Edit: typo
Edit: typo
(in fairness pervasive logging by American companies should probably be treated with the same level of hostility these days, lest you be stopped for a Vance meme)
On the other hand, OpenAI would trivially hand out my information to the FBI, NSA, US Gov, and might even do things on behalf of the government without a court order to stay in their good graces. This could have a far more material impact on your life.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extraordinary_rendition
Russia is more known for poisoning people. But of all of them China feels the least threatening if you are not Chinese. If you are Chinese you aren't safe from the Chinese government no matter where you are
Compounding the difficulty of the question: half of HN thinks this would be a good idea.
https://www.nycpolicefoundation.org/ourwork/advance/countert...
https://www.nyc.gov/site/nypd/bureaus/investigative/intellig...
Extortion is one thing. That's how spy agencies have operated for millennia to gather HUMINT. The Russians, the ultimate masters, even have a word for it: kompromat. You may not care about China, Russia, Israel, the UK or the US (the top nations when it comes to espionage) - but if you work at a place they're interested, they care about you.
The other thing is, China has been known to operate overseas against targets (usually their own citizens and public dissidents), and so have the CIA and Mossad. Just search for "Chinese secret police station" [1], these have cropped up worldwide.
And, even if you personally are of no interest to any foreign or national security service, sentiment analysis is a thing. Listen in on what people talk about, run it through a STT engine and a ML model to condense it down, and you get a pretty broad picture of what's going on in a nation (aka, what are potential wedge points in a society that can be used to fuel discontent). Or proximity gathering stuff... basically the same thing the ad industry [2] or Strava does [3], that can then be used in warfare.
And no, I'm not paranoid. This, sadly, is the world we live in - there is no privacy any more, nowhere, and there are lots of financial and "national security" interest in keeping it that way.
[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-65305415
[2] https://techxplore.com/news/2023-05-advertisers-tracking-tho...
[3] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jan/28/fitness-tracki...
And also worth noting that "place a hostile intelligence service may be interested in" can be extremely broad. I think people have this skewed impression they're only after assets that work for goverment departments and defense contractors, but really, everything is fair game. Communications infrastructure, social media networks, cutting edge R&D, financial services - these are all useful inputs for intelligence services.
These are also softer targets: someone working for a defense contractor or for the government will have had training to identify foreign blackmail attempts and will be far more likely to notify their country's counterintelligence services (having the penalties for espionage clearly explained on the regular helps). Someone who works for a small SaaS vendor, though? Far less likely to understand the consequences.
Here in boring New Zealand, the Chinese government has had anti-China protestors beaten in new zealand. They have stalked and broken into the office and home of an academic, expert in China. They have a dubious relationship with both the main political parties (including having an ex-Chinese spy elected as an MP).
It’s an uncomfortable situation and we are possibly the least strategically useful country in the world.
You're still part of Five Eyes... a privilege no single European Union country enjoys. That's what makes you a juicy target for China.
this is something I was talking when LLM boom started. it's now possible to spy on everyone on every conversation. you just need enough computing power to run special AI agent (pun intended)
You wouldn't want your mom finding out your weird sexual fetish, would you?
I bet that decision is decided solely by dev team. All the CEO care is "I want the chat log sync between devices, i don't care how you do this". They won't even know the chat log is stored on their server.
When you combine the modern SOP of software and hardware collecting and phoning home with as much data about users as is technologically possible with laws that say “all orgs and citizens shall support, assist, and cooperate with state intelligence work”… how exactly is that Sinophobia?
I’ll give you a hint: In this case it’s the one-party unitary authoritarian political system with an increasingly aggressive pursuit of global influence.
The United States?
Gonna need a more specific hint to narrow it down.
Anyone in the US should be very concerned, no matter if it is the current administration's thought police, or the next who treats it as precident.
As I am not actively involved in something the Chinese government would view as a huge risk, but being put on a plane without due process to be sent to a labor camp based on trumped up charges by my own government is far more likely.
You know of these things due to the domestic free press holding the government accountable and being able to speak freely about it as you’re doing here. Seeing the two as remotely comparable is beyond belief. You don’t fear the U.S. government but it’s fun to pretend you live under an authoritarian dictatorship because your concept of it is purely academic.
The president threatened to deport a legal citizen who won the primary for mayor in NYC. He's tried to send the military after civilians.
He's sued and extracted payment from media companies who said things he didn't like. We do not have a free press.
We're fully as bad as China. I don't know what your criteria for "authoritarian dictatorship" is but it doesn't appear to be reality based.
This could describe any of the countries involved.
The difference that makes it concerning and problematic that China is doing it is that with China, there is no recourse. If you are harmed by a US company, you have legal recourse, and this holds the companies in check, restraining some of the most egregious behaviors.
That's not sinophobia. Any other country where products are coming out of that is effectively immune from consequences for bad behavior warrants heavy skepticism and scrutiny. Just like popup manufacturing companies and third world suppliers, you might get a good deal on cheap parts, but there's no legal accountability if anything goes wrong.
If a company in the US or EU engages in bad faith, or harms consumers, then trade treaties and consumer protection law in their respective jurisdictions ensure the company will be held to account.
This creates a degree of trust that is currently entirely absent from the Chinese market, because they deliberately and belligerently decline to participate in reciprocal legal accountability and mutually beneficial agreements if it means impinging even an inch on their superiority and sovereignty.
China is not a good faith participant in trade deals, they're after enriching themselves and degrading those they consider adversaries. They play zero sum games at the expense of other players and their own citizens, so long as they achieve their geopolitical goals.
Intellectual property, consumer and worker safety, environmental protection, civil liberties, and all of those factors that come into play with international trade treaties allow the US and EU to trade freely and engage in trustworthy and mutually good faith transactions. China basically says "just trust us, bro" and will occasionally performatively execute or imprison a bad actor in their own markets, but are otherwise completely beyond the reach of any accountability.
You don't think Trump's backers have used profiling, say, to influence voters? Or that DOGE {party of the USA regime} has done "sketchy things" with people's data?
This company cannot be helped. They cannot be saved through knowledge.
See ya.
Yes, even when you know what you're doing security incidents dan happen. And in those cases, your response to a vulnerable matters most.
The point is there are so many dumb mistakes and worrying design flaws that neglect and incompetence seems ample. Most likely they simply don't grasp what they're doing
As far as being "very welcoming", that's nice, but it only goes so far to make up for irresponsible gross incompetence. They made a choice to sell a product that's z-tier flaming crap, and they ought to be treated accordingly.
to assume it is not spying on you is naive at best. to address your sinophobia label, personally, I assume everything is spying on me regardless of country of origin. I assume every single website is spying on me. I assume every single app is spying on me. I assume every single device that runs an app or loads a website is spying on me. Sometimes that spying is done for me, but pretty much always the person doing the spying is benefiting someway much greater than any benefit I receive. Especially the Facebook example of every website spying on me for Facebook, yet I don't use Facebook.
Suppose you live in the USA and the USA is spying on you. Whatever information they collect goes into a machine learning system and it flags you for disappearal. You get disappeared.
Suppose you live in the USA and China is spying on you. Whatever information they collect goes into a machine learning system and it flags you for disappearal. But you're not in China and have no ties to China so nothing happens to you. This is a strictly better scenario than the first one.
If you're living in China with a Chinese family, of course, the scenarios are reversed.
This was the opposite of a professional response:
* Official communication coming from a Gmail. (Is this even an employee or some random contractor?)
* Asked no clarifying questions
* Gave no timelines for expected fixes, no expectations on when the next communication should be
* No discussion about process to disclose the issues publicly
* Mixing unrelated business discussions within a security discussion. While not an outright offer of a bribe, ANY adjacent comments about creating a business relationship like a sponsorship is wildly inappropriate in this context.
These folks are total clown shoes on the security side, and the efficacy of their "fix", and then their lack of communication, further proves that.
It depends on what you mean by simple security design flaws. I'd rather frame it as, neglect or incompetence.
That isn't the same as malice, of course, and they deserve credits for their relatively professional response as you already pointed out.
But, come on, it reeks of people not understanding what they're doing. Not appreciating the context of a complicated device and delivering a high end service.
If they're not up to it, they should not be doing this.
> Overall simple security design flaws but it's good to see a company that cares to fix them, even if they didn't take security seriously from the start
I don't think that should give anyone a free pass though. It was such a simple flaw that realistically speaking they shouldn't ever be trusted again. If it had been a non-obvious flaw that required going through lots of hoops then fair enough but they straight up had zero authentication. That isn't a 'flaw' you need an external researcher to tell you about.
I personally believe companies should not be praised for responding to such a blatant disregard for quality, standards, privacy and security. No matter where they are from.
This is factually not sinophobia, by the literal definition of it - "prejudice, hatred, hostility, and discrimination that is directed towards Chinese people or Chinese culture"
This tactic is straight out of the PRC influence playbook, badly breaks the HN guidelines, is extremely anti-intellectual and profoundly uninteresting. Please don't do it.
/s