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WeChat ban is just evil, no justifiable benefit. Almost all the users in America are overseas Chinese who use it to talk to friends and family in China and send money.
There are also many non-Chinese that use wechat.
WeChat ban is just evil, no justifiable benefit. Almost all the users in America are overseas Chinese who use it to talk to friends and family in China and send money.
Yes, they do some evil spyware things, but so do many US apps as well.
> no justifiable benefit.
Maybe to you, but this does not apply to everyone. This is supposed to be a free country, but projecting one person's idea of benefits on everyone is exactly the opposite of a free country.
> Almost all the users in America are overseas Chinese who use it to talk to friends and family in China and send money.
Well yes, people need a way to talk to their family, and we shouldn't be taking out country politics on civilians' basic human needs, including both visitors and US citizens with family in China. As a free country we should be respecting the needs of the overseas Chinese and overseas everyone-else who is here.
While I do support apps not being evil, I don't think the right answer is to ban WeChat. Rather, the right answer is better and stricter privacy controls on phone OSes that prevent these apps from doing evil things, like arbitrarily scanning your Wi-Fi networks, which both WeChat and Google do.
LineageOS (Android fork) has a good set of tools for this and can run WeChat just fine while spoofing fake data to their servers for most of these spy attempts.
WeChat ban is just evil, no justifiable benefit. Almost all the users in America are overseas Chinese who use it to talk to friends and family in China and send money.
I’m genuinely curious what the perceived threat is here. Is it as simple as “China is going to read everyone’s stuff and use machine learning to figure out what the cool kids are doing and then brainwash them?”
Also, if you think banning a chat app is more of a government restriction on free speech than requiring filmmakers to censor their movies and require Chinese government minders to be on the set in order to be screened in China then I would disagree with you.
Although this is very reactionary and targeted, I hope it eventually spurs a structured process to handle issues like these, ie: a) Clear criteria for what constitutes an app national security risk b) An actual government process to evaluate, respond, and enforce against all potential app threats (not just based on popularity, though scale is a factor in prioritization)
I’m genuinely curious what the perceived threat is here. Is it as simple as “China is going to read everyone’s stuff and use machine learning to figure out what the cool kids are doing and then brainwash them?”
General election interference, manipulating public perception by constantly suggesting pro-CCP propaganda, aggravating the general public to turn on each other, tracking vocal anti-CCP individuals and potentially targeting them while traveling abroad. That's a few off the top of my head.
It's been 10+ years of these companies and no meaningful oversight has been exerted, at least not on behalf of users. Not after:
1. Self-admitted election interference https://www.vox.com/2017/4/28/15476142/facebook-report-trump...
2. Tracking and targeting individuals' political speech in the US https://www.theverge.com/2019/8/31/20837448/social-media-dhs...
3. Tracking and targeting individuals' political speech in autocratic nations: https://www.npr.org/2019/11/07/777352750/how-saudi-arabia-us...
4. Paid to suggest pro-CCP propaganda! https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/08/technology/china-facebook...
What was the point of selling TikTok to Oracle if it's just going to be banned anyway?
WeChat ban is just evil, no justifiable benefit. Almost all the users in America are overseas Chinese who use it to talk to friends and family in China and send money.
> WeChat ban is just evil Yes, they do some evil spyware things, but so do many US apps as well. > no justifiable benefit. Maybe to you, but this does not apply to everyone. This is supposed to be a free country, but projecting one person's idea of benefits on everyone is exactly the opposite of a free country. > Almost all the users in America are overseas Chinese who use it to talk to friends and family in China an…
The rest of the code base, everyone could see.