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Comment by qikInNdOutReply | Hacker News Reader

If china ever gets democratic, a new mighty privacy player will appear. Chinas citizens have the same nasty experience as east germans had with the stasi and the poles, chechs with the cheka. They have been spied upon, reported upon by there fellow citizen and have been victims of "zersetzung". Aka social engineering to destroy a citizen.

https://www.stasi-unterlagen-archiv.de/mfs-lexikon/detail/ze...

Link is german: Shows how denunciation aka controlled leaking of private life like affairs was used, to destroy the lifes of resisting citizens.

PS: FB and Google could in theory use similar instruments against citizens that put pressure on them. Nobody could ever catch them at it.

If the ccp ever gets swept away and replaced by a new better china, the resulting parties will outdo one another to promise freedom and privacy.

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Hey hey hey, don’t leave us ex-Yugoslavians out! We had UDBA and political prisons and much of the rest. I hear it was “great” (too young to remember/experience myself).

Yes it wasn’t as bad as many other places. But bad enough for people to know there are things you can and can’t talk about in public. Growing up it was interesting to observe how my history class evolved from elementary to high school as news and declassifications trickled out.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_Security_Administration_...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Political_repression_...

Ah, do you have "Auskunftsrecht", were you can hand in your familys name at the states office, and they will crawl the Security office documentation for your name and give you all the information on all the people who brought shame upon themselves?

Bonuspoints: If you had family who was horrible in the Nazi times and the descendants then were horrible during Stasi times. And you know, anyone who can remember the name can crawl that info.. makes you wish, the ground could melt and swallow you.

Imagine that info got bundled into a family dharma app, were crimes would follow your family name through the generations. Nowhere on the planet, can you escape the murder spree of grandpas uncle.

Well no, because many (most?) of the people who were bad during nazi times simply got killed by the communists and put in unmarked mass graves. No records.

Many cultures have a simple "You are not guilty of crimes other people committed" rule baked into their law and culture to accommodate this, because what you're describing is also just known as "history."

In general, most people have at least one near ancestor that did something terrible. That makes none of the descendents terrible people.

Or us Portuguese - up until 1974 we had PIDE (translated: International and State Defense Police); so within living memory of many in power today. They did all the things any "good" oppressive police force of a semi-fascist to fully-fascist state does: receive anonymous complaints from conspirators, arrest people and torture them for reasons ranging from the political ("being a communist") to the moral ("being homosexual"), and generally make sure everyone's lives are too miserable and filled with fear to dream of overthrowing the powers-that-be.

Our concern with privacy is so prevalent that fairly recently the collection (and subsequent usage) of metadata by police was deemed unconstitutional[1]. This was met with a lot of complaints by investigators, and while there's some sectors pushing for a constitutional revision, this seems unlikely at the moment, but not entirely off the table.

[1] - https://verfassungsblog.de/how-the-data-retention-legislatio...

Yes, I have read about the UDBA, they would follow opposition to abroad to kill them.

And the fallout after Yugoslavia fell apart had the same people and criminals unpunished, with the climax of a broad daylight execution of a prime minister.

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