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Comment by ardy42 | Hacker News Reader

>> It's highly unlikely. It is required by CCP law to record user activities up to 90 (or 30? vague memories) days.

> Actually sounds pretty good. In Australia it is 730 days.

No, it doesn't. China requires the content of user activities to be saved, so your chat history is literally being sent to the local police in real time for scanning. The result is stuff like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MiMLVYK4hEc (Chinese police casually asserting their dominance by locking some poor guy in a tiger chair for badmouthing them on a private WeChat chat). A few years back someone found an analyzed an unsecured Mongo DB that was storing these messages: https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/open-mongodb-...

IIRC, Australia only has metadata retention requirements.

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The Australian implementation is "metadata", but what that is and means is still rather ambiguous.

After a five year court case, the Federal Court decided in 2017 that the average citizen isn't allowed to access all data that may be about them, despite being allowed to do so under the Privacy Act. If that sounds ambiguous... It's because it is.

Without an ability to say with is metadata and what is not, everything may be getting stored, and some companies will be overly conservative in how much data they are storing.

Not to say that this is worse than the Chinese implementation which is far more explicit in its demands for privacy invasion, just that the Australian case is... Worse than it sounds.

That's eye opening if true.

Surveillance in China is completely ubiquitous to an extent that most westerners don't realize. There is an excellent book on the subject, "We Have Been Harmonized" by Kai Strittmatter that discusses it. As an example, if you jaywalk in Shenzen, facial recognition technology will trigger and have your face and name posted on a television screen before you have even finished crossing the road.

I am sorry, but how do we know that youtube video is real? The channel it is uploaded to doesn't seem trustworthy at all.

>China requires the content of user activities to be saved,

Do you have a source for this? I find it hard to find information on this, I assume it's because I don't speak Chinese.

> I am sorry, but how do we know that youtube video is real? The channel it is uploaded to doesn't seem trustworthy at all.

The copy I linked is clearly a re-upload of a re-upload, it was just the first copy I found.

How do we know anything is real at all? I don't have a specific chain of custody for the video, but I judge that it's likely true because the practices shown are consistent with other reports (e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M8PgCUap1Vg, https://www.hrw.org/report/2015/05/13/tiger-chairs-and-cell-...). It gets other details right, like the anti-motorcycle crackdown. Also, the low-level Chinese police that would create a video like that very likely do not understand how bad the optics of it are when seen by foreigners.

> Do you have a source for this? I find it hard to find information on this, I assume it's because I don't speak Chinese.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WeChat#State_surveillance_and_.... It wasn't hard to find.

>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WeChat#State_surveillance_and_.... It wasn't hard to find.

This says nothing about the amount of days. Neither do the sources.

>Its parent company is obliged to share data with the Chinese government under the China Internet Security Law and National Intelligence Law.

Can be said about the US as well, companies can be forced to share their data with the government.

edit: Thanks for the HRW report, I'll have a read

> This says nothing about the amount of days. Neither do the sources.

Is the amount of days really the most important aspect of this?

> Can be said about the US as well, companies can be forced to share their data with the government.

While the US is definitely not perfect, that's a false equivalency. One can only draw superficial parallels between the US and China on this topic. The key difference is actually in the area of political culture. For instance: both the US and China make a big deal about the "rule of law," but they're actually talking about very different things. The the US, it means the law is applied consistently and even constrains the government. In China, the government is in a very real sense above the law, and the phrase merely means that they demand you comply with their rule through the laws they make.

>Is the amount of days really the most important aspect of this?

No, but if people cannot get such a simple thing right, and find citations for that, I also don't trust they got the rest right. No one has linked me anything that says "all messages from everyone need to be stored for whatever amount of days".

If you are going to paint China as the bad guys, at least do it over stuff that can be supported by facts, or if it is supported by fact make sure you can show them if someone asks.

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