I tried feeding some of the phonetically spelled stuff into google translate and it was completely lost at sea. So no worries about the claim this could stuff up NLP/search, then.
This isn't a secret code or anything; it's a standard romanization that almost everyone who learns Cantonese formally will learn. The thing is---formal education in Cantonese and other non-Mandarin Chinese languages is banned in schools in China. Mainlanders that speak Cantonese as a primary language often don't even know how to use it (I talked to a Cantonese-speaking girl from Zhuhai, and she was like "Can you show me what Jyutping looks like?" Bizarre).
It's pretty smart, and a bit of a slap in the face to the establishment, which has been forcing Mandarin down people's throats for the past 50 years or so.
The step that's missing for me is how to turn the Romanisation into Chinese characters.
Outside Hong Kong, Jyutping seems pretty much universal.
Is everybody really typing with Cangjie/handwriting? xD
For day to day transliterations of names etc there's actually no standard, just some loose rules based on English pronunciation.
As an aside this has caused colloquial Cantonese prounciation to "shift" over the years [0], it's called "lazy tone". E.g. 你 (you), the proper way is 'nei5', but most younger people say it 'lei5'. It's a big debate whether this trend ought to be stopped or not.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proper_Cantonese_pronunciation
But translate.google.cn is not banned on the mainland and Google services work very finely in Hong Kong.
And forcing Mandarin does people's throats is not all bad, in terms of literacy and considering that 70 years ago most of the country was illiterate, no only in language but also in ideas, such as basic western ideas in medical - which led to a huge reduction in infant mortality - the doctors and the literate going to the countryside.
And the across the sea, river, passing swamp, was Hong Kong, which figured out very much earlier and flourished.
But.. translate.google.cn is not blocked in China.
US equivalent to this would be forcing English (which we do) while jailing anyone who teaches Creole (which we don’t).
Mandarin being the primary language of education doesn't mean that Cantonese is prohibited; it's just not mandatory, so most native Cantonese speakers aren't going to get a formal education in it unless they specifically seek it out.
The examples in the article miss the tones. It's like writing pinyin without tones (even with tones it's much less clear than using characters).
This means that understanding a sentence requires a good knowledge of the oral language and to read it all to extract the meaning from the overall context.
That seems to be the point: Software tools will be completely lost.
Pace the obvious and awesome power of the Chinese surveillance state, nothing is foregone.
Edit: it's true that you could eventually translate the literal stuff back into Chinese characters, I'm sure, but that doesn't mean things are predetermined in a wider sense.