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Comment by lucideer | Hacker News Reader

Could it be the same reason anyone outside of the US would voluntarily choose to run close-source software from a company that's subject to domestic laws and regulations in the US? The ECPA is no joke.

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I would argue if you are American nor Chinese, the US has a greater ability to negatively influence your life. Chinese government has full control domestically but can’t (currently) do too much outside of their borders. The US on the other hand...

It goes the same for any of the "Eyes" countries. They share intelligence and tracking of citizens as well. It's not just the US, so don't act like it is.

Don't pretend any other country have as much surveillance capability as the US does. There are levels to the awfulness and not everyone is at final boss level. Most are random green scrubs comparatively.

> Don't pretend any other country have as much surveillance capability as the US does.

The level of surveillance in Xinjiang vastly exceed that of anywhere else in the world except for military installations.

You're drawing a parallel that doesn't exist. Xinjiang is a physical location that is controlled entirely by them.

US (or any) surveillance, especially over data, requires no such ownership or control.

Don't forget our laws here in Australia. (I know you mentioned eyes countries, which we are, but I wanted to highlight this).

Our laws are so damn barbaric in relation to security that it's scary.

It's gotten to the point where I nearly gave up on security. Who's compromised?

I definitely missed out on a job because I was Australian. (Confirmed later over drinks with one of the devs who I am friends with).

Can you relate anymore about the industry and size of company you applied for?

I'm an aussie dev, and I hadn't even considered my eligibility to foreign companies may be compromised.

I'm sure that a Chinese citizen would see the NSA as an equal or greater threat. The difference from my perspective is that as a citizen of a NATO country with a functioning democracy, I'm highly unlikely to be rounded up by my government and put in a prison or concentration camp for expressing my political opinions or religion.

You only need to look at the past several years of news from Hong Kong and the Uyghur/Xinjiang province situation to see the stark real world difference in human rights, political freedoms and press freedoms.

I'm not 100% sure from your comment whether you're making out that:

(a). China is bad (yes, known)

(b). The US is not quite as bad (debatable but for the sake of argument lets agree that this is true)

(c). The US is benign

My comment was only refuting the 3rd supposition. I'm not sure if you actually believe this is true. Though terms such as "country with a functioning democracy" make me think you might...

My point was absolutely not (c). The US has a vast and complex array of sociopolitical, economic disparity, racism, police brutality issues, some of which have been highlighted throughout 2020. But I definitely consider it to be the lesser of two evils.

The lesser of two evils is still collecting literally as much data as it can on you. And helping the Saudis with it too:

https://theintercept.com/2014/07/25/nsas-new-partner-spying-...

US Intelligence has too long a history of its own largely consequence-free abuses too. Someone else having a surveillance state doesn't make the one at home any better.

Someone from outside the US will probably worry more about its history of backing coups than the domestic problems you mentioned. If the US puts a Pinochet in my country and their algorithms say I'm likely to be a communist sympathizer, am I at risk?

Definitely. Those of us from Latin American countries have a history with the US that we don't have with China, and so while China might be bad to us, we are (mostly) outside its sphere of direct influence; on the other hand, the US has a proven track record of supporting blood-thirsty and ruthless dictators in the relatively recent past, and meddling with our democratic institutions and electoral processes, so it's the "biggest threat" to us, so to speak.

> My comment was only refuting the 3rd supposition. I'm not sure if you actually believe this is true.

The country is an imperfect union. Although the country attempts at every turn to work towards "A more perfect Union"; clearly we have similar issues that other countries do.

In a comparative analysis, OP was merely saying the US is head and shoulders above a country that suppresses freedom of speech, eliminates political dissent and the people who promote freedom and sends them away to actual concentration camps under the guise of "re-education".

2 million people. No less.

How are those different from American concentration camps, such as Guantanamo?

Black and white sophism. No country is going to meet c), no country is benign. What matters is how much better the country in aspects like this. And the US still much better, NSA included.

*Insert joke: [internet <- Chinese router - US router -> home network]

Responses like this are so predictable and shed no further light or provide no new insight.

They're unproductive and flame-war prone. I downvoted your comment.

There is nothing new about the question "why would someone buy cheap phones when they come with spyware". So someone asks a shit question and gets a shit answer.

Why is it unproductive? Parent makes a point that non-US consumers don't care whether it's a US or Chinese product. Both nations have access to domestic company's data.

The original message was saying they couldn't understand / couldn't empathise with someone making a conscious decision to use xiaomi. I gambled that they make the same conscious decisions using US software, but only see their decision to do so differently due to a set of pro-US biases that others won't have.

It's difficult to look past such biases if they're deeply ingrained but I think this can definitely be productive to do so. If you can empathise better with conscious xiaomi users, and understand why people use non-optimal software, such understanding can have a lot of benefits.

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