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Comment by colinsane | Hacker News Reader

> it is based on a simple idea - people will happily give away their data and privacy if you consistently entertain them.

there’s the individual-level view, and the state-level view.

i, as an individual, don’t really care if China has my location data or shopping data. what are they going to do with it? they can exert soft power over me: propaganda; distort my worldview a bit.

meanwhile, if my own government has access to this same data, i suffer direct consequences. my odds of getting arrested for nonviolent crime (e.g. political activism; buying drugs online) go way up when my govt surveils me: far less so when it’s a foreign govt doing this.

it doesn’t have so much to do with individuals making foolish tradeoffs over their own interests IMO: the way espionage plays into this is as an alignment gap between individual and state interests.

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I don't use TikTok, but I assume there's also a concern over foreign influence of a nation's voters? Whether you use TikTok or not, that'd be a potential concern. Entire countries could be subtly influenced by supposed algorithms. A finger on the scales or whatever they call it.

I've long wondered if we might (past or future) see a social media company be successful mostly because, in their infancy, they were indirectly funded by intelligence services in exchange for data access. However, I assume as operations scale, it gets harder for that sort of link to stay secret.

> meanwhile, if my own government has access to this same data, i suffer direct consequences. my odds of getting arrested for nonviolent crime (e.g. political activism; buying drugs online) go way up when my govt surveils me

It seems like an error to assume these two forms of surveillance are mutually exclusive.

At any of

> the Starbucks you’re using for free wifi

> the ISP your endpoint is using for internet access

> the data centers in which Tiktok is serving you data

> the device on which you didn’t write the OS or any background programs written on it

Presumably anyone with the power and inclination to listen or influence the design of the above can intercept any non-encrypted or not-yet-encrypted data you’re exchanging (and if they’re a state actor, probably get access to whatever information they’d need to perform decryption) - including your government.

Almost all APIs are TLS-encrypted these days, leaking only the hostname to which the client is connecting (via SNI which is as yet unencrypted).

This is not to say you're not being surveilled (as to which apps you use, etc) but there is relatively little unencrypted traffic coming out of most devices in 2022.

What if US government makes a (secret) deal with China to get data from them? It might seem unlikely today, but politics can change any time. Data markets can be fairly efficient. Once someone has your data, they can always (re)sell it to the highest bidder.

China doesn't exactly limit its activities to people within its borders. There are reports of Uighurs speaking up who get harassed after fleeing the country and speaking up: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-56563449

Five men were charged with stalking and harassing Chinese dissidents in the US, including by seeking to derail the election bid of a congressional candidate: https://www.asiafinancial.com/five-charged-with-harassment-o...

It's certainly not direct physical violence to citizens of an established world power that is a concern. It's pushing things in one direction or another politically.

See well documented: Intelligence community v.s Trump v.s Facebook v.s Russian propaganda campaign v.s traditional "manufactured concent" of citizen.

How these players interplay is what is at stake.

If helps tremendously if some of the actors are "trying" have enough independent thought and don't suffer too much when they push things in more liberal & egalitarian direction.

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