Ex-ByteDance exec: Communist Party had ‘God credential’
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It's all bits and since China has the executives of course they'll always retain a way to access the data as long as no independent entity is watching over them and all entities in China are under control of the CCP.
Instead of thinking of it as us vs. them, think of it as your own personal threat assessment. Google is all nice and friendly now. They serve all that JS and Fonts for free and give you free storage, calendars, teleconferencing etc... but how about in 10 years when they start loosing revenue to some AI startup that is better than search? Will they be so nice with your data then?
I use a Xiaomi phone , a Huawei laptop and an Aliyun email .. if they are exfiltrating my data and know which AI porn I look at.. It has zero impact on my life. They're not even able to target advertising to me because they don't control the relevant platforms (I guess they could sell my data to Google, but it seems unlikely). I hope the Chinese are doing similarly and using western platforms :)
It has zero impact on your life now, but you should strongly prefer that they don't, so as to keep your options open in the future. An analogy might be making sure you don't leak a sextape of yourself when you're young and don't care about who sees it, in case you run for public office in your 50s.
As long as you don't try to get hired by a company owned by or having a large presence in China. Though even otherwise, you may be underestimating their influence:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2022/09/14/china-open...
https://www.smh.com.au/national/chinese-australian-voters-pu...
For the release of “Fantastic Beasts” in China, Warner Bros edited out any references to a gay relationship. - https://variety.com/2022/film/news/fantastic-beasts-3-gay-di...
China's unofficial trade war pressures Apple to build its economy and technology - https://www.theinformation.com/articles/facing-hostile-chine...
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-08-21/china-australia-polit...
https://www.wsj.com/articles/china-makes-sure-everyone-write... - The CCP forced a Colorado highschool to edit their website to say Taiwan is a province of China. The school complied, so that the kids could attend United Nations Commission on the Status of Women.
https://www.reuters.com/world/china/chinese-censorship-surve...
https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/116723925/posters-depicting...
Disney Pressed American Magazine to Delete Star Director’s Quote Criticizing China - https://www.nationalreview.com/news/disney-pressed-american-...
Apple Told Some Apple TV+ Show Developers Not To Anger China - https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/alexkantrowitz/apple-ch...
Theoretically there are "channels" but they are in practice for a select few who partner with Chinese companies and give them a huge portion of any profits.
Meanwhile not only can any Chinese company release games in the USA they also can and have been buying huge amounts of our companies and IP.
In October 2019, American video game developer Blizzard Entertainment punished Ng Wai Chung (吳偉聰) (known as Blitzchung), a Hong Kong esports player of the online video game Hearthstone, for voicing his support of the 2019–2020 Hong Kong protests during an official streaming event. Blizzard also terminated their contract with the two livestream presenters who were interviewing Blitzchung. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blitzchung_controversy
Obviously, I don't like government surveillance, but at least in the west we are (1) generally protected from the worst excesses by legislation, and (2) generally aligned with our own government's priorities on a very high level view (eg: support for liberal democracy), if not the specifics. Those two do not hold for China, especially for data from a foreigner.
Even if you don't hold a security clearance, you can still be a target for hostile foreign actors, especially in the tech sector. What happens if a foreign actor with blackmail material on you threatens to destroy your life unless you cough up implementation details for a system you're working on, or open up a backdoor?
If you are concerned about surveillance, fine, but there are much better ways to avoid it by using privacy-respecting self hosted and commercial services. Replacing American big tech with Chinese big tech is just trading bad for worse.
Yes, if you're in the 0.1% that is working on nuclear missiles or technological equivalents - and you are a direct target of espionage.. then my train of thought clearly wouldn't apply. The vast majority of the population is of no interest to foreign intelligence.. and never will be. Fantasizing that some day you will be is loosing sight of the big, and much more likely threat closer to home
This isn't James Bond. The only way you could exhibit more ignorance about espionage would be by suggesting spies in balaclavas rappel through laser arrays to hack mainframes and steal blueprints.
Foreign intelligence services target people in far more banal positions, all the way down to lowly network engineers, with boring goals like compromising communications infrastructure so the country you're about to invade can't coordinate defense.
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Master_Control_Panel_s...
People think that because they understand how things work in the US, they understand how things work in China. That because in the US businesses have functional constitutionally granted protections from government overreach, that China functional constitutionally granted protections from government overreach.
Which is completely not the case. China is essentially a dictatorship. With one leader of one party that dominates everything, kangaroo courts and disappearing family, the works.
That worked great in the case of PRISM et al
This is not true!
Meanwhile, govt officials in China appear to have unrestricted access
IMHO this mirrors nicely the situation of a US citizen being concerned that the Chines govt won't protect their rights. This is how most of the world sees the US "checks" and "balances".
It is their own business to protect it themselves.
That which doesn't see the light of day may as well not even exist.
Why are you so quick to believe they don't, and that China does?
> process to request the data involving courts
Secret courts that rubberstamp agency requests without oversight.
I’ve lived in Iran, I really don’t see much of a difference in how the US operates. The U.S. just does more paperwork to justify their shit.
Comparing it against the government having "god credentials" to the entire backend is disingenuous.
The US government is spying on literally everyone. You can't name anyone who has a web presence and isn't caught in the dragnet.
CCP is the Chinese government. They are the law. when you say normal legal channels, it is not the same "normal" as in democratic countries.
The whole concept of a "warrent canary" came from this.
How is this any different than a "god mode"?
I'm not defending China -- but let's face facts....
So to your own point - Why should we believe what you say about China? Are you even Chinese? Maybe you’re a Chinese expert?
Given how few Americans properly understand how the American government functions I’m skeptical Americans understand the Chinese government and its nuance.
Wait, who thinks that?!
Having worked with a Chinese University and had a Chinese business as a client, I can attest that this is indeed the case. It's not essentially a dictatorship, it IS a dictatorship. Except it's not by one person, it's by a political party that has ingrained itself at every level of one's life in that country.
In the US, there is the government, there are private companies who don't interact with the government at all, there are public companies who don't directly work with the state but still have influence on the state (think large scale food providers or airlines or car makers), and there are public companies that sometimes can blur the separation line due to how ingrained they are with the state's infrastructure (for example, Lockheed-Martin or Microsoft). Sometimes any of these different types of entities might be asked to do the state's bidding, but they can refuse (in some cases) or negotiate, or get things in return (tax breaks, etc).
In China, there is The Party. That's it. Everything is intentionally an arm of the state, directly or indirectly. The Party controls everything and every action any organization of any meaningful size whatsoever is directly done to aid The Party's goals. The Party has a representative at the highest level of every major company in China, and said representative isn't just there to be in meetings, they are there to control the company to make sure said company is doing what The Party wants them to do.
Keep in mind that China's goals != The Party's goals....despite what The Party wants you (and its citizens) to think.
Jack Ma fucked himself off the Ant Financial deal because The Party representatives at Ant were also the heads of the Chinese state bank. He talked shit to their faces, so The Party decided that he was too big, so they took him to task and made him "donate" a few billion to The Party.
Imagine if Zuck told the government regulators to pound sand on national TV, and the government basically responded with "ok, well, you can donate 25% of your net worth to our political party, or the world will never hear from you again". That's China.
There is no country in the world where you can insult powerful people for free
That's the entire point though. The relationship between Meta and the State is governed predominantly by letter of law and the system of the court. It's not perfect, but it absolutely puts limitations on government retribution towards a company that does something workers of the State do not like, but is legal.
In China, the relationship between a private company (in as much as that can exist in China) and the State is governed ENTIRELY by the whims of the party. There is no way to limit the party to things that are "legal", because laws do not constrain the party.
Zuck is above every "powerful person" he met at that hearing. Those people owe their position, careers and livelihoods to votes and ultimately public opinion.
Guess who nowadays controls a large chunk of humanity's social fabric? Piss him off and you may as well be dead as far as your voter base is concerned, since nobody on Facebook properties will ever hear anything about you (on the other hand they will hear plenty about your competitors).
Jack Ma forking disappeared for three months [0]. Then lost a huge amount of money and influence over his empire, and he has been extremely quiet since then. It is not hard to see that had not complied, he would still be disappeared.
In contrast, look at the US. Disney publicly tells a state gov and POTUS candidate that his proposed law is bad. Gov, with his entire political party apparatus retaliates. Disney repeatedly counters every move and comes out on top, massively embarrassing the state governor.
China is a nation ruled by a dictatorship/authoritarian state. The US is, for the time being, ruled by law (there are those trying to change that).
In a democratic govt, all branches of govt (legislative, judicial, executive), and all areas of society (industry, press, academia, non-profits/NGOs, clubs, sports, etc.) are independent. In an authoritarian system, all of the branches of government and parts of society are bent to the will of the dictator/party.
The distinction is critical.
[0]
Those elected officials have 100 billion rea$on$ to not go after someone who insulted them. Zuck is bigger than all of those people combined. He's the powerful person, not some schmuck in congress who may or may not be in that same seat in a year or two. He could easily say "oh, you want to come after me because I talked back to you? OK, well, don't be surprised if your opponent in your reelection campaign just got a nice $100 million dollar boost" or "hey, yeah I said some mean things to you, but how about you come and work here at Meta once your term is over? I'll make it worth your while" and just like that all regulatory pressure is done away with.
In China, The Party can just say "we're bigger than you, so what we say goes", and that's it - no recourse, no independent watchdog, no independent judiciary, nothing. The Party owns your ass, and you'd best be thankful for that.
Anyone that thinks so, can go to China and call our the leadership. Or go to Middle East and call out their leadership and see what happens.
They can easily do that in the US, you can get on social media, go on TV, write an article about why the president, the supreme court, senate are a bunch of idiots and keep living your life with your freedom. Try the equivalent else where if you believe it's the same. They don't and they won't because they know it's not.
The US and Europe have spent over a century backing despots in the Middle East and putting down or helping put down popular movements by force. The US doesn't even seem to mind if they dismember Washington Post reporters in their embassies. The US sends billions to Netanyahu every year to put down the Palestinian mass movement.
Funny how the US props up these despots, then points to them as a point of supposedly flattering comparison.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_in_China
The U.S. government is pretty steadily pushing towards adopting many elements of the Chinese model, such as censorship of social media (although more often by the tactic of amplifying some themes and suppressing others, shadow-banning and so on). Does anyone really doubt that the current political leadership would jump at the chance to assign everyone a 'social credit score', for example, that would influence their ability to travel, get a job, etc., based on criteria that they themselves determined (e.g. support for US foreign policy decisions, domestic economic programs, positive attitudes about a two-party political system largely controlled by a small number of wealthy donors, etc.)?
The U.S. is more in danger of becoming like China, than the other way around.
Imagine a US congressman used TikTok for 90 minutes per week. They don't write any comments just scroll through videos and potentially like/share some videos.
Everyone talks about how scary good the TikTok algorithm is at determining your preferences and sending you laser focused content that you will find interesting and engaging. I am curious how much of that preference is extractable and how that might be valuable for purposes other than delivering viral short-form video.
I wonder how effective it would be at creating preferences. What happens if it drip feeds you small amounts of fetish material, carefully tracking what type and level appeals to you, slowly turning up the intensity until one day you have some kink for little kids in provocative cat costumes or something?
Any country is going to tap into any local deep data sources
No. It is worse in China. Especially with the 'police stations' and applying their national security law to activists overseas. Here one example example:
A TikTok user in Hong Kong protesting against the CCP has it worse than one protesting against the US government. The difference is obvious:
In the US you are free to peacefully protest against the US government which that is protected by the 1st amendment in the US constitution.
China on the other hand can use it's national security law (and in Hong Kong) to get activists overseas and disappear you. [0] Given that China has access to ByteDance's data, I don't think you would want to be the user who attempted to protest against the CCP in HK and currently be on the run.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jul/31/china-hong-kon...
The US has so many problems, I agree, but what big democracy doesn't? Does the UK have problems? Yes. Does France? Yes. Does India? Yes. Because the US is so powerful, and has used this power for questionable purposes (as well as good purposes), people create a caricature of the country and ignore that we have things like constitutional protections, freedom of speech, mechanisms to sue the government and prevail.
Just to detail one of my examples above, freedom of speech. Many people will go and give examples of why the US has no true freedom of speech. Most of these people have never lived in a place which actually has no freedom of speech! For instance, I've bought many highly critical books of the US government, talked about them in public, visited libraries to read these books. In a less free country, this can, and often does get you arrested or killed, assuming that you were able to find the books to begin with, more often you won't even have access to any real criticism of the government.
I don't want any country storing my personal data. But if I'd pick between the US or China, AT LEAST there is a minimum of transparency and rule of law (and it's actually a lot more than "minimum", the real protections are significant) regarding how this data is used in the US.
- Starting dubious wars against foreign nations? We've had Afghanistan and Iraq.
- Spying on and criminalizing citizens? We're having Five Eyes and possibly much more than we don't know about.
- Treating whistleblowers against our standards of human rights? We're having Manning, Snowden and Assange. And probably many more we haven't heard about.
I'm not repeating some whataboutisms trying to relativize, e.g., the horrible attack of Russia against Ukraine or the Chinese Social Scoring system. I'm just asking about the meaning of "democracy" in the Western world is, if our gov'ts are sh*tting on our values any time they need.
Like the Arab nationalists being waterboarded in Guantanamo Bay?
Although some of them the US realized it picked up the wrong guy and released them.
Incidentally, Guaantanamo Bay is occupied by the US military against the wishes of Cuba.
You can find "some people" on HN to match basically anything.