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WeChat is Watching: Living in China with the app that knows everything about me

nautil.us

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Re: WeChat is Watching: Living in China with the app that knows everything about me

#81

Post by nerd7473 »

bamboozled wrote: post #63
th3iedkid wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Is it too much effort to just make your own coffee in your own apartment? Does that now also have to be delivered to you? The amount of waste involved in this just boggles my mind. Not from China but have been different phases of life where have either preferred to have early morning coffe delivered/fetched/made myself in my apartment. Different priorities would drove the choices for me. Pricing differences between…

I’m curious, do people even enjoying drinking nice / real coffee anymore when drinking from Starbucks or have it delivered and sipping it at your desk or in the elevator, or is this just some kind of habit like smoking? Why not just wash down a caffeine pill with warm glass of water for the kick and move when time pressed?

I love a regular serving of six cups of almost dark coffee. I can't stand real sweet foods as my sense of taste is overwhelmingly strong (yeah I have sensory issues, it's part of life for me).

Re: WeChat is Watching: Living in China with the app that knows everything about me

#82

Post by dractori »

maimeowmeow wrote: post #71
bamboozled wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m curious, do people even enjoying drinking nice / real coffee anymore when drinking from Starbucks or have it delivered and sipping it at your desk or in the elevator, or is this just some kind of habit like smoking? Why not just wash down a caffeine pill with warm glass of water for the kick and move when time pressed?

If such a pill was ever created, I surmise that the coffee industry would collapse overnight.

You can get 120 pills of 100mg of caffeine for $6 including shipping "Jet-Alert 100 MG Each Caffeine Tab 120 Count". There are fancier ones that include L-Theanine (found in green tea) to mellow the caffeine jitters out but those are significantly more expensive.

Re: WeChat is Watching: Living in China with the app that knows everything about me

#83

Post by parhaml »

ConfusedDog wrote: post #47

> If it wasn’t for the fact that I grew up in London and use a VPN to jump the great firewall to keep in touch with my friends at home and use Google, I could go entire days without leaving WeChat. I wonder what VPN people use in China to access Google. When I was there last month, I couldn't find a single one that worked for more than a few days.

Last month would have been close to impossible. The leadup to the Tiananmen anniversary would see stronger crackdowns on VPN use.

Re: WeChat is Watching: Living in China with the app that knows everything about me

#84

Post by adinobro »

adamsea wrote: post #74
adinobro wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't say anything about privacy just that it is a private company. It doesn't seem that different to the US government with AT&T. https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130901/23253224379/att-h...

It is different because in China I doubt there would have been any investigative reporting about the government and AT&T. And while AT&T doesn’t seem to have done this, other companies such as Apple have enacted privacy measures which directly contravene the stated wishes of the government - but which are legal. In China, I believe the way it works is, whatever the government wants becomes legal. The US is far from p…

One of the biggest and more interesting difference is that the US government wants to keep these things secret and investigative reporting finds them.

In China, they want this information public because they want people to know that they know and self regulate - Panopticon.

The cynic in me looks at the US as a country controlled by companies while China is a country that controls companies. I don't know if it makes that much of a difference any more now that companies are almost the same size as countries.

Re: WeChat is Watching: Living in China with the app that knows everything about me

#85

Post by pwinnski »

adinobro wrote: post #26
test1235 wrote: post #21

How is the Chinese government with regards to IT quality? I've come to believe that most governments are inept when it comes to the management, security and general quality of their software. With the government holding so much critical information, it seems a very obvious and valuable target for hackers.

WeChat is a private company owned by Tencent.

This is a distinction without a difference in China.

Re: WeChat is Watching: Living in China with the app that knows everything about me

#86

Post by markplindsay »

adinobro wrote: post #44
n1000 wrote: post #40

Going to China soon and everybody tells me WeChat will help me a lot over there. However, I cannot create my account without a "voiceprint". It wants me to read some numbers to fingerprint my voice. Apparently I cannot skip this step and I am not very comfortable with that.

I actually find Alipay easier to use for payments and it is easier to set up. If you don't want to chat I would use it instead.

Can you set up Alipay with a non-Chinese bank account or card?

It works great for Chinese people and foreign residents of the PRC who have a bank account. However, my experience as a tourist was that it was impossible to link my US credit card using the PRC version of the app downloaded while in China.

Re: WeChat is Watching: Living in China with the app that knows everything about me

#87

Post by avcdsuia »

test1235 wrote: post #21

How is the Chinese government with regards to IT quality? I've come to believe that most governments are inept when it comes to the management, security and general quality of their software. With the government holding so much critical information, it seems a very obvious and valuable target for hackers.

> I've come to believe that most governments are inept when it comes to the management, security and general quality of their software.

They are very well aware of it, so they do outsourcing to pro-CCP companies, e.g. Hikvision, Face++.

Re: WeChat is Watching: Living in China with the app that knows everything about me

#88

Post by zrobotics »

yoz-y wrote: post #75
adinobro wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actually find Alipay easier to use for payments and it is easier to set up. If you don't want to chat I would use it instead.

I have created a WeChat account years ago and I can not actually use it for payments. I don't know why it is but the wallet option never appears.

We hat payments used to require a Chinese bank account, so we're essentially inaccessible to foreigners. This is secondhand knowledge, I've never used it, but I have heard this has changed. Perhaps since the account was created while this restriction was in place, the option was never enabled?

Re: WeChat is Watching: Living in China with the app that knows everything about me

#89

Post by adinobro »

yoz-y wrote: post #75
adinobro wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actually find Alipay easier to use for payments and it is easier to set up. If you don't want to chat I would use it instead.

I have created a WeChat account years ago and I can not actually use it for payments. I don't know why it is but the wallet option never appears.

The wallet option only exists if you have a Chinese Wechat account (using a Chinese phone number).

Re: WeChat is Watching: Living in China with the app that knows everything about me

#90

Post by adinobro »

powerapple wrote: post #57
adinobro wrote: post #17

A few things worth being aware of Alibaba does not own WeChat but rather's it's competition Alipay. It does not have any access to WeChat data. So far the "social credit" on seems to be mostly based on how much you buy and it only seems to give you discounts to massively overpriced products (similar to a credit card reward system). You don't really download apps in Wechat but rather add a link more like a Facebook Ap…

Sesame credit score is used when you use to book a hotel online, if you score is higher you don't need a deposit. It linked to how much money you can borrow from some services. It is basically a credit score similar to what you get from credit agency.

I don't stay in hotels that expensive (I generally have to pay up front) very often and since I'm not Chinese I don't have access to most loans here either.
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