DHS warns of 'strong concerns' that Chinese-made drones are stealing data | Hacker News Reader

DHS warns of 'strong concerns' that Chinese-made drones are stealing data

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18 pointspolskibus9 comments

This is a reminder that DJI left an S3 bucket exposed nearly two years ago, containing sensitive customer information like flight logs and PII. Oh, and they also had the wildcard SSL private key for dji.com sitting in a public repo for four years.

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/11/16/dji_private_keys_le...

DJI released an update to enable private mode. They should turn it on by default or ask the user to choose during the initial setup.

"The United States government has strong concerns about any technology product that takes American data into the territory of an authoritarian state that permits its intelligence services to have unfettered access to that data or otherwise abuses that access,"

Oh the hypocrisy. Not saying it's unwarranted, just humorous to me.

I am sorry, how is this different from Google recording my location data?

Is the fact that servers are in China automatically make it malicious? What is they moved them to Switzerland?

Home vs. Outsider. Visa vs. An-unknown-transaction-processor.

Though the analogy can be questionable.

I don't see why every claim about a Chinese company must come with a "but X company is just as bad" comparison. Consumers need to be informed about risks to their privacy. Moralizing about who is the worst offender transforms the discussion away from privacy education.

Well, let's turn that around. Why is this automatically malicious just because the company is Chinese?

(Yes, I agree that China does some horrible stuff, but let's not forget Facebook and CA were neither Chinese)

It's malicious all on its own. Any entity handling your data poorly and collecting more than strictly necessary poses a risk to you.

Where this gets fuzzy is when you get into the identities of the perpetrator and the victim. Are you a Uighar in China? Well, then China is clearly a pressing threat to you. Are you a Muslim in Burma? Perhaps then China is not very much of a threat. What if you're an American in the US military? What if you're from a hostile country, but traveling to the US? Etc ... People don't always map this risk out in a way that I believe is sensible. Many Americans are worried about using Google, and are much more comfortable with China spying on them than Google. Is this a valid concern? I think it depends on who you are and what you believe about either entity. But, that's sort of the point. The "is X company/country" evil?" discussion can be a bit fruitless, subjective, and politically divisive.

A much more useful conversation for everyone is "Entity X collects the following kinds of data, and shares it with the following parties." In this scenario, a disagreement about who is the real political evil is not necessary. The more this information is made available, the more disparate groups can protect ourselves.

> I am sorry, how is this different from Google recording my location data?

There is no difference. There is a fight for privacy against almost every big tech company. It became a norm for these companies to collect data in recent years. And we just realized how powerful and destructive it can be and everybody is fighting back.

Chinese are just under the spotlight because of the trade war and bold statements from Trump administration. Otherwise, many American tech companies are also accused of collecting data inside and outside the US including Google which is probably the worst.

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