I've come to believe that most governments are inept when it comes to the management, security and general quality of their software.
With the government holding so much critical information, it seems a very obvious and valuable target for hackers.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/kateoflahertyuk/2019/02/18/chin...
They are very well aware of it, so they do outsourcing to pro-CCP companies, e.g. Hikvision, Face++.
The thing is, this is not some hypothetically argument, but governments ARE corrupt and abuse their powers. Even in our awesome democratic western systems. In china much more. And that the general chinese population is used to it and therefore does not mind so much, is just that they are used to it.
It doesn't seem that different to the US government with AT&T.
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130901/23253224379/att-h...
And while AT&T doesn’t seem to have done this, other companies such as Apple have enacted privacy measures which directly contravene the stated wishes of the government - but which are legal.
In China, I believe the way it works is, whatever the government wants becomes legal. The US is far from perfect but the rule of law exists here to some degree.
In China, they want this information public because they want people to know that they know and self regulate - Panopticon.
The cynic in me looks at the US as a country controlled by companies while China is a country that controls companies. I don't know if it makes that much of a difference any more now that companies are almost the same size as countries.
Either way, the current reality of some lucky individuals having all the access to everyone’s information, whether it’s Chinese government or companies or US government or companies is the worst situation to be in if you have little power, i.e. 99.9999999% of people who aren’t billionaires/nation state level diplomats.
It's not just "government can be corrupt and abuse its powers", it's also "government will be inept and leak your data".
And since you can't unreveal data, "government" doesn't just mean "current government", it means "current and any possible future government".
And before you say not all communist are alike and you can't generalize… yeah no, they are quite alike and you can generalize. Anyone who lived in any of them knows exactly what guanxi and other social concepts mean, the cultures are remarkably cookie-cutter.
Why are "victims of communism" allowed to generalize from their experience, while "victims of capitalism" are not?
And before the nitpicking starts, I'm well aware that monied interests can influence democratic politics. That does not make an economic system a political system. It would be like calling democracy an economic system.