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China has wealth of data on what individuals are doing at a micro level

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Re: China has wealth of data on what individuals are doing at a micro level

#71
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The key issue is the data is on sale or not or potentially could be sold. Agencies collecting data is totally fine. No one can avoid it in this world nowadays. Showing IDs seems very old-school. Remember PRISM? As long as one is using a smartphone, they are being tracked every single second.

Showing ID is a reminder that you can't function in society without staying in line. You can't really fall back on dropping out of digital, financial and location tracking no matter where you are.

Sure you can

Re: China has wealth of data on what individuals are doing at a micro level

#74
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing in China is that so many trivial daily activities require government-issued ID. Buying a coach/train ticket. Buying a SIM card. Every website/mobile app registration require a mobile phone number, which means any account is easily traceable to your government-issued ID, too. Hell, even visiting your friend in a hotel requires recording your ID before hotel staff will let you go upstairs (strictly enforced i…

There are always security/privacy trade-offs when it comes to applying policies. There are 1.4bn people in China. It has to take a much scalable approach to manage the population to ensure safety for average people and smooth functioning of a society. Especially given there is modern terrorism randomly seeks opportunities. Btw, not every app is interested in tracing you, and quite a few are giving options to email re…

Recording ID for hotel visitors and chef's knife purchases are hardly 'scalable'. And, it's not the apps that are tracing you. It's apps linked with ID that enables not only government surveillance, but surveillance that's as convenient for the government as possible, and for as many governmental agencies as possible.

Re: China has wealth of data on what individuals are doing at a micro level

#75
post #58
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> China has done better than any other country on Earth at poverty reduction This is only true if you're applying a ludicrous double standard. China has done better than most other countries at this because China was extremely poor just a few decades back. Nowadays, much of China is still very poor. Of course it's much easier for China to slash its poverty rates than for an already-developed nation. The real thing to…

Im comparing China to other countries that were similarly poor in 1980-- much of the world, including the second biggest country, India. China did much better than them. I don't think any other society in history has lifted as many people out of poverty in as short a time.

Did American corporations not gift China with a massive amount of free, working out of the box technology to get them going?

Re: China has wealth of data on what individuals are doing at a micro level

#76
post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Showing ID is a reminder that you can't function in society without staying in line. You can't really fall back on dropping out of digital, financial and location tracking no matter where you are.

Sure you can

Care to expand on that?

Re: China has wealth of data on what individuals are doing at a micro level

#77
post #25
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing in China is that so many trivial daily activities require government-issued ID. Buying a coach/train ticket. Buying a SIM card. Every website/mobile app registration require a mobile phone number, which means any account is easily traceable to your government-issued ID, too. Hell, even visiting your friend in a hotel requires recording your ID before hotel staff will let you go upstairs (strictly enforced i…

The key issue is the data is on sale or not or potentially could be sold. Agencies collecting data is totally fine. No one can avoid it in this world nowadays. Showing IDs seems very old-school. Remember PRISM? As long as one is using a smartphone, they are being tracked every single second.

This is a world humans are building AND sustaining by repeatedly saying yes to it, and it's putting the worst as a cork on the bottle in which the best should asphyxiate. That's just silly; the reasons are silly and the excuses are silly as well.

People claim it's necessary, but they're just parroting someone like the guardian in that Kafka story: it's just talk. Just walk on through while you still live. Until we do, I don't even see a "there" where we are, I just see black and white moving pictures and hear sad music.

Re: China has wealth of data on what individuals are doing at a micro level

#78
This is what comes out of Google allowing apps to read phone IMEI in Android. I have no concrete proof, but the reason why all major Chinese apps snoop after phone IMEI is said to be that the commies have secretly demanded Chinese dotcoms to collect and report phone IMEIs.

For example if you have a 6.0 or later Android, Alibaba app will block you if you disabled the permission to read IMEI or it detects spoofing.

https://postimg.org/image/m5u0nmdxd/

It is easy to see how they also use it for their own purposes: open a new taobao account, search for some items, do factory reset, install taobao and see that you are being shown same stuff you been searching before. This way they also clearly violate Google store rules that prohibit using IMEIs as tracking IDs for marketing purposes. It was reported over so many times, and Google clearly knows of this. I guess, they are afraid of antagonising "the premier Chinese dotcom" or still considering going back to China.

Re: China has wealth of data on what individuals are doing at a micro level

#79
post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Im comparing China to other countries that were similarly poor in 1980-- much of the world, including the second biggest country, India. China did much better than them. I don't think any other society in history has lifted as many people out of poverty in as short a time.

Did American corporations not gift China with a massive amount of free, working out of the box technology to get them going?

Are you referring to surveillance/data processing technology specifically or technological advances in general? If it's general advances, I don't see how it's really relevant. To some extent, similar technologies are available to all countries at this point, so its down to governments and society wrt how productively these technologies are leveraged.

The classic example of this is how landline telephony is much less prevalent than cellular in much of Africa. Landline technology was effectively skipped. I don't think African governments and societies are benefitting at the expense of western cell phone businesses. It's not a zero-sum game in this respect.

Re: China has wealth of data on what individuals are doing at a micro level

#80

The big problem is black market for data/identities. Not only in China but in the world. Identity theft is quite huge. And a lot of those data weren't even stolen but was sold by those corrupt officials or staffs in some firms.

How much do they pay for a post these days?
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