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We Chat, They Watch

citizenlab.ca

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Re: We Chat, They Watch

#381

Post by gigatexal »

As the world moves more and more to an Orwellian-dystopia things like this don’t surprise me much. In the states Google and Facebook do the same thing: data and monetizing it for better ads in a capitalistic sense vs. using it to suppress dissent and bolster government power when the PBOC does it.

I am free to say vile things about political leaders (so long as I don’t flat out call for anyone’s harm) here in the west which is nice. I feel bad for my fellow nerds in mainland China that don’t have as much access to the same information and opportunities that a largely free internet affords. I hope that one day we will see a liberalizing of China in this regard.

Re: We Chat, They Watch

#382

Post by seanmcdirmid »

usaar333 wrote: post #206
idrios wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah WhatsApp, Facebook, Reddit, Google Hangouts all banned in China. Pretty much anything not owned by a Chinese company, or anything that didn't go through all sorts of hoops to meet Chinese censorship criteria (and even then it's not a guarantee), is banned. Even github was banned until Chinese developers complained that it made their jobs impossible

I was aware basically every expat used a VPN/roaming cell service. Your home internet is unusable if you don't.

No, VPNs are slow and unreliable. Many expats go without. After paying yearly fees for a couple of VPNs that stopped working a couple of weeks after the fees were paid, I gave up also.

You learn to live inside the Chinese internet. Video sharing sites in China have ripped most everything off of YouTube anyways, and there is less enforcement of copyrights.

Re: We Chat, They Watch

#383

Post by Markoff »

lolc wrote: post #333
Markoff wrote: post #299

Can someone from Google please explain why is this literal spyware allowed in Play Store? And why ISPs don't block such obvious widely spread spyware?

I'm not affiliated with any of the players. Still the reason of why Wechat is available is clear to me: Unlike many other apps that track you on the side, this one is actually needed by a large chunk of Android users. And I mean needed in the strong sense of losing family and business ties if it were removed. It's pretty much utility-level at this point. If your store doesn't have it, people will use another store. A…

strange, when I lived in China nobody cared I can't communicate with my family abroad

for business everyone is using VPN or email, do you really think people will be isntalling Chinese spyware to their phones to talk to their business partners in China?

Re: We Chat, They Watch

#384

Post by tedk-42 »

dannyw wrote: post #81
tedk-42 wrote: post #69

This is common knowledge. You can't send a picture of winnie the pooh without it being scanned first and deleted over the wire before being received. People don't use WeChat to organise dissent against the government or for any kind of malicious or illegal activity. The intention is for well meaning folk to communicate and do business online.

Implying that dissent isn’t done by well meaning people.

World isn't binary like you frame it to be.

Re: We Chat, They Watch

#385

Post by tedk-42 »

defnotashton2 wrote: post #314
tedk-42 wrote: post #69

This is common knowledge. You can't send a picture of winnie the pooh without it being scanned first and deleted over the wire before being received. People don't use WeChat to organise dissent against the government or for any kind of malicious or illegal activity. The intention is for well meaning folk to communicate and do business online.

Implying that censorship is only used to suppress malicious or illegal activity.

World isn't binary like you frame it to be.

Re: We Chat, They Watch

#386

Post by infecto »

88840-8855 wrote: post #273
woutr_be wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use WeChat to talk to friends in China, (I live in HK) and I noticed that last year, especially when the protests were intense, many of my posts just didn't show up. These were mostly pictures unrelated to the protests. I had the sense that anything coming out of Hong Kong was just hidden by default.

lol, this is nothing new and nothing special. There are some words that just dont go through and messages dont arrive. I lived there and tried it with friends. You literally stand next to each other, some messages arrive, some dont. For me it is not a big deal - for most Chinese it is not a big deal. Somehow most people who never touched Wechat it seems to be a big deal.

Looking at comment history you seem to really be on the defend China bandwagon. Why is that? Also have you surveyed the chinese population to see if its not a big deal that wechat messages get censored?

Re: We Chat, They Watch

#387

Post by gberger »

arminiusreturns wrote: post #260

I worked for a company that tried to require wechat. I refused. Never got any flak, but missed a lot of comms from the first gen Chinese immigrants in the company. I posit they use WeChat more than just to censor/spy in wechat, but rather more as an one of a set of apps that can be used to side-channel leak data about the phone/user. (Israel is also the other giant player in this arena). I don't understand any tech-s…

Is the company Chinese?

Re: We Chat, They Watch

#388

Post by liberal_098 »

not_exactly__ wrote: post #278
88840-8855 wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

lol, this is nothing new and nothing special. There are some words that just dont go through and messages dont arrive. I lived there and tried it with friends. You literally stand next to each other, some messages arrive, some dont. For me it is not a big deal - for most Chinese it is not a big deal. Somehow most people who never touched Wechat it seems to be a big deal.

Yeah I agree that most in China don’t think much of it (or often don’t even realize censorship is happening on their exchanges). But it’s still tragic. And I’m happy to see Silicon Valley come to its sense regarding WeChat. A few years back, VC’s were tripping over each other to sing the praises of WeChat and how much better it made China with its mobile payment and mini apps.

> Yeah I agree that most in China don’t think much of it (or often don’t even realize censorship is happening on their exchanges). But it’s still tragic.

Hm... Why is it tragic? Simply rephrase it: most Americans do not even realize there is censorship". Is it tragic? If yes then for whom? Probably not for them but rather for external observers.

Re: We Chat, They Watch

#389

Post by FpUser »

waste_monk wrote: post #169
TallGuyShort wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So like, the way America did with the Japanese? And I support enforcement of borders, but the conditions for detention of illegal immigrants has drawn recent comparisons. Not as bad as communist countries, of course, but not much of a moral high ground either.

There's a pretty big difference between internment camps and literally keeping prisoners so you can harvest organs from them (without anaesthetic, often fatally) on demand, my dude. Not that America hasn't done a lot of bad stuff, but they definately do have a significant moral high ground over China.

Not doing as many bad things as the counterpart can not possible be "moral high ground". Rather lesser of two evils

Re: We Chat, They Watch

#390

Post by liberal_098 »

system2 wrote: post #255
xf1cf wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can see the pro-chinese propaganda on this site alone. The number of people supporting Zoom, WHO, WeChat, etc is enough to conclude with near certainty this site as well is owned by the Chinese. Unfortunately this comment and mine will be downvoted to oblivion. But the truth is the Chinese war doctrine is to purchase land and acquire covenants. Look at Africa, Indonesia, and India. They are bought wholesale by Ch…

Downvotes don't mean censorship. You clearly made your point with complete freedom of speech. Agreeing with you is another thing.

> Downvotes don't mean censorship.

Good question. I think it does if downvotes result in inability to express an opinion (as opposed to simply having downvotes shown).

If downvotes are used to suppress freedoms then downvoting is a means of censorship. In other words, there is no big difference between prohibiting something by one person (dictatorship) or by 10 persons (collective dictatorship) (if it is not prohibited by law of course).

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