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Comment by markus_zhang | Hacker News Reader

I don't see WeChat, which is weird, considering it has been out for decades and not particularly famous for being secure. Maybe it is rarely used by people in Western countries, I guess. But anyway the Chinese government can conveniently read your WeChat messages. Congratulations to all tech brothers and sisters who bring upon the love of governments to us.

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The example is from a Czech citizen, unlikely that they use WeChat (Line neither though).

Yeah my thought, too. I'm also wondering whether they hire in-house engineers or mostly just buy it from some other places. Maybe they also hire people straight out from intelligence?

Maybe it's just me being old, but it generally seems unlikely that 5 or 6 messaging apps. I can understand having both TikTok and Snapchat (plus a number of other social media apps).

My take is that this is probably a test account.

Yeah, it is probably a test account, but a test account that is somewhat plausible. I don't find 5 or 6 messaging apps unlikely and I see people with a lot of them, because there is little perceived cost of installing more and it improves reachability.

Like, I have Threema installed, even though none of my contacts use it. But if one does happen to use it in the future, I'm reachable if necessary.

If the Chinese government can read WeChat but not the actual government, which has unlimited access to our body parts, I guess we should all be switching to WeChat.

I'm fine with not criticizing China or Chi, as long as EU and US governments don't have access to my messages.

I think you need to be invited by a Chinese citizen to use WeChat, and they're penalised (in the real world!) for inviting people who don't comply with Chinese law.

Stuff like that is wild to me. At least in the US, we have internal laws democratically elected that can force things to happen (Epstein transparency act for example).

In China, it can be illegal to even talk about changing the status quo.

When I see people on the internet saying things like: "Yeah screw the US, we just made a deal with China!" I wonder how oblivious they are to the domestic conditions in China.

I don't really think there is a lot of differences between the two. China does have a heavy hand in regulating the chats, e.g. you could have your account auto-banned for whatever the reason, if the AI finds something. Sometimes it could as trivial as mentioning e.g. 8964 in a completely different context.

But I think this is more about China wasting resources on trivial things while the US wisely focuses on more important things /s.

>I don't really think there is a lot of differences between the two.

Did your sarcasm include that sentence?

If not, I suggest you stop doom scrolling. You don't really believe this? That would be wild.

Nope. Both countries are ruled by elites who don't give a fuck about ordinary people. In that perspective the Chinese one actually cares a bit more -- you can't imagine what would happen if the Chinese elites really don't care about ordinary people if guns are legal. Historically speaking, the peasants would just kill, rape and destroy every elite family.

Wow, I feel bad for you.

(I'm in a third country)

Yeah that's pretty scary when it happened every 200 years. I'd say right now both sides probably feel they get a slightly better bargain, but scroll back 20 years definitely a lot would agree that the ordinary people of the US got a better deal, given how many Chinese wanted to go abroad at the time.

Wait so in the US you can talk against Palestine and still have a job, bank accounts not froze and police trying to arrest you for being Islamophobe?

It's funny you use the Epstein transparency act as an example of a law forcing things to happen, when the government is not complyibg with the Epstein transparency act.

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