Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

cbc.ca

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 250 posts

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

#171

Post by jbg_ »

rconti wrote: post #151
dirktheman wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From June 2017 there will be no extra dataroaming charges in the EU. So you could buy a non-registered SIM card in The Netherlands (you can even buy them at the checkout counter at the supermarket) and use it all over EU member states. Strange situation...

The world can't wait -- but I'd not call it strange. I hadn't been to Europe since 2004, and on my subsequent visit in 2011, I just casually told my wife "we'll just buy SIMs at the first country we go to, surely they've sorted out this stupid roaming-when-you-travel-a-few-hundred-miles thing by now." WRONG. So glad this is coming to an end. I've wasted far too much time and money country-hopping and having to spend…

There are several providers doing EU-wide roaming already. I use Orange Spain which I've found to be good. If Spain isn't your first port of call you can buy an Orange Spain SIM on ebay. I think Aldi in Germany also does EU-wide roaming, and I've seen ads for others in other countries.

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

#172

Post by masklinn »

robinson-wall wrote: post #166
bad_user wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even though I like Android more, I have to agree that iOS has had a better privacy story. But even iOS has problems. For example I cannot force apps like Waze or Uber to only use my location while using them, you have to either disable location for them completely, or to allow them to take your location while running in the background. It's an either/or proposition and the result is that Waze and Uber users do have t…

I don't think iOS is to blame for the binary choice that you get with Uber / Waze. I have some apps which have three choices in the location services settings (Always, While using the app, Never) so it seems like a choice by the developer.

Well Apple could have made the list unmodifiable so that application can't "opt out" of the "while using the app" setting.

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

#173

Post by simonh »

pyrale wrote: post #164
logicchains wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not compare China to countries that were similarly poor in the 1950s? China, Korea, Taiwan were comparable then, but Korea and Taiwan have leaped ahead now due to saner government. If anything how poor China is in PPP GDP per capita terms vs Taiwan/Korea should be taken as an indictment of how terrible the government's been.

Because then, you would have to account for geopolitics. China didn't receive the kind of helicopter money non-communist countries in the area received. China (but also, e.g. Vietnam) also got access to consumer markets much later.

By conscious choice by the Chinese government though. If a government criminalizes capitalism, they can hardly cry foul if countries that don't do that reap enormous rewards from allowing inward capital investment. Especially when China later reaps the same rewards when they do finally allow it.

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

#174

Post by masklinn »

kriro wrote: post #159
baybal2 wrote: post #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. htt…

On Android 6.0+ you can deny the READ_PHONE_STATE permission and stop using apps that won't work if you do. A quick search seems to indicate that there is an Alibaba app for iOS. Do you think Apple negotiated that the IMEI isn't required for the iOS version? Personally I don't trust Android (or the hardware companies that sell Android devices) or iOS but picked an Android 6+ device because in principle I'd rather hav…

> Do you think Apple negotiated that the IMEI isn't required for the iOS version?

Didn't need to negotiate anything, on iOS the IMEI has never been programmatically accessible[0], and other "global identifiers" (UDID, MAC) either weren't ever accessible or were removed afterwards.

You can get an "advertising identifier" which should only be used to hand to ad networks (your application can get banned if you use it otherwise) and a "vendor identifier" which identifies the device to the app vendor only.

[0] via public frameworks, you can get it from the private NetworkController class but that will get your application rejected from the appstore. You're "at risk" if you sideload applications though.

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

#175

Post by simonh »

dcposch wrote: post #35

China is fascinating. On one hand... - China has done better than any other country on Earth at poverty reduction. Chinese policy since Deng Xiaoping lifted hundreds of millions of people out of subsistence poverty. Free markets were a big part of this, but so were Special Economic Zones starting with Shenzhen, a culture of sharing IP, massive govt investments in infrastructure, research and education. - China are al…

> while stopping our own governments from repeating China's mistakes and acts of authoritarian overreach

But you can't so easily dissentangle the one from the other. A lot of their development is so quick because they ride roughshod over property rights, safety standards, environmental concerns and individual liberties to push them through.

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

#176

Post by simonh »

TaylorAlexander wrote: post #81

Oracle maintains a database of personal information for billions of people. The US corporate surveillance web is rich in complexity. Before we judge China, lets make sure we know what we're comparing them to. I highly encourage anyone interested in the subject to watch this talk from last month's Chaos Computer Club Congress. "Corporate surveillance, digital tracking, big data & privacy: How thousands of companies ar…

The concerns about US/Western surveillance is that it could lead to routine direct abuses and active intrusions into daily life. It's important that we use the political and legal protections we have to limit the risks this raises.

In China they have routine direct abuses and intrusion into daily life right now and are expanding it as fast as they can. There are no legal protections and the risks are already happening.

If you can't see there's a difference there, I can't help you.

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

#177

Post by simonh »

rconti wrote: post #131
pjtr wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large-scale_macroeconometric_m... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computational_economics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Living_Earth_Simulator_Project

Damn. No offense meant to the parent (because I wasn't even smart enough to come up with this on my own in 2017, much less the 1940s), but it's humbling to see someone having such insight 70 years ago.

I read Asimov in my teens back in the 80s, but the fact that Chaos Theory had already pretty much killed a lot of those ideas as a plausible possibility took the edge off a bit.

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

#178

Post by moeffju »

smallnamespace wrote: post #136
logicchains wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not compare China to countries that were similarly poor in the 1950s? China, Korea, Taiwan were comparable then, but Korea and Taiwan have leaped ahead now due to saner government. If anything how poor China is in PPP GDP per capita terms vs Taiwan/Korea should be taken as an indictment of how terrible the government's been.

Because getting something to happen in a large country is much much harder than in a smaller country. China is literally 20 times the size of Korea AND Taiwan. To achieve growth in a small country, you can be nimble and find relatively small market opportunities and then exploit them relentlessly. That simply doesn't scale to 1bn+ people.

Almost 40 times, actually. https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=area+of+china+%2F+(are...

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

#179

Post by zimpenfish »

masklinn wrote: post #172
robinson-wall wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think iOS is to blame for the binary choice that you get with Uber / Waze. I have some apps which have three choices in the location services settings (Always, While using the app, Never) so it seems like a choice by the developer.

Well Apple could have made the list unmodifiable so that application can't "opt out" of the "while using the app" setting.

But then every app would just go for "Always" in case they ever wanted to change it in the future and we'd all lose.

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

#180

Post by zimpenfish »

bad_user wrote: post #141
peteretep wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Google allowing apps to read > phone IMEI in Android An unpopular sentiment, but this is why I love iOS. I genuinely don't think any of my apps can meaningfully spy on me without my having told them they may. I even get reminders if I've let an app read my location in the background, to check that's what I want to do.

Even though I like Android more, I have to agree that iOS has had a better privacy story. But even iOS has problems. For example I cannot force apps like Waze or Uber to only use my location while using them, you have to either disable location for them completely, or to allow them to take your location while running in the background. It's an either/or proposition and the result is that Waze and Uber users do have t…

Allowing "While using the app" to cover ~10 minutes of background work after you switch away from the app would fix the Uber issue - at the expense of creating a whole world of confusion about what "using the app" actually covers.

An alternative would be a temporary grant for an hour / until the end of the day like you have with "Find Friends". But working out the UX and UI logistics of that are beyond my skills.

Post reply on HN