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We Chat, They Watch

citizenlab.ca

421–430 of 555 posts

Re: We Chat, They Watch

#421
post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That opinion is more mainstream then you give it credit. It is backed up recently by the nba losses (2 billion reported) for letting a player give support to Hong kong. China has increased their power. Calling that notion racist discounts all of the different people who make up China's population. China is a country with people of many different colors, backgrounds and religions. Thinking of China as a single color i…

The NBA losing money and the Chinese government being totalitarian and thin skinned doesn't give free rein to any old racist shit, mate. And they own media companies to push their agenda is flat out, textbook conspiracy theory racism, unless you have more evidence than something completely unrelated.

How is criticizing a government racist towards the people it happens to rule over, again?

In that logic, criticizing someone is racism towards each and every group that human happens to be part of. That's plain silly.

Re: We Chat, They Watch

#422

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?

TikTok? Yes.

Re: We Chat, They Watch

#423
post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh that's interesting because the lack of regulation and proper enforcement of said regulation of wet meat markets is what caused this in the first place.

Not if you believe the US government, which says that it actually came from a lab in China.

Trump and his circle are not the US Govt.

Re: We Chat, They Watch

#424
post #406

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can have those things without the oppression. Correlation doesn't equal causation.

Yeah, is there any information on why the Chinese government feels like they need the censorship? As far as I can tell they are the most successful government at least in modern history in terms of increasing living standards (huge GDP growth and even things like being the only country to successfully almost eradicate SARS-CoV-2), so it seems they would keep power even in a fully functioning democracy with no censors…

They conducted an extensive historical study of what happened to the Soviet Union and decided to avoid that.

Re: We Chat, They Watch

#425
post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is the incentive for any app to do the right thing then? It seems to me that coloring all apps the same regardless means that all apps may as well just do exactly as you describe... Anyone who doesn't isn't thought of as any better...

> What is the incentive for any app to do the right thing then? Presumably, doing the right thing (TM) becomes their USP?

It's not of much value if like the other users they just assume you're doing the wrong thing already.

Re: We Chat, They Watch

#426

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But why WeChat? Any other chat app will do the same, without being monitored by the Chnese government.

Really? Messenger can't. Whatsapp can't. Snapchat can't. Zalo can't. GroupMe can't (maybe I could create a solo group chatin it?. I don't remember telegram having it. At some point app fatigue sets in and you don't want to install even more apps. I'm not setting up a second account just to have something to send it to. Additionally the messages won't be available on my computer.

You can definitely chat with yourself in Messenger. (also Slack)

Re: We Chat, They Watch

#427

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But why WeChat? Any other chat app will do the same, without being monitored by the Chnese government.

Really? Messenger can't. Whatsapp can't. Snapchat can't. Zalo can't. GroupMe can't (maybe I could create a solo group chatin it?. I don't remember telegram having it. At some point app fatigue sets in and you don't want to install even more apps. I'm not setting up a second account just to have something to send it to. Additionally the messages won't be available on my computer.

You can send yourself messages with iMessage and have them sync to your computer, if you use an iPhone and Mac. If you don't, then of course this isn't much of a solution, but that's how many people solve it.

Re: We Chat, They Watch

#429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I am sure my messages on iMessage are not used to train censorship applications by the NSA What basis do you have for this certainty?

To your question: Relative transparency and relative accountability of the governments in question. But your question is by nature setting up a false comparison. There is no observed censorship apparatus in place in the US. You can always pose "what if" scenarios about super classified efforts, but functionally there is no active system in place. Compare this to the vastly-resourced, all-encompassing one operated ope…

Short of absolute transparency and absolute accountability, you can only be relatively certain, i.e. not certain.

Re: We Chat, They Watch

#430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But why WeChat? Any other chat app will do the same, without being monitored by the Chnese government.

Really? Messenger can't. Whatsapp can't. Snapchat can't. Zalo can't. GroupMe can't (maybe I could create a solo group chatin it?. I don't remember telegram having it. At some point app fatigue sets in and you don't want to install even more apps. I'm not setting up a second account just to have something to send it to. Additionally the messages won't be available on my computer.

Telegram allows you to chat and send messages to yourself. The search is decent and searches through the rich text description of links you sent too (so you can look for the title of a YouTube video despite having only sent the link).
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