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Comment by gruez | Hacker News Reader

Tencent: "show me your face or I won't let you pay my game", me: "fine I won't play your game then"

Government: "show me your face or else[1]", me: "r-right away sir"

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly_on_violence

The PRC government controls which organisations are permitted to publish games in China, so it's not as simple as just choosing to play some other company's games. Tencent et al are de facto arms of the government.

The article states that "authorities stepped in" and that this is at the very least some type of public-private partnership where "the gaming platform’s facial verification system" is "linked with big data from the central public security system".

My inclination is to assume this is compelled by the Chinese state.

Indeed, it's impossible to get access for China's government facial recognition server for a company, unless the government wants it to.

Games were an anonymous chat outlet before, so they are closing on that now with radical actions.

Now I believe they will be feeding game chats to their version of PRISM, and want to tie them to reliable real world identities.

Basically, chicoms want to close any way for a chat message to not to have a reliable ID matched to it.

"Let me monitor and censor your private speech otherwise you won't be able to communicate with your friends and family on our platform they all use."

The apologetics for corporate-government fascism digust me. No, it's not okay for the ruling class to contract out their oppression to corporations any more than it is for them to use the government for that purpose.

>"Let me monitor and censor your private speech otherwise you won't be able to communicate with your friends and family on our platform they all use."

This is how the internet has been for as long as I remember. When you use a website, you agree to its rules. Do people truly believe they are oppressed over this?

Corporations are absolutely involved in oppressing people at the behest of government or other ruling class, yes. If you were deluded into thinking otherwise.

You're okay if the government privatizes certain "problematic" services it provides and allows the now private organization to violate peoples' rights?

Please don't take HN threads further into ideological flamewar. It makes discussions tedious and nasty, as below. We're trying for something quite different here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

So you expect people to live without any entertainment? Just work eat and sleep I guess.

Tencent has a monopoly on entertainment?

No but you are apparently oke with entertainment requiring face scans to access. If Tencent can do it it won't be long untill every large publisher does it.

If people only want to produce games that require giving up your privacy to play, then you have to make a choice between giving up games, or giving up privacy. Ultimately those are the only choices available to you that don't involve bending peaceful people to your will under pain of imprisonment.

Perhaps a third choice, that also doesn't require resorting interfering with other people's private choices, with legal threats that emanate from the state's monopoly on violence, is to lobby to allocate a portion of public funds to subsidizing game publishers that respect privacy.

In any case, even a modest portion of the population choosing to avoid privacy-compromising game publishers would establish a market for privacy-preserving games. So this is really a matter of consumers educating themselves and making responsible choices.

The real problem here is likely the state stepping in to force all game publishers who attain Tencent's market reach to institute these kinds of measures.

I'd be fine if the government would use their "monopoly on violence" to ensure companies don't step so far out of line. That's basically one of the central reasons governments exist.

Governments exist to provide public goods. One such public good is protecting private citizens from having their rights violated by other parties, through a national defense system and a justice system.

A collection of people not providing you with games on your terms is not a violation of your rights. You siccing the government on them is a violation of their right to choose for themselves what to work on and on what terms to offer it for sale.

In the admittedly mainstream approach you endorse, the government is acting in contravention of its benevolent purpose, something Frédéric Bastiat wrote about at length 170 years ago:

https://www.econlib.org/library/Bastiat/basLaw.html?chapter_...

So if all food companies decided to slightly poison all the food that people can buy. The government should not intervene at all? After all A collection of people not providing you with food on your terms is not a violation of your rights right?

How is that at all comparable to this situation? That is putting in toxic ingredients that the buyer is not informed about. That's false advertising, fraud and criminal negligence. This is a company offering a game with terms of services clearly spelled out to you, with you free to accept or reject their offer with full knowledge of what they are offering.

>>A collection of people not providing you with food on your terms is not a violation of your rights right?

It is not a violation of my rights, but what you described is not that. That would be like if food providers all decided to offer food that is slightly poisoned, and disclosed that the food had been slightly poisoned. You would then have a choice to either take your chances on producing your own food, or taking their poisoned food.

I didn't say the buyer is not informed about it. You completely made that up. It's on the back in small print with the chemical name just like all other ingredients.

Besides that I think that your viewpoint is completely nuts and no well functioning society could exist like that.

>>It's on the back in small print with the chemical name just like all other ingredients.

So they are not informed. No court would consider that sufficient disclosure of a poison additive. Common law can't be evaded by resorting to technicalities as in your caricature.

Its basis is informed consent, and that incorporates all of the context that goes into making a determination of whether that's present, including custom, reasonable assumptions, etc.

Notice what distinguishes your "fine print" hypothetical from the scenario I described:

This is a company offering a game with terms of services clearly spelled out to you, with you free to accept or reject their offer with full knowledge of what they are offering.

Note: "clearly spelled out to you" and "full knowledge of what they are offering"

Not "fine print", with the implication that no one is reading it.

>>Besides that I think that your viewpoint is completely nuts and no well functioning society could exist like that.

You have not explained why you think this, so this is not a particularly constructive track of discussion.

It's not quite as simple when you consider time invested. Messing with someone's lifetime of training with ever-changing EULAs is something I haven't seen talked about. But similar to the damage to pro soccer players if, officially from now on, the soccer ball was twice as big, the fields half as big, and each player was required to swear allegiance to China, a sudden change that kills the careers of pro e-sport players is not as simple as "well don't buy the game". Well I already bought the game and practiced it for 10k hours, and now you're declaring I can't do it anymore.

Maybe you could take them to court based on the argument that they made certain implicit promises, based on custom and reasonable and forseeable assumptions about their customers' expectations, when they began providing the service/platform.

It's in court where both parties get a chance to make their case and have it decided by an impartial party, based on the balance of evidence.

That sounds entirely reasonable. I'm just wondering if anyone would ever take the side of a mere gamer.

It would be quite hard to be a gamer and completely avoid playing anything that Tencent doesn't at least partly own.

Maybe if you jump from game to game and try to play the "latest and greatest" all the time. There are plenty of people who mostly play a few games or niche games.

Arguing that you can always just avoid Tencent in China is equivalent to standing under a tree to avoid the rain, then when it soaks through the leaves and makes you wet, saying “well I can always find another tree.”

Tencent is doing this verification because the law of the land in China says they have to. If other companies in China don’t employ the same measures, it’s only a matter of time before they will as well.

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