Comment by John_KZ | Hacker News Reader

Comment by John_KZ | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

>Google is selling out for nothing.

I don't understand the notion. Google already censors anything they like with very advanced methods that even provide them with plausible deniability, high specificity etc. And I bet they're better than the Chinese at tracking literally everything you do online and connecting that with your real, offline identity, complete with your entire social network graph, your biometrics, SSN, income, race, personality type, political affiliations etc etc... And they already provide that data to governments upon request. Not a legal request, but an API request.

The only thing I'd want explained about the article is how it would be physically possible to track users more closely than they currently do in the western world.

Censorship is a government action. When people and private companies do it, it's called filtering. There's a world of difference between an individual or company having control over data vs. a government. People and companies with heavy influence can mess things up a quite a bit, sure, but they can't arrest, imprison, sentence or put anyone to death.

And this time we actually have legitimate, real, censorship to fight.

Censorship is not at all limited to government action. It is "the suppression or prohibition of any parts of books, films, news, etc. that are considered obscene, politically unacceptable, or a threat to security."

Anybody with suppressional power over information can do it.

"Filtering" is not descriptive of what is happening either, that word trivializes and even gives the action a positive connotation. Filtering removes stuff nobody wants, it cleans, it gets rid of debris and trash.

Beware of word subversion! If you try to make morally bankrupt actions harder to describe depending on the actor then you're attempting speech and thought control.

That world of difference is a very small world given the kind of collusion that goes on these days. In China, it's probably about the size of a desktop globe.

Censorship can also be unofficial, when there is no law for it, but someone from the government unofficially advises that the company should "filter" some information and they comply.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com