Gangster Capitalism and the American Theft of Chinese Innovation | Hacker News Reader

Gangster Capitalism and the American Theft of Chinese Innovation

techcrunch.com

9 pointskrmmalik3 comments

I think this article makes some really important points, especially on how silly it is for us to fight unfair Chinese business practices with the same tactics. However, I do think it is questionable to leave out the detail about whether we want Americans (or folks from any other country in this world) to have their data passing through and being stored on Chinese servers - likely owned and operated by, but at least, accessible to - Chinese government operatives, who are known to be assembling social credit profiles which can be very repressive. (See: https://www.wired.com/story/age-of-social-credit/)

There is an element of this that involves the responsibility of governments to protect their people's data from becoming weaponized against them. I haven't been able to ascertain all the details of the TikTok debacle, but IMHO the key thing government should be doing here is ensuring that data remains within the country from which it originated. These sorts of data and privacy concerns are quite reasonable. Robbing brilliant ideas from other countries is not.

Semi-tangential but I think a lot of people look at that Wired article and affirm their own beliefs without reading it. Primarily, it references the Zhima score in Alipay which, at best, is a commercial reward point system, like get a free soda after buying 2 meals at Chipotle. It's nothing like the police risk score (https://www.wired.co.uk/article/police-violence-prediction-n...) or the court justice score (https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/01/21/137783/algorithm...) we're building.

Also from Wired: https://www.wired.com/story/china-social-credit-score-system...

Fair point. Don't get me wrong, I'm not under any illusion that America is a completely free, do-gooder country - I think Snowden has proven our government will stoop to the same levels as any other authoritarian regime, and those articles you provided on police violence prediction and crime prediction algorithms in general are incredibly worrisome. Nonetheless, I can actually write this comment here and not worry about either going to jail without explanation, harassment of my family, seizure of my business, or being locked out of my bank account. For now, at least, anyway.

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