In China, consumers are becoming more anxious about data privacy | Hacker News Reader

In China, consumers are becoming more anxious about data privacy

economist.com

129 pointssubsubsub65 comments

As someone who lived in China, I doubt it.

Individual rights and limitations on government power are not taught in Chinese schools nor ingrained in Chinese culture. Politics is not natural part of the Chinese conversational diet in much the same way that bread is not a natural part of their nutritional diet. To the extent that such topics come up it is pragmatic to a fault. It is always in the context of fixing a specific problem in the here and now (Eg there is corruption therefore lets purge the corrupt) and never in the context of a broader political philosophy (Eg how should we structure the civil service to dis-incentivize corruption). Chinese ideas on what ought be legal are rooted in intuition for what we would call natural law rather than study of what we would call natural law.

I can't imagine Chinese people being concerned about the general case of lax data protection. I can picture a near infinite string of ad hoc outcry over things like the strawberry adverts.

Anyone from China disagreeing with my observations on your country, feel free to yell at me. I invite you.

> Politics is not natural part of the Chinese conversational diet in much the same way that bread is not a natural part of their nutritional diet.

What do you mean by natural? Because I hear Chinese people talk about politics all the time. It's an extremely popular topic and they love to get into the intricacies of it and compare how current leaders act compared to historical leaders.

I definitely hear them talk about how society and philosophy influence current day politics. For example, how different would this political leader be if he followed the Mozi [1] school of thought.

Of course, I understand Chinese so perhaps that's why? I know that many Chinese people dislike talking about politics with foreigners. Especially if they can't speak/understand Chinese.

Also, not to be nit-picky, but mantou [2] and shaobing [3] are both a natural part of Northern Chinese diets. Of course I guess some people might not consider them true breads.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozi

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mantou

3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shaobing

This is tough because it's mostly anecdotal, but after living in China for two years (I can speak mandarin) talking about politics in the US was like suddenly being able to breathe again, it was a tangible culture shock. Sure, some people liked to talk about society and politics and economic development especially when it related to China's history, but I can only remember one or two times in two years that I experienced the kind of completely open political conversation that we have every day in the US. China is big, so this could be related to region as well, I was in Hunan.

The OP conflates politics with criticizing government or CCP. Arguably some do believe politics is solely an activity of blaming government.

What can I say. I guess we just knew different people.

In SH 2+ years, agree 110%. Complete absence of domestic discussion. Well versed on foreign politics based pretty much on what is fed to them by their media hook, line, and sinker.

Similar to anon, I'd disagree with you that "politics is not a natural part of the Chinese conversational diet". Chinese people talk about politics all the time: America being world police, current reforms the government is trying to push through, etc.

More about individual rights/data privacy though, I'm not convinced that it's something ingrained in the culture. As badly as the Tiananmen square protests went, that was still a significant portion of China advocating for a democratic government.

I do agree that there is an uphill battle where many Chinese are simply apathetic about the government. For many of them, they've just been in the middle of 30 years of pretty unbelievable economic growth. Not exactly the type of environment conducive for anti-government ideals to take hold.

> Politics is not natural part...

I wouldn't say that Chinese political habits are natural in the way that diet is natural, when the people in power discourage political expression not controlled by the party.

Boy did Apple skate to where the puck was headed or what? I remember reading all those hot takes years ago insisting it was a mistake and thinking how short sighted that was [1][2]. It was also weird because even before the Apple Watch was announced there was plenty of evidence of their health ambitions, so it obviously made sense to be strong on privacy and security. Since then multiple high profile hacks have happened (and are bound to keep happening), the FBI fought Apple and lost (at least in lower courts), GDPR is being implemented in the EU, and antitrust regulators are taking a look at internet business models [3].

[1] https://dcurt.is/privacy-vs-user-experience

[2] https://stratechery.com/2015/tim-cooks-unfair-and-unrealisti...

[3] https://www.ft.com/content/9376eece-00e4-11e8-9650-9c0ad2d7c...

From [1]: The truth is that collecting information about people allows you to make significantly better products, and the more information you collect, the better products you can build

That is a hilariously absurd statement. Collecting data has never been about making better products.

And apple being pro-privacy is equally absurd, they just haven't gone full retard and started collecting everything they can. Which I guess is noteworthy of a company its size today, but don't confuse that with pro-privacy. It is just what everyone would expect of any sane entity. The climate of today just means we've set the bar so low that some confuse it for "pro-privacy" to care the slightest of it's consumers.

> Collecting data has never been about making better products.

I’d argue that Google Maps is a much better product BECAUSE it collects a whole lot of information from its users. The most visible one is the traffic information, you literally cannot provide that information world wide without collecting data from your users (unless you want to burn all your money on installing sensors on every street corner in the world)

I don’t think that’s objectively true. Apple has been making deliberate tradeoffs that favour privacy where it would be easier and possibly better UX not to do so. Siri is a pretty classic example of these tradeoffs in action.

Saying a company is "pro" anything is probably a bit of a stretch. But Apple have made a number of public statements, and fought against the US government taking a stand on for the privacy of their users. Given the option available, they seem to take the one of stronger stands on privacy (for a company developing their own phones/operating systems).

> Collecting data has never been about making better products.

That's a strong statement. Especially given that I know for sure data that is collected exactly for that purpose within my company.

Maybe you'd consider an alternate statement: "Collecting data is no longer solely about making better products."

That doesn't mean much for the Chinese, though:

https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2018/01/16/icloud-i...

My only problem is that to use an Apple device, you have to give them your name and physical address to sign up for an Apple ID.

I understand that privacy != anonymity, but I prefer the Google way, where they don't ask for all that information (of course I bet they already know with their all powerful location tracking).

What? You can give them a fake name and address to sign up for an Apple ID. And as a bonus, they won't even randomly freeze your account and demand your phone number. The fact is that with Google, even if you don't tell them who you are, they will figure it out anyway and use that data is all kinds of ways that won't necessarily benefit you.

In terms of privacy, Apple has got my back whereas Google would feed me to the hounds for extra advertising revenue. This is why I changed from Android to iPhone after being a hardcore Android fan for years.

But Google decided to leave China instead of giving in while Apple has turned iCloud over to the China government and removed VPN software.

http://dailycaller.com/2017/08/06/while-trashing-trump-apple... Apple Is Selling Its Soul To China | The Daily Caller

> My only problem is that to use an Apple device, you have to give them your name and physical address to sign up for an Apple ID.

Umm, no: an icloud/appleid can simply be generated (here, make yourself a few: https://appleid.apple.com/account#!&page=create ).

For an itunes ID sure, as a side effect of it being a billing ID, but your itunes account doesn't have to have the same email address or even be connected in any way with your appleid. Mine are like that.

Is there any possibility that China could try to limit Apple product's availability to citizens there?

Why do that, they can coerce apple to do whatever they want. Apple showed no resistance whatsoever about that.

Apple is a more of a high status fashion company that happens to use a lot of tech, like Rolex in the early 20th century. Tech specs aside, I don't feel that there are equivalent products so it would be hard to do to itself, like going on a diet.

Man, it's a strange article. Fraud of every kind is endemic in China. When I'm in China, it's reasonable to assume anyone who initiates conversation with me has some kind of scam in mind. Strangers are very wary of each other. It's common to receive scam texts from people saying they're your dad or your landlord and to send money to such and such a bank account. I think most Chinese people have never had the opportunity to use any computer other than perhaps an iPhone that has not been backdoored/rootkit'd/RAT'd in at least one way. What would data protection by Chinese companies even mean? They're already comprehensively cooperating with the CCP.

To be fair to China that scam has targeted me at least 15 years ago via email and so common in the USA that the FTC warns people about it. https://www.consumer.ftc.gov/articles/0204-family-emergency-... Fraud is everywhere including the USA but not in the same way as China I imagine. There are some industries rife with fraud in the USA, how do you explain the following to people in China - auto repair (can't trust anybody until proven fair and have to get multiple estimates)/short term payday loans/that recent posting about elder guardianship abuse/multi level marketing systems/furniture rental. OTOH I don't worry about the food in the USA being tampered with in the infamous ways Chinese industries put poison in pet food or put plastic toxins in milk to cut costs.

You don’t get scammed on the street like you do in china or Italy tourist areas. Ya, instead you have to believe a Nigerian prince really is contacting you by email or that Microsoft is really calling you about your windows PC.l, or there are really single girls in your area who are interested in you in the Internet.

But really scams all over the world prey on people who don’t get “too good to be true.” That fancy shampoo you bought cheaply at the whole in the wall store below your apartment? Ya, it will definitely be fake!

> You don’t get scammed on the street like you do in china or Italy tourist areas.

Yes you do.

When I was in New York, Baltimore, New Orleans, Chicago, and other cities, I constantly had people come up to me and "ask for help." They would give some sob story about how they were tricked to come to the city and they are just trying to get some money to go back home.

Or people would approach me at gas stations, saying they forgot their wallet and just needed to borrow some money for gas.

That’s not scamming, that’s begging.

Have you spent time in NYC? I get scammed regularly here, it's not a Chinese or American thing. It's possible the rates are higher there in general, but I wouldn't say you "don't get scammed in the streets" in the USA.

I haven't, but I've spent plenty of time in Beijing. I think Italy is worse though, especially Milan.

Anecdotally in the Bay Area have been approached by strangers for both the three card Monte and the shell game. I think that if I did not have prior knowledge of these I would have been vulnerable to them as well.

I don't know. Gambling on the street doesn't seem like a very American thing. Are you sure you weren't targeted because you looked Chinese? (for the same reason white people get targeted for specific scams in China...)

> Gambling on the street doesn't seem like a very American thing.

I've seen it occur a few times personally, usually with no Asian participants, and its been regularly depicted as a thing in US entertainment media with non-Asian participants in a manner which suggests that the audience was not expected to see it as unusual as a practice.

I don't know, either, not enough data/investigation to judge. Off the top of my head I was in San Francisco and a homeless person approached me and several Asian friends for a game in the street and once in a BART station and another time I was with some caucasian co workers in Redwood City at a fast food place.

Strange. I've been to the Bay Area many times, lived there for a couple of years even, and I never saw anything like that, especially in Redwood City.

I'm pretty versed in the foreigner scams in China, but, they aren't applied to Chinese people. The main ones that apply to Chinese are fake goods at the small stores (very common, almost universal), a farmer in the middle of the street at night pretending to get hit or waiting to pretend to get hit, and the money on the ground scam.

Or opium in the noodles... https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2014/09/2...

I wouldn't be so sure an iphone isn't backdoored. Apple did participate in PRISM[1], after all.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_(surveillance_program)

and Apple was denying PRISM before proofs were presented[1]... Apple has 100% control on your device and the government has 100% control over Apple. If you think that the device is unbreakable, you are foolish. But either way, they can transfer data while you are using the phone because it is unencrypted at that point.

1. https://www.cultofmac.com/230452/are-apple-and-other-tech-co...

>What would data protection by Chinese companies even mean? They're already comprehensively cooperating with the CCP.

Well even if it looked anything like the EU's GDPR, even then the CCP would still have a carte blanche to collect whatever they wanted, just as the BND [0], AVID [1] et al do so today, and at least the politicians could pat them selves on the back about how they are protecting their people, while continuing to subvert such protections.

[0] https://electrospaces.blogspot.com/2016/09/secret-report-rev...

[1] https://electrospaces.blogspot.com/2014/02/dutch-government-...

The GDPR specifically exempts governments from the regulation.

In fact the GDPR would likely concentrate data collection to governments which would provide services to the market. In fact this has already happened in countries with strict regulation like Germany where if you want to look up someone’s details it’s much easier to simply access them from a government run DB than collect them on your own.

>if you want to look up someone’s details it’s much easier to simply access them from a government run DB

Yes, it will be much easier to gain access to a compromised government DB if you want to have bulk access to such information a la shadowbrokers et al.

> When I'm in China, it's reasonable to assume anyone who initiates conversation with me has some kind of scam in mind.

That's pretty much true everywhere else, isn't it now? If a random stranger you don't know initiates a conversation with you, it's usually because they have something in mind that quite likely is not in your best interest. I believe what you called "having a scam in mind" for China is usually called "salesmanship" in the US.

I walk to and from work each day in a large urban downtown in the US, and I average one interaction each way, each day. Almost none of them are approaching me about anything involving a scam.

For every 5 people that communicate (other than a nod or polite hello), 4 are just asking for money, full-stop. That's begging, but not a scam. It's honest, they ask, I say no, because I don't carry cash. The other 1 out of 5, such as today, was just a guy who wasn't sure if the bus he was looking for stopped at the street we were both on. It was about 22:30 and he was worried he'd miss the last express bus home.

Occasionally someone asks for money for food, and then I offer to buy them lunch, and most turn it down. Maybe that counts as a scam? But some take me up on it. So if that's a scam, I'd estimate 5% of people I talk to ask me for money for food, truly just want money, and have a scam in mind. That's definitely a minority.

Edit: As additional context, I traveled through China for a little over a month in 2005, and very much related to the GP's comment. I know the country has changed massively since then, but I have traveled through a half-dozen countries, lived in 2 others, and China stands out in that way.

In the few years that I lived in the US, there were at least two occasions where I have been approached with a somewhat scammy story in different (large) cities. I'm not saying its endemic in the US, but it does happen.

But compared to China, (a) the frequency of an encounter with a random person on the street as a pedestrian is significantly lower in US cities and (b) I imagine the levels of poverty in China were/are much higher, which might be a factor why scams are frequent?

No, what I mean is that in China, anyone who comes up to me, especially if they are speaking English, intends to lie to me and maybe lead me to some place to be defrauded, and this is their job. It's not the same in the US or many other places at all.

Strange. In my experience, when someone comes up to me, they are either trying to hand me a leaflet or they are some old dude who's amazed that he gets to see a real foreigner in his lifetime and wants to make some small talk. The one time someone spoke English, it was a student who wanted to practice.

Obviously I'm not spending enough time in the right places to be targeted for a scam.

> Obviously I'm not spending enough time in the right places to be targeted for a scam.

Or you don't look like an easy mark.

Sorry, when I look back at my comment, it was overly broad. China is very diverse and every city is different. Part of my time in China was spent in probably one of the worst areas for that kind of behavior, at least towards foreigners: Shanghai.

Well, I've been living in Shanghai for more than a year now ...

There's a pretty clear distinction between salesmanship and fraud, to the point that one is legal and the other is not.

Not in Canada.

I hope this is a turning point in Chinese conscious of human rights

This is my hope, too. Humans tend to eventually revolt if they get oppressed too much. I like to think that this move to create total surveillance and censorship for anything "bad" the Chinese do or think, and the government's project to create "Perfect Citizen" score, will eventually result in a blowback.

At the same time, I worry that the Chinese have been brainwashed (yes, I know, westerners are brainwashed in many ways, too) for so long about how things should be in China, and this surveillance and censorship apparatus backed by advanced AI would be so powerful than the government will be able to crush any potential dissent as soon as there's a spark of it. So this could go on for a long time, potentially indefinitely.

We'll see if new technologies, such as uncensorable blockchains will be able to prevent that in any way.

Could be, but don't expect them to turn into the US any time now. The culture is different, fundamentally.

Surely the US isn't what we're hoping other countries aspire to when it comes to human rights? High rate of incarceration, high rate of poverty (both symptoms of fundamental racial issues), death penalty, high youth incarceration, ongoing struggle for same sex marriages and abortions, the state of its health care, government attack on privacy ... and that's just on the domestic front.

Out of all countries to turn into, US shouldn't be even in the top 5.

Name another country and I'll go ahead and list all the problems they struggle with too.

Iceland

Took me about 5 seconds.[1]

[1]https://grapevine.is/news/2016/10/27/unicef-red-cross-icelan...

That can only happen If China become a stable, developed country.

This is a common talking point of the CCP, but it is not the truth. When the state protects the rights of all people within its borders, those people grow to trust the state; they choose to work openly with the state and each other instead of hoarding wealth in secret. A state which does not protect human rights can not earn the trust of citizens and cannot win their full participation in developing the country.

I'm not saying it's true for all countries, but it is true for China. The government is putting development as priority instead of human rights, and since the government is unlikely to change anytime soon, this is the reality. Only when China is prosper enough, the government may start caring about human right. It's also a big culture shift, and can take a long time and lot's of mistakes.

I'm not saying it's true for all countries, but it is true for China.

China is full of people, and people are depressingly alike.

.. and thats why there is no tax avoiders in the west. They all trust the state, especially the trusts thrust the state.

Poland has gotten rid of its communist government at the height of surveillance and oppression, when the country was anything but stable and developed. So I don't think that's a necessary prerequisite.

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