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Zoom Acknowledges It Suspended Activists' Accounts at China's Request

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Re: Zoom Acknowledges It Suspended Activists' Accounts at China's Request

#81

Post by honzzz »

darawk wrote: post #59
gonehome wrote: post #14

“The reality is Zoom operates in more than 80 countries and continues to expand, which requires compliance with local laws even as Zoom seeks to promote the open exchange of ideas.“ This kind of rationalization isn’t just a problem with Zoom, Apple does the same thing - blocking podcasts and other apps in the Chinese market (also the Taiwan flag emoji). This is wrong. What’s legal and what’s right are not the same th…

This is kind of a weird problem though. It seems like the equilibrium effect of not obeying Chinese laws will be that the companies are simply excluded from the Chinese market. I'm not sure how that really helps anyone. It feels like a moral victory, but i'm not sure that it actually helps anyone. It seems like the right approach might be to comply as minimally and poorly as you can get away with, while steadily tryi…

Although your opinion seems reasonable, I disagree based on my experience growing up in a communist country. The problem is that there is some weird moral feedback loop; each little steep towards complying with something problematic makes you change, you rationalize it and this makes you more likely to walk further in that direction. The concept you describe, comply and liberalize... I never observed it in reality. People do not change the system from within for the better. The system changes people trying to compromise for the worse.

Re: Zoom Acknowledges It Suspended Activists' Accounts at China's Request

#82

Post by gonehome »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #62
gonehome wrote: post #14

“The reality is Zoom operates in more than 80 countries and continues to expand, which requires compliance with local laws even as Zoom seeks to promote the open exchange of ideas.“ This kind of rationalization isn’t just a problem with Zoom, Apple does the same thing - blocking podcasts and other apps in the Chinese market (also the Taiwan flag emoji). This is wrong. What’s legal and what’s right are not the same th…

Zoom has many employees in China, don’t they? If they lose their business license, they’ll lose those employees. Imagine losing half your company almost overnight. How well would you do?

I think that’s just evidence that this isn’t an issue they ever cared about.

They were planning to just censor whatever the CCP wanted from the beginning, their “mistake” was extending this to a US account because they don’t have the granularity to separate out mainland China users (which itself should be disturbing since they’re clearly not walling things off to protect accounts the CCP shouldn’t have access to).

They’re in this position because they don’t think what they’re doing is unethical in the first place.

I still think it’s wrong, I wouldn’t have been in China in the first place because of this.

Re: Zoom Acknowledges It Suspended Activists' Accounts at China's Request

#83

Post by Nextgrid »

duxup wrote: post #30
gonehome wrote: post #14

“The reality is Zoom operates in more than 80 countries and continues to expand, which requires compliance with local laws even as Zoom seeks to promote the open exchange of ideas.“ This kind of rationalization isn’t just a problem with Zoom, Apple does the same thing - blocking podcasts and other apps in the Chinese market (also the Taiwan flag emoji). This is wrong. What’s legal and what’s right are not the same th…

Apple blocks things in China right? Zoom performs China's bidding globally.

When setting up an iPhone in China the “iCloud” is actually operated by a local third-party and has access to all the content.

Most of Apple’s privacy promises and commitments go out the window when it comes to being in China.

Re: Zoom Acknowledges It Suspended Activists' Accounts at China's Request

#84

Post by dheera »

tsimionescu wrote: post #76
dheera wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Legality should be the bare minimum standard - and in countries with bad laws (Middle East, China) it shouldn’t even be that. Honestly an app only needs to operate out of one country. To have users in other countries, all that is needed is an open TCP/IP connection and a cross-border payment system (e.g. PayPal, bitcoin); it is not necessary for them to operate a local business entity, which would mean that they sh…

The Internet does not invalidate national sovereignty. I believe this has been a very bad principle in the past, this idea that you can do business in some country, and if it's via the Internet you somehow shouldn't care about their laws. If you accept one connection from a user in some country, you are doing business in that country. And much more uncontroversially, if you are accepting payments from someone in anot…

> If you accept one connection from a user in some country, you are doing business in that country.

I disagree with this. I have an open port at 80 and 443 and whoever wants to connect to it can do so. If my server is physically in the US, it only needs to obey US laws. If someone is violating their country's (weird) laws by visiting the server, that's that person's problem.

It's not my job as a developer, website host, or business owner, to for example ink out photos of women because Saudi law requires that. It's not my job to remove references to the Tiananmen incident. Those countries can, if they would like to, censor my website at their borders with a firewall, I don't care. It's not even my job to track down where your IP address is physically located. I couldn't care less about your IP. You could be using a VPN, for all I know.

Iran or China has issues with my website? They'll block it. Problem solved. I don't have to think about it too much. They do the work for me.

EU has beef with my website? Go ahead, you block it too, I don't care. I'll grab some popcorn and sit back and watch how your citizens react. (hee hee)

> And much more uncontroversially, if you are accepting payments from someone in another country, then you are definitely doing business in that country.

I disagree with this, as well, if those payments are coming from individuals and not businesses. If an individual in Germany flies over to the US and buys something from me, they are subject to US laws in that transaction. They are subject to German laws when they take that thing back. But in NO part of the entire process am I subject to German laws.

That doesn't change if "flies with an international flight" changes to "travels virtually via an international TCP connection".

Re: Zoom Acknowledges It Suspended Activists' Accounts at China's Request

#85

Post by pnako »

deathgrips wrote: post #69
joyfulmantis wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The idea that your country knows best and that your countries companies can feel free to ignore other countries laws while operating in them is -- imperialism.

Call it whatever you want, I'll take the imperialist country that doesn't censor activists' accounts.

And which country would that be?

Even if the US, peer pressure is often enough to get political dissenters banned from their social media accounts, jobs, etc.

Many people use the cope out that it's different when it's done by the government or by a private company, but I don't see it as being that different.

Re: Zoom Acknowledges It Suspended Activists' Accounts at China's Request

#86

Post by TheSpiceIsLife »

joyfulmantis wrote: post #51
rayiner wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm not necessarily saying that US and Chinese laws are equivalent in this sense, but it does seem like something of a double standard. And that’s perfectly fine.

The idea that your country knows best and that your countries companies can feel free to ignore other countries laws while operating in them is -- imperialism.

The practice of those ideas is imperialism.

Re: Zoom Acknowledges It Suspended Activists' Accounts at China's Request

#87

Post by jdm2212 »

yingw787 wrote: post #25

I'm not sure I agree with Zoom's strategy here. Adtech can get away with compromising user's privacy because users aren't customers, they're eyeballs for advertisers. Zoom by contrast does primarily B2B sales, and calls do need to have some semblance of privacy. If a Western-based multinational corporation competes with a China-based company, Zoom suddenly looks a lot scarier. People sometimes say nothing came of the…

Zoom's strategy is to follow local laws as much as possible. For US-based users, they follow US laws. For China-based users, they follow Chinese laws. International calls probably have to be compliant with both countries' laws.

You may disagree with Chinese law, and maybe if you were Zoom's CEO you'd cease offering Zoom in China, but then you'd just be ceding the Chinese market to some Chinese videoconferencing solution that would do the exact same odious stuff and possibly use the Chinese market as a springboard to challenge Zoom in other countries. So the net effect would be that the world would be no better off, and Zoom would be worse off.

Google was able to lock the NSA out because the NSA didn't have any legal power to intercept traffic between data centers. The Chinese government in contrast has the power to do pretty much whatever it wants with Chinese internet traffic.

Re: Zoom Acknowledges It Suspended Activists' Accounts at China's Request

#88

Post by astatine »

These skirmishes (Zoom now, TikTok earlier and the ongoing Huawei one) make for interesting shows, for those outside China and the US. China uses nationalism as the excuse for censorship. As long as you don't criticize China you are free to do anything you want. The US uses morality as the excuse for censorship. As long as you don't do anything that violates that particular notion of morality (the American way of life?), you are free to do anything you want. Wonder which will be easier for the 80% of people outside these 2 countries.

Re: Zoom Acknowledges It Suspended Activists' Accounts at China's Request

#89

Post by TheSpiceIsLife »

GhostVII wrote: post #68
joyfulmantis wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The idea that your country knows best and that your countries companies can feel free to ignore other countries laws while operating in them is -- imperialism.

I think it is fair to say that the laws in the US are objectively better than in China. The US does not put hundreds of thousands of people in camps because of their religion, or heavily censor the internet, or kill hundreds or thousands of civilians to suppress pro-democracy protests.

You’re on shaky ground there.

The US does imprison more of its citizens on a per capita basis than any other comparable nation.

The US isn’t the moral beacon it was billed to be.

I’ll stop there.

Re: Zoom Acknowledges It Suspended Activists' Accounts at China's Request

#90

Post by Melting_Harps »

gonehome wrote: post #14

“The reality is Zoom operates in more than 80 countries and continues to expand, which requires compliance with local laws even as Zoom seeks to promote the open exchange of ideas.“ This kind of rationalization isn’t just a problem with Zoom, Apple does the same thing - blocking podcasts and other apps in the Chinese market (also the Taiwan flag emoji). This is wrong. What’s legal and what’s right are not the same th…

> When Zoom is requested to send over names and videos of political dissidents to authoritarian leaders will they comply?

No, the CCP will just get the UN (according to Humans Right Lawyer at the UN) to do it for them:

https://thehumanoid.net/un-whistleblower-emma-reilly-un-huma...

Cool handle, I wished more people would just stop using propriety closed source software, we can at least try and make inroads that way.

Because realistically no fledgling startup going after marketshare is going to realistically turn down CCP money, and will accept what ever they have to gain access to China and this is why its so dangerous why they have infiltrated this space as this is just one example of so many violations due to it. God only knows what all of those facial recognition companies with CCP blessing have done.

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