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Comment by id00 | Hacker News Reader

Here is my experience in the center of Shanghai, very subjective of course:

- I can't pay with my credit/debit cards there so I need to get their alipay pay app. There is KYC required to upload my government ID.

- We stayed in a short rent apartment, so we had to temporarily register with government. Of course that requires uploading photos of me, my kids, and all our IDs

- with a lot of apps banned there, you are essentially told which one you have to use

- you need VPN

- you go outside, there is always a police or some security in booth watching you. Of course cameras are also everywhere.

- fences everywhere - don't walk on the nice lawn there, don't sit here, don't stand there. And the moment your kids do - the security / police will come

- lack of public spaces (we couldn't find a playground, the one we eventually found was behind the fence) make the environment hostile and it almost feels like they don't want you outside

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Re: KYC

US is out of control on KYC as well. If you're a nomad, as in you don't have a permanent physical address, you cannot have a bank account. You cannot have credit cards. And now you cannot even have a mail handling service, because the new USPS requirements include ID showing a permanent residential address.

Sure this doesn't affect most people, but it affects at least two groups: the very poor, and the perpetual travelers (which includes retired folks who bought RVs and live/drive around the country full time).

Before anyone comments with, "I'm a nomad and I have X bank/credit card", I'll just say that within one year you won't. Every one of those services is legally required to collect your permanent address info. They haven't all done it yet, but they are increasingly becoming compliant. The various services which previously enabled nomad life are becoming blocked by the financial verification services.

The usual (bad) suggestion is, "just use a family member's address". This is a bad idea for many reasons, not the least of which is how the sloppy credit and data aggregation agencies will comingle yours and your family's data, resulting in all kinds of problems later.

Re: Apartment

You can't rent an apartment in Texas without proving your ID, passing a credit check, and potentially overcoming other obstacles. And you can't stay in a hotel for more then 30 days at a time (without separate bookings). You can't check into a hotel without proving your ID and the IDs of everyone staying with you.

Re: Public Spaces

Few and far between in many US cities.

Re: Police, security, fences

I'm not sure where in the US you are, but lots of developed areas of Texas are like what you describe. Worse, you've got the occasional Proud American property owner who is just itching to be a manly man and brandish his gun.

I'm an Australian who was born in Eastern Europe. I've travelled around the world, lived in the US for 4 years and done a few cross country trips in the US including visiting Texas. With all its pros/cons, my experience there can't be compared to what I had in China

It's surprising to me to learn that a place like Texas is like that. I live in California and have access to lots of public spaces, and rarely see police or fences. Private security is pretty common, but that don't bother me much; most of them don't carry firearms, and there's very little they're legally allowed to do. (And they don't make enough to risk life and limb, so they're not going to get into any but the lightest of confrontations.)

I haven't had to rent an apartment since 2014, but my experience then was similar to yours. I don't think any of that is required by law, but if I were going to rent my house out to someone I'd absolutely want to do all that stuff too.

I've definitely checked into hotels in California only providing my own ID, not the IDs of anyone staying with me. And I believe the ID check wasn't a legal requirement; the hotel was using it to verify that I was actually the person I was claiming to be for the purposes of matching me to my reservation. I don't know if there are legal limits on how long you can stay in a hotel here without re-booking.

> You can't rent an apartment in Texas without proving your ID, passing a credit check, and potentially overcoming other obstacles

Yes you absolutely can there are landlords that will rent you a crappy cheaper place that you can use to establish some identity chain within a month

It sounds like "know-your-customer" is not the problem, but rather the quaint assumption of a permanent mailing address is the problem. Isn't some manner of KYC an essential part of a society with laws?

yes, currently getting credit cards way easier than checking accounts.

> you need VPN

Roaming works to bypass GFW. Apparently many local employees of international businesses have a Hong Kong SIM card with generous data allowances, just so they can communicate with the outside world.

> you go outside, there is always a police or some security in booth watching you. Of course cameras are also everywhere.

My take on this is that because of high youth unemployment in China, there's a nationwide drive to hire young people as security. When I was there, I noticed how young many of the security people are.

But yeah, a lot of this security theatre probably has to do with having to manage their large population and keeping them gainfully employed.

>Roaming works to bypass GFW. Apparently many local employees of international businesses have a Hong Kong SIM card with generous data allowances, just so they can communicate with the outside world.

Isn't that basically just an IPSec VPN?

> Isn't that basically just an IPSec VPN?

I… don't know. If anyone knew exactly how GFW worked (and it adapts over time), and made something that would bypass whatever blocking or throttling happens when it does, they'd make a lot of money selling their solution.

I had difficulty using non-XRay VPNs even back to my home network, so for the most part I just used data roaming even with my laptop.

Usually, yes, but it's an IPsec VPN that the great firewall will explicitly not mess with in any way, because they don't want to inconvenience foreigners who are there on business.

> - I can't pay with my credit/debit cards there so I need to get their alipay pay app. There is KYC required to upload my government ID.

It's not so odd that the Chinese choose to use their domestic payment system over a US one. You probably needed a government ID to get your credit/debit card too (at least when you opened your bank account).

I'm not saying the Chinese surveillance system isn't horrible, but the western ones are catching up quickly with the adoption of Flock cameras everywhere and Palantir analyzing every bit of digital footprint you leave. Is there anyone who think there isn't a non-negliable risk that people will walk around with a "jew star" marking in the US in the coming 5-10 years?

Interesting...although most of these are present in any country, at least the ones I have been to. You can use Google in India but not Tiktok (to give one example). Earlier Singapore used to have proxy server for websites but for a long time, that is gone but I guess that's cos they have found other ways to check if they need to. Crackdowns on private condos becoming hotels with guests dragging their luggage and strangers in lift 24x7 have created a lot of trouble in many cities.

Credit card seems too much...have not seen that anywhere.

As for playgrounds etc, I guess this is to do with China being still lower income + much more densely populated.

> Earlier Singapore used to have proxy server for websites but for a long time, that is gone but I guess that's cos they have found other ways to check if they need to.

They probably had to do away with it, with HTTPS becoming more and more mainstream.

Singapore still blocks numerous sites at ISP DNS level:

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

Wouldn't they have most of that just from customs/your passport? Not saying it isn't all rather dystopian, but, like, they have your ID as soon as you hit an airport.

Added surveillance bonus(!) at Mainland Chinese airports: When doing international to international transfers, you are required to have your passport scanned. I have never seen this in free countries. You just wait in an international terminal (no customs, etc) and take the next flight. I am curious if CCP will require HK Airport to change their rules/procedures in the future.

In Singapore Changi, the arrival and departure are at same gate so you can just sit and wait for next flight. Passport is checked before you get into next flight at the gate where they check your boarding pass as well..right there your bags are also scanned (at each gate or group of few gates)

Just transited in HKG, the gates are same but boarding at different levels. So you clear the security at a common area, get same PP checks done then go to departure gate which is one level above. IIRC Qatar etc are the same.

But PP checks do happen in both cases.

Big difference between airline employee checking whether or not you're the ticket holder and the government checking every passenger for warrants.

The false positive rate when doing this via passenger records alone is so high that airport law enforcement will generally only go out of their way to actively look for particularly interesting people.

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