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

211–220 of 250 posts

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

#211

Post by 3pt14159 »

delegate wrote: post #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 ?…

1. Secrets that are widely known don't stay secret for long. Snowden leaked a lot of documents and none of them said the government was doing this already.

2. The data that is out there is _very_ messy. If you have a unique name and you use it as your twitter handle, sure, this is already happening. It's called Klout. But most companies just use it to figure out what image to put on their coupons.

3. I've never heard of employers asking for someones "trustwrothiness score". We as a society get pretty pissy about this type of thing. We've banned IQ tests, and needlessly asking for credit reports / scores. If a metric like this came out in wide use we'd ban it.

4. License agreements are generally unenforcible. You don't get the right to someones car just because you put it in a license agreement. If you could do that there would be lots of scams trying to get old grandpa to install a new photo app to see his grandkids.

5. What is going on in China is overblown in the media. It's not a episode of Black Mirror. The people that are most impacted by it are politically loud young adults online, but the vast, vast majority of Chinese don't worry about it. There are much more important human rights concerns in China that need addressing like freedom of the press.

6. We're not in a nightmare phase, we're in the same phase we've always been in. The telegraph cables were tapped by every major government, the radios listened to, the phones tapped, we even put recording equipment into televisions we sold overseas, our major hotels have always been tapped (or easily tapped given a court order if a foreign national was in town). This has been happening for over a hundred years.

I agree we should know about it (thank you Snowden) and in some cases I don't like it, but the solution isn't to wish it away, it's to use encryption and not say or do stupid things around computers.

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

#212

Post by wodencafe »

the8472 wrote: post #206
DanielBMarkham wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. There's a technical word for the kind of world we technical folks are helping to build. It's called a "dystopia" And while it's fun to either wave our arms around and say "But everybody's doing it!" or talking about wild dreams of a better tomorrow, the crap we've created is right here, right now. As a technical person, if you're looking for somebody to blame, there's the mirror. When I was in the armed force…

> There's a technical word for the kind of world we technical folks are helping to build. It's called a "dystopia" Consider e-cash. People would love to implement it, but banking regulation makes it difficult to actually do business through anonymous transactions. Similarly many privacy-conscious ISP operators want to throw away logs as soon as possible, but regulation forces them to retain data. Sure, the likes of f…

It always comes down to big companies and big gov't.

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

#213

Post by wu-ikkyu »

krona wrote: post #194
delegate wrote: post #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 ?…

In the EU you can instruct a company to divulge everything it knows about you. Facebook will give it to you on a DVD (or at least they used to). As an instrument of control and coercion, however, there is a massive difference between a government collecting data and not telling you, and a government collecting the data and telling you they use it to calculate your worth to society. The latter seems utterly tyrannical…

How can you know what the "massive" difference is between the two cases since in the former case you are left in the dark as to what the information is being used for?

Both cases utilize the tools of tyranny, and Facebook has shown they are more than willing to comply with whatever the host nations government wishes, lest they lose profits for their shareholders.

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

#214

Post by battlebot »

verst wrote: post #31
notliketherest wrote: post #17

As an American, I would never download a Chinese app like WeChat or use a digital service based in China.

I'm German and (as stereotypes would have it) extremely privacy conscious. Having lived in the US for over a decade I've reluctantly come to terms with the lesser privacy standards here. For a long time I refused to keep a lot of information on Facebook as Facebook seemed to only consider privacy as an afterthought after users expressed outrage (I appreciate transparency about the use of data so I can make my own dec…

Convenience is how they get to you. Just say no to convenience.

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

#215

Post by asdfGUYasdfn »

The data is one thing, actionable knowledge about that data is another. Just look at the US and how data is processed by the intelligence community. Not to say anything has come of it, but the proliferation of information is still an issue of computing power and well designed algorithms that can sniff it. Just imagine China .... it's still way under the curb.

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

#216

Post by wu-ikkyu »

simonh wrote: post #176
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 happenin…

>The concerns about US/Western surveillance is that it could lead to routine direct abuses

Curious use of the word "could", as it seems to imply such abuses have not already occurred and been exposed without legal recourse.

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

#217

Post by masklinn »

zimpenfish wrote: post #207
masklinn wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Uber went from allowing "While using the app" + "Always" to only "Always". I was perhaps misunderstanding the parent as suggesting that once an app has allowed "While using the app" as a choice, that could never be removed - ie Uber would still have to allow "While using the app" as a choice. If that was the case, apps might avoid offering the "While using" choice in the first place if they might ever consider the ne…

I was suggesting that no application should be allowed to remove "while using" ever, regardless of what they initially offered.

that is the current permutations which an application can provide are:

* no, using, always

* no, using

* no, always

I do not think the latter should be allowed.

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

#218

Post by masklinn »

zimpenfish wrote: post #208
e_proxus wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Ah, you mean apps should always have to support the options of "Never", "While using", and "Always" rather than the app specifying which it supports? Sure, makes sense, and I would be on-board with that.

Removing "always" could make sense for an application not needing it, but that aside yes, the "never" and "while using" choices should always be present.

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

#219

Post by DanielBMarkham »

wodencafe wrote: post #212
the8472 wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There's a technical word for the kind of world we technical folks are helping to build. It's called a "dystopia" Consider e-cash. People would love to implement it, but banking regulation makes it difficult to actually do business through anonymous transactions. Similarly many privacy-conscious ISP operators want to throw away logs as soon as possible, but regulation forces them to retain data. Sure, the likes of f…

It always comes down to big companies and big gov't.

Yep.

You get to be a big company by creating something where people voluntarily give you information that big governments have long dreamed of forcing out of people.

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

#220

Post by yyhhsj0521 »

mistermann wrote: post #75
dcposch wrote: 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?

Not really... Like US government even banned Intel from selling certain chips to China, and Chinese rocket scientists are somehow not able to attend any conference hosted by NASA (not sure about this one).
Post reply on HN