Hacker News Reader

Comment by petesergeant | Hacker News Reader

If you thought Cambridge Analytica was bad, wait 'til you find out what a China-based company can do with detailed preference and arousal data from young people.

View on HN

Probably as much as a US based company can. I didn't see any US social media giants getting any real punishment for what they got up to between 2007-17.

In fact, given the general distrust of China in the West in international politics, feels like national governments are more likely to respond to any emerging harms than they did with Facebook.

Tik Tok seems to be worse than Facebook in that regard

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/02/08/tiktok-shares-your-data-more...

Well, as a non-US person I like that not all my PII is concentrated in US companies. If anything, I feel that US having something on me can have worse effects on me, compared to China, given the amount of US/western stuff I use.

This is what keeps me off Tiktok. I feel like I’m losing my mind even having to make a judgement like this, but I trust Facebook more than China. Only a tiny bit, but it’s there.

That’s because Facebook’s motives are absolutely sublime in their purity: they want you to use their product and they want you to click on those ads.

The motives of a company controlled by the CCP are much much murkier.

The Devil you know

I honestly don’t care if the Chinese government knows everything about me. Much more worried about the American government.

Any entity that knows so much about you can manipulate you in ways you won’t suspect. Their government isn’t held back by the Constitution and they probably wouldn’t hesitate to influence the citizenry of their main rival on the world stage.

The US government isn't really held back by the Constitution either. It's been diluted so much they can just use Canada as a proxy and return the favour, for example, no problem. I agree with your overall point but it's not really a legal matter, it's just power.

For non-US citizens the US constitution also has no relevance. Thus for non-US citizens it makes no real difference

I'm non-US citizen and still think that there is difference between US and Chinese government.

Tell that to Assange.

... the US government isn't particularly limited in such a way either. They have nice have for everything foreign communications, and all the actions are held as confidential

Sure, I also don’t care what the Chinese government knows about me. I care a lot about their ability to influence US elections though.

I'm much more worried about the ability of Google to influence US elections than China.

At least the FBI can't get hold of it ...

Yawn.. Get better material

Reply on news.ycombinator.com