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Comment by oceanplexian | Hacker News Reader

This might come as a weird take but I'm less concerned about the Chinese logging my private information than an American company. What's China going to do? It's a far away country I don't live in and don't care about. If they got an American court order they would probably use it as toilet paper.

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.

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That's rather naive, considering China has a international police unit, that is stationed in several countries https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_police_overseas_servic...

There's also the Mossad's approach to "you're out of our jurisdiction".

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

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

Also the CIA's approach

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

And the Saudi Bone Saw Diplomatic Team.

They only arrest chinese citizens.

Right, but the vast majority of people living in the USA as citizens have threat models that rightly do not include "Being disappeared by China"

What about the threat model that goes, "Trump threatens to impose 1000% tariffs if Chinese don't immediately turn over copies of all data captured by their AI products from users in the US?"

Compounding the difficulty of the question: half of HN thinks this would be a good idea.

The history of tariff talks seems to indicate that rather than oblige, China would stop all shipments of semiconductors to the US and Trump would back down after a week or two.

TACO...

True. Now imagine a future POTUS who has all of Trump's faults except his endearingly-feckless idiocy.

I recently learned that the New York City Police Department has international presence as well. Not sure if it directly compares, but... what a world we live in.

https://www.nycpolicefoundation.org/ourwork/advance/countert...

https://www.nyc.gov/site/nypd/bureaus/investigative/intellig...

Pretty sure NYPD has a budget in the billions and covers more landmass and population than some small countries, so there’s also that.

Man wait until you hear what's in DC (and the surrounding area). In any possible way China is a threat to my health, the US state and corporations based here are a far greater one.

> What's China going to do? It's a far away country I don't live in and don't care about.

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...

> but if you work at a place they're interested, they care about you.

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.

> The other thing is, China has been known to operate overseas against targets

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.

> 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.

> Listen in on what people talk about, run it through a STT engine and a ML model to condense it down

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)

These threads always seem to be what can China do to me in a limited way of thinking that China cannot jail you or something. However, do you think all of the Chinese data scrapers are not doing something similar to Facebook where every source of data gathering ultimately gets tied back to you? Once China has a dosier on every single person on the planet regardless of country they live, they can then start using their algos to influence you in ways well beyond advertising. If they can have their algos show you content that causes you to change your mind on who you are voting for or some other method of having you do something to make changes in your local/state/federal elections, then that's much worse to me than some feigned threat of Chinese advertising making you buy something

They probably will do that, but I think it’s naive to think the US military/intelligence/tech sector wouldn’t happily do the same. Given many of us likely see the hand of the US already trying to tip the scale in our local politics more than China, why would we be more worried of China?

So flip the script, what do I care if the US is trying to influence the minds of adversary's citizens? If people are saying they don't care what China knows about them (not being a Chinese citizen), why should I (not a Chinese citizen) care what my gov't knows about Chinese citizens?

Nobody said they don’t care, they said it worries them less than America.

The "don't care" is implied when someone says that "China knowing about me when I'm not in China nor a Chinese citizen"

Carry this package and deliver it to person X with you next time you fly. Go to the outskirts of this military base and take a picture and send it to us.

You wouldn't want your mom finding out your weird sexual fetish, would you?

China has a policy of chilling free speech in the west with political pressure.

So does the west.

The censorship in the West is directly in the models

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