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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

#221

Post by yyhhsj0521 »

messick wrote: post #97
contingencies wrote: post #94

What a silly article: "download the controls to the private sector" indeed. The government already owns the telcos, half the banks, the only domestic interbank transfer system and the only domestic travel reservation system so they have your IMEI, real time location and history, network traffic, bank balance and payment and employment history and travel plans anyway. And that of your friends/relatives. They certainly…

Safer? I guess that Great Firewall does work: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiananmen_Square_protests_of_1...

It is indeed safer (in term of murder rate at least). I'm not saying that the safety is achieved by the right method though. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intention...

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

#222

Post by yyhhsj0521 »

ralfd wrote: post #148
oblio wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we judge them by their history and by their results, the image changes quite a bit. They were on the verge of a major economic breakthrough and they needed political stability. Also, historically political instability in China lead to millions of people dieing. I don't approve of their actions, they reacted way too late and were too violent. A faster intervention, something like mass arrests (+ releases after ever…

> It's easy to judge them from outside. To be fair, isn't that the only way to judge this? China forbids discussion of the Tiananmen Square protests and censors informations, younger generations aren't even aware of it.

Nah... I live in China, and have just graduated from high school. There isn't a single person who doesn't know about the 64 protest. (but I am from one of those "elite high schools" so this may not tell much about the whole population). Few really care about it though, like (I imagine) few teens in US really care about the gulf war or the Vietnam war.

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

#223

Post by mistermann »

maksimum wrote: post #79
mistermann wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

No, just that they were more or less a third world country with extremely cheap and hard working labor, I'm under the impression that American (and European, etc) companies went over there and provided equipment and expertise to set up fully functioning manufacturing plants, China had to provide the labor.

It seems fairly unlikely to me that China turned into the manufacturer of the world in such a short period of time without being gifted the skills and technology to do so. And now, companies like Xiamoi can now challenge (or, at least run with) the tech leaders.

Pretty impressive transformation in < 20 years.

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

#224

Post by mistermann »

agentcoops wrote: post #82
mistermann wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

"History is like a grandmother; it loves the younger grand-children. To the latecomers it gives not the bones but the marrow, while Western Europe has hurt her fingers badly in her attempts to break the bones."

This sounds interesting but I don't think I'm catching the full meaning....

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

#225

Post by pyrale »

simonh wrote: post #173
pyrale wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

We're discussing two very differents topics. I'm trying to explain why the chinese or the vietnamese situation is quite different from e.g. the south korean or the japanese situation, which makes it hard to compare them. You on the other hand, are discussing about the fairness, or moral justification of the events I talk about.

These two discussions are completely orthogonal.

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

#226

Post by TeMPOraL »

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…

You can't forget that there are good reasons for those regulations you mentioned, and getting rid of them isn't necessarily going to create a brighter, better future.

I'm not going to push "terrorism" or "pictures of small children" angle, because people engaging in those actions are very rare. Reality is much more boring - those rules help against run-of-the-mill fraud and abuse, the kind which every other individual business, small and large, would happily do. Nor did those regulations came out of thin air or "imagination" - they're almost always responses to real problems.

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

#227

Post by mrSugar »

3pt14159 wrote: post #211
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…

What about just not saying or doing stupid things at all?

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

#228

Post by paulmd »

3pt14159 wrote: post #211
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…

> 3. We've banned ... needlessly asking for credit reports / scores.

No, it's perfectly legal for employers to run a credit report on you and make a hiring decision on that basis. You're outright incorrect here.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/kerryhannon/2013/03/16/has-your-...

> 4. License agreements are generally unenforcible.

Good luck proving that in court. Especially when you just also agreed to mandatory binding arbitration instead of a court hearing.

It's not even a situation of you not being able to mount a defense against a billion-dollar corporation, you will literally never have the chance to have a lawyer in the room with you in any sort of hearing.

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

#229

Post by 3pt14159 »

paulmd wrote: post #228
3pt14159 wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 3. We've banned ... needlessly asking for credit reports / scores. No, it's perfectly legal for employers to run a credit report on you and make a hiring decision on that basis. You're outright incorrect here. http://www.forbes.com/sites/kerryhannon/2013/03/16/has-your-... > 4. License agreements are generally unenforcible. Good luck proving that in court. Especially when you just also agreed to mandatory binding a…

3. It's banned almost everywhere in the western world except for America. California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, Nevada, Oregon, Vermont, Washington, and NYC have banned it unless it's needed for the job (i.e. they give you a credit card) and even the states where it is legal it's still not used for non-sensitive positions or responsibilities, and if it started to become widespread there they'd ban it there too.

4. It has been proved in court countless times when the terms have been ruled out of scope. You need to have meeting of the minds in contracts. You cannot unknowingly agree to binding arbitration either. This is just FUD. Show me the court case or the media storm when little Sally lost all her money because she unwittingly agreed to some completely unreasonable ToS. The infringing company would get countersued by an attorney working on commission.

Not that you can't get fucked by the courts and contracts in America, you most certainly can, but not by these unenforceable / unreasonable ToS.

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

#230

Post by the8472 »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #226
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…

You can't forget that there are good reasons for those regulations you mentioned, and getting rid of them isn't necessarily going to create a brighter, better future. I'm not going to push "terrorism" or "pictures of small children" angle, because people engaging in those actions are very rare. Reality is much more boring - those rules help against run-of-the-mill fraud and abuse, the kind which every other individua…

That does not change the fact that new regulation usually tends to do little against information-gathering entities or even mandates more of it while there's little regulation strengthening privacy.

The thing is, anonymous cash transactions work. They have for millenia. And yet there are 0 motions to enable them in the digital space and >0 to restrict or abolish them in meatspace. The privacy they enable is practically treated like a historical accident that needs fixing.

Maybe part of the problem is that it's easy to assign monetary value to the law enforcement effort saved if you could just have more surveillance or the additional tax revenue if only every transaction were traceable. But it's a lot harder to put a value on privacy.

> they're almost always responses to real problems.

Problems may be real, but if the solutions fix that problem by creating new problems then it's not obvious that we should actually fix those problems. Maybe some youths setting bus seats on fire a few times a year is a price worth paying to not have surveillance cameras following every step you make.

Just because there are reasons behind those regulations does not mean they are good.

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