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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

#181
post #4

It is precisely the same in the United States, it is just somewhat deniable there due to things like the FISA court. It allows peoples' inherent belief in American virtue to doublethink themselves into believing that the NSA doesn't collect this high-res data in bulk from Facebook and Google and Amazon and Apple and the mobile carriers—when we have clear documents showing that they do. LOVEINT is real. The large soci…

>It is precisely the same in the United States..

No it isn't.

> when we have clear documents showing that they do.

We have claims and vague overview documents, but no actual direct evidence. For China, it's so rampant that direct evidence is everywhere.

> Your social media and financial data are already being aggregated and sold—we know this, too.

Financial data can only be sold in non-personally identifying anonymized forms. Now either you know this and you're willfully trolling, or you don't and you have no idea what you're talking about. I live in the UK so modulo Brexit, my social media data is protected by EU rules. At least the US does have some controls.

China has no controls whatsoever, the government blatantly ignores the law, completely owns the courts and exploits the data directly right now for censorship and persecution. It also sells it for the personal gain of officials. No innuendo, no supposition, no conspiracy theories required, they're doing it in plain sight on a massive scale.

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

#182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You misunderstand. The list is for the user to choose, not the app developers. As it is now, Apple allows app developers to disable the middle choice for users, instead of forcing them to support it if the user so chooses.

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

#183
post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish everyone would just install Signal and Wire - it's not that hard :-/

Signal is not intended to protect from government surveillance, nor is it able to.

I thought that was exactly the point? Who is it intended to protect you from?

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

#184

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…

The Uber thing pisses me off, but I've found an easy way around it: Call your cars from city mapper. All the coords get passed along and you're depriving uber of the data they want. Win-win really.

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

#185
> Now every picture posted, every comment made, every driving infraction could go into a central database to produce a person's 'trustworthiness' score.

How is this China-only ? Can't Facebook do the same ? Can't the government force Facebook, Microsoft, etc to give out all the information that we generate in their networks ? Can't they compute such a "trustworthiness" score and sell it to your (potential) employer ?

Of course they can and they will if they don't already.

I've agreed to countless "license agreements" which I haven't read - I might have given some company my exclusive permission to monitor my every move...

What if your agreement contained a special clause not present in other user's agreements ?

There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that what is going on in China will become the status quo in a lot of other countries and this will accelerate as shit gets tougher due to all the global problems that we now face.

What's even more disappointing is that these surveillance systems are most probably built on top of open source software and libraries - which have been ideologically released in order to increase the user's 'freedom', yet who would have thought ...

Unfortunately the dream of a better, closer, freer world is now passing through a nightmare phase - we've built the perfect tools for crazies to do their crazy thing...

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

#186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You misunderstand. The list is for the user to choose, not the app developers. As it is now, Apple allows app developers to disable the middle choice for users, instead of forcing them to support it if the user so chooses.

> As it is now, Apple allows app developers to disable the middle choice for users, instead of forcing them to support it if the user so chooses.

TBF they also allow disabling the final choice, most of my applications (including many built-in applications like Calendar or Maps) only have "never" and "while using the app".

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

#187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Er… what? The application can't "change it in the future" in the first place.

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

#188
post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish everyone would just install Signal and Wire - it's not that hard :-/

Signal is not intended to protect from government surveillance, nor is it able to.

If you're specifically targeted by 3-letter level organisations, it gets very difficult to protect yourself, sure. "If your adversary is the Mossad, YOU’RE GONNA DIE AND THERE’S NOTHING THAT YOU CAN DO ABOUT IT. The Mossad is not intimidated by the fact that you employ https://", as James Mickens put it in his hilarious column [1].

However, against mass surveillance, Signal will protect you, I'd think, just by making it much more complicated to intercept than WeChat or Skype, which have backdoors built right in.

[1] https://www.usenix.org/system/files/1401_08-12_mickens.pdf

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

#189
Much the same as in The Netherlands, where the police is proud to be able to track any move of any citizen through big cities (using installed cameras) and which is the country with the most telephone taps per citizen.

Really, many countries in Europe are basically run like Singapore.

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

#190
post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish everyone would just install Signal and Wire - it's not that hard :-/

Signal is not intended to protect from government surveillance, nor is it able to.

You have the source code to Signal. You can see exactly how it protects you from government (and other) surveillance.

To be clear: it does better than anything else you can find in an app store.

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