized to not harm the public in a large way because the execs would lose their jobs and careers

These protections are FAR from perfect and shouldn't prevent you from losing sleep, but imagine living in a country where the government is incentivized to not protect its citizens through regulation or enforce standard legal protections

More chilling is the potential social acceptance of such snooping in the name of social harmony, trust in government etc. if people no longer believe such censorship or oppression is bad, you have a real problem

Edit: The NSA is an analogous threat in the US, but to my knowledge that info isn't used to secure the reputations and positions of government leaders. Also there is a huge public backlash against them, not sure if the same exists in china

> Of course there would be no direct consequences to either, but HR and managers would know (because they check) and it would affect their opinions of me negatively.

It's one thing to fire someone for having a political opinion (like Google recently) and just to have an opinion about people you work with.

You can't help having an opinion. We're not logical robots. All we can hope to do is to be aware of or decision making process d not to let irrelevant opinions influence it.

I agree with you, I'm just saying that the reality is that people will have worse opinions of you / treat you worse if you have political opinions they consider unsavory. So practically speaking, if you are interested in your career, you shouldn't voice any controversial (given your employer) political opinions on public social media.

I don't want to give HR any more reasons to mistrust me: say I supported candidate X, and HR think's X and their supporters are racist/misogynist/anti-immigrant. Now if someone raises a complaint about me, legitimate or not, and HR sees that, they're more likely to assume I'm guilty. And at the end of the day, all else being equal (and it often is with HR because they aren't really able to evaluate technical work well), who gets the promotion: the person HR sees as edgy, controversial, and potentially an asshole because of their political views, or the person who doesn't share their political views?

Things shouldn't be this way, but they are.

> And at the end of the day, all else being equal (and it often is with HR because they aren't really able to evaluate technical work well), who gets the promotion: the person HR sees as edgy, controversial, and potentially an asshole because of their political views, or the person who doesn't share their political views?

You are correct. However, I don't think that it can is even remotely close to China's censorship.