We Should Worry About How China Uses Apps Like TikTok | Hacker News Reader

We Should Worry About How China Uses Apps Like TikTok

nytimes.com

25 pointspanarky13 comments

Not to get too "whatabouty" here, but it always feels a bit less poignant to call China out for the same things the United States, and massive private US corporations, are doing. Censorship, collection of private data, public data, biometrics, DNA, monitoring and incarcerating ethnic minorities. At least in China they have public healthcare.

Unhelpful comparison without acknowledgement of the serious shortcomings and corruption in Chinese healthcare; and the free debate in the US concerning privacy. The gap is too large to "what about".

Free debate doesn't do much when the people in power have no motivation to change, and when even small wins (like net neutrality) are so easily undone. I really don't think the gap is as large as you might think.

The US is a bit more liberal in its allowances of public discourse than China but at the end of the day US media mostly serves to maintain the status quo; you're not going to make any real lasting change via freedom of speech alone.

Also look at actual movements within the US which have made an impact on people's lives and see how the US state has cracked down on them, the Black Panthers are a good example of this.

It's hard for me to read this in a US newspaper and square it with the real world. It bemoans race riots and military police in Xinjiang - in China. From the context of the Baltimore race riots three years ago I cast my mind to Xinjiang Muslim radicals within China - right next to the Afghans who American troops and military police patrol 18 years and counting, on the other side of the world. Radicals in Afghanistan who the US had originally armed in the 1970s and 1980s to overthrow the then secular Afghan government incidentally.

Then from Facebook Google and most of the surveillance San Francisco establishment, in lockstep with government PRISM, we look East to see the Chinese doing the same?

Africans in the US, native Americans at the Standing Rock reservation being water cannoned, are no better off than those in Xinjiang. More African men in the US are in the prison system than college.

The demonization of China by Americans for what Americans are doing, with less reason, is silly.

It is like the hypocrisy of telling Venezuelan military to revolt and cheering street protests in Venezuela, then going back to hearings about Russian interference in the US or condemnations of yellow vest protests. Macron praises the destructive protests in Caracas and condemns yellow vests in Paris in the same press conference.

> no better off than those in Xinjiang.

This is false equivalence.

While treatment of many groups is disgraceful in the US, the level of surveillance, social control and repression is nowhere near what happens in China.

China has locked up millions Uyghurs and other ethnic groups in re-education camps.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xinjiang_re-education_camps

Yes, America's wars are shameful.

Guantánamo Bay, the FISA "court" and domestic concentration camps for asylum seekers are contemptible.

But these things are not on the same scale as what China is doing.

The fact that we can have this conversation without censorship or fear of arrest is evidence that the US and China are far from equivalent.

We should worry about all such apps, regardless of provenance... As a non-US citizen, I don't really see the difference between e.g. a China-based app and an US-based app.

This is very true.

As a non-US citizen I would trust US apps, especially those by companies like Google or Apple, any day over Chinese apps.

Me too, the consequences are less severe. (For now).

For example? Can you give some concrete examples of consequences for you in the two cases?

I also prefer US apps over China apps, but only because of UX. Not because of trust.

NYT's China hit article of the day

Of course we should

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