Hacker News Reader

Comment by severino | Hacker News Reader

But the CCP is not our government, and at least it can mean that your government knows less about you.

In the old East Germany, it wasn't a problem that the CIA knew everything about you. It was that the Stasi did.

> But the CCP is not our government,

But there are Chinese dissidents and Tibet independentists in your country which are at risk, so it's OK if China spies on those because "they are not your government"?

https://edition.cnn.com/2016/04/13/opinions/j-michael-cole-o...

I don't think they are at risk while they remain here in my country. It's very unlikely that the Chinese government decides on a strike against any dissident here. That's more typical of the US like they did yesterday in Afghanistan.

The US also kidnapped people in Europe to send them to torture camps in the middel east. The US military was also caught buying location data from muslim prayer apps, we can guess how that data was used.

So your example of "US dissident" is the head of a global terrorist organization?

China will also call those dissidents terrorists, and some may even fill that definition. And we can end up agreeing: for example, last month, Sweden decided that the political refugees it has been hosting are now terrorists and should be extradited, as requested by Turkey in exchange of not vetoing the country's accession to NATO.

Nobody really cares what they are called, important is what happens to them. The ones put bombs and kill people, the others say nasty things about a government. This is what makes the difference between who got killed by the US (because bombs) and who got killed by Putin (because ooh critics) or who got killed by the CCP (because ooh muslim).

But let's not forget what started the discussion: we play here the game of relativization to justify the CCP spying on tiktok users. That's all there is to know.

So we shouldn't use TikTok because... Chinese dissidents who live in the US can be harmed?

Unless you use some sort of totally de-googlified phone (if such a thing exists), it will still be both governments knowing everything about you.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com