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Comment by typon | Hacker News Reader

"The sinister Huawei has close ties with the Chinese government. Our companies can't compete on a level playing field!"

Tech is in bed with the government everywhere on the planet, and has been for a long time. The question has never been about fairness, it is: who has your interests in mind?

As hard as it may be to accept, this is the reality we live in.

None of them particularly care about the average citizens interests, so treating the two similarly seems fair.

Who would you rather have logs of all your Internet activity: your own government, or another government thousands of miles away that is increasingly at odds with country's?

This is never an either/or situation, it is neither/both.

It is increasingly "both, and do nothing about it" or "both, and be vocally opposed to it, and potentially cause issues for yourself x years from now."

I could argue that I'm much more worried about the set of events my own government can set in action against me if they so choose.

The other government has less power over me because they are thousands of miles away and don't control the institutions that I need to function as a citizen.

That being said, the foreign government might be less afraid of using my information against me, since they would be less afraid of blowback.

I guess I'm not sure. Both suck.

Better use TAILS.

The answer highly depends on who you are, what you do, and who is interested in your information.

In this case the US really doesn’t have my interests in mind.

Over ehre in Small Belgium it doesn't feel like it. In bed with big internationals for other reasons some of which local like de beers sure tho but that just smells more of corruption than anything protectionist or intelligence based

Because EU countries don't have mammoth sized, trillion dollar SW companies with a global monopoly.

If your country's software industry is comprised mostly of 10-200 person web shops and consultancies there's no real gain for the Goverment agencies to be in bed with them.

If you follow that thought through to other industries, what do you think Denmark learns of US military movement and equipment from the armies biggest heavy lifter, Danish Maersk shipping? It can't be much since outside the software world companies don't sift through every single piece of "cargo" and goes to show why you shouldn't trust foreign software companies at all, allies or not.

Err... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAP

Billion, trillion, shmillion, lose some, win some, it's all virtual. Not backed by anything real. I mean, you can see the house of cards falling down because of a sneeze right now :-)

Weird Ron Paul fiat currently pseudo-rant notwithstanding, SAP is a good example but an outlier. Pick a random multinational [b|tr]illion-dollar software company and it's going to be American most of the time, and from San Francisco most of the time that it's American.

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