Such a stupid move, I’d bet that it’ll be withdrawn quietly.
India orders smartphone makers to preload state-owned cyber safety app
331–340 of 783 posts
Re: India orders smartphone makers to preload state-owned cyber safety app
#332Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think a lot of people in the US are clinging to the hope that this type of friction, along with judicial decisions, will cause the process of removing our legal protections to stall out. I'm not optimistic that this is the case, because the party currently driving the federal incursion on private and state-held data is the one that until recently was opposed to things like national ID. Anything can be done in the n…
Does the letter N stand for Democrats...?
No
Re: India orders smartphone makers to preload state-owned cyber safety app
#333Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am unconvinced from a practical standpoint that this vision of the world that you wish to live in is even possible today due to the increase in sectarian communal tensions, dense cities, widely available cars/guns/etc and stresses from cost of living and income inequality, as well as the spread of ideas that mass casualty attacks might be a thing to do (the US did not have school attacks until it became an unfortun…
In most countries, death by terrorist is at least an order of magnitude less likely than death by bee. Strangely, we do not seem to be on a campaign to lock all humans in-doors to protect them from bees, nor have we declared a global war on beeism. These stats hold from before the modern surveillance regime, and so can hardly be credited to it. It's not actually a problem in particular need of urgent solving. Regular…
Sincerely, you misunderstand what I am saying, or you didn't read until the end where I said that some level of terrorism is a price worth paying in my subjective judgment.
My point is that my subjective judgment counts for nothing, because the negative feedback loop that I described is a society-wide phenomenon beyond my control as an individual. Asking the majority of people to think the way you do about terrorism is somewhere between wishcasting and virtue signalling. It doesn't interrupt the causality behind the negative feedback loop, so it therefore fails to outline a path that can be trodden in the real world to achieve your desired vision of no surveillance.
I urge everyone to banish this mode of thinking which fixates on what "should" happen without first checking whether that desired end state is a possible world we can exist in once you factor in the second and third order effects beyond the control of any individual.
> Bukele and Duterte did not rise out of an environment of terrorism
Move your abstraction one level higher. They arose out of public safety concerns around murder and drugs and gangs. Those are not terrorism, but they fit under the same umbrella of public safety concerns that motivate regular people to demand authoritarian solutions.
Re: India orders smartphone makers to preload state-owned cyber safety app
#334Re: India orders smartphone makers to preload state-owned cyber safety app
#335Earlier quoted context omitted.
> What really is the Government going to do with a digital ID service that they can't do already? In 20 years, the UK suffers a terrorist attack just before an election, and then elects a ultra right wing government on a platform of "remigrating foreigners." You're a British born citizen but your mom fled from Iran in the 80s and immigrated to the UK. If you don't have digital ID, and the government decides to "remig…
Being able to break the law is never a good thing. Immigration agencies can still fight whatever after people have been kicked out as has been decided. Government inefficiency should never be celebrated.
> Being able to break the law is never a good thing.
Suppose there is a law against being Jewish.
Re: India orders smartphone makers to preload state-owned cyber safety app
#336Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am unconvinced from a practical standpoint that this vision of the world that you wish to live in is even possible today due to the increase in sectarian communal tensions, dense cities, widely available cars/guns/etc and stresses from cost of living and income inequality, as well as the spread of ideas that mass casualty attacks might be a thing to do (the US did not have school attacks until it became an unfortun…
In most countries, death by terrorist is at least an order of magnitude less likely than death by bee. Strangely, we do not seem to be on a campaign to lock all humans in-doors to protect them from bees, nor have we declared a global war on beeism. These stats hold from before the modern surveillance regime, and so can hardly be credited to it. It's not actually a problem in particular need of urgent solving. Regular…
India saw 779 million dollars lost to cyber fraud in the first 5 months of 2025.
The degree of cyber fraud in India is beyond insane.
Also - funnily enough - Indian telecom companies are meant to be fined for every SIM card given out under false data. There is already meant to be a check that stops this.
Re: India orders smartphone makers to preload state-owned cyber safety app
#337Earlier quoted context omitted.
Mate, this isn't even remotely "nationalist". This stuff is being pushed across the world. Digital ID? The only people really desperate for it are our rulers.
The lack of digital ID is a huge problem in many domains and enables a lot of scams and crime in the first place. Requiring identification in situations that don't need it is where the problems start, but that's possible with analog IDs as well, and is often even worse there (since these provide neither security against digital copies, nor privacy, which digital ID can, e.g. via zero knowledge proofs).
> Requiring identification in situations that don't need it is where the problems start
Which is exactly the argument against digital ID, because it reduces the friction to asking for ID in situations that don't need it, causing it to become epidemic.
Meanwhile nearly all the instances where ID actually should be required are also instances where showing up in person should be required, like taking out your first line of credit with a financial institution, or signing on to a new job. Because the entire point is to verify that that person is the person on the ID and not someone in Russia who managed to hack their phone.
Re: India orders smartphone makers to preload state-owned cyber safety app
#338Earlier quoted context omitted.
I used to think like that. Now in my country we have a president who would use that to deport or target political opponents, track people who criticize Israel, etc. You can never put the genie back in the bottle and you never know who will be in charge in 20 years
Yeah but the US was never a full democracy. Part of the problem with the US is that the president has way too much power to begin with. If trump was elected prime minister of Sweden, he wouldn't have been able to do half the stuff he's done.
The president isn't supposed to have that much power in the US either. The federal government in general wasn't supposed to have much power; power is supposed to be reserved to the states except for specific scenarios enumerated in our constitution. Unfortunately, a century of blatantly illegal power grabs by the federal government, combined with Congress (which should've acted as a check upon the president) willingly giving their power over to the president, we are in a pretty bad spot. However, if it happened to us it could happen to any country. At the end of the day the constitution of a nation is only meaningful to the extent that people will actually enforce it.
Re: India orders smartphone makers to preload state-owned cyber safety app
#339Earlier quoted context omitted.
Mate, this isn't even remotely "nationalist". This stuff is being pushed across the world. Digital ID? The only people really desperate for it are our rulers.
How so? In Sweden we have digital ID and it's great! Super practical and I struggle to think of how it would be used to spy on citizens, given that it has the same legal protections as banks have regarding your account transactions etc. Like sure you could in theory see every document I've ever signed if you have a warrant for BankID servers, but you could probably glean most of that if you had a warrant for the bank…
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Re: India orders smartphone makers to preload state-owned cyber safety app
#340Earlier quoted context omitted.
I dunno man, your reply doesn't sound _kind_. Maybe you could try to explain the point you're defending rather than ad hominem and overextrapolate a perceived insult. I genuinely want to learn and it's frustrating that your comment does not do that.
Calling their objections “weirdly vitriolic” belies both a complaint about “kindness”, and shows an explicit desire to not learn a single thing. Perhaps, if you have genuine curiosity in the future, you should be thoughtful about the questions you ask, and the ad hominem attacks you make in the asking, rather than whining after the fact because people didn’t excuse your lack of tactful interaction sufficiently? Or ju…
The person to whom you are replying is not the person who said the "weirdly vitriolic" remark. You're chastising someone who didn't do the thing you are (rightly) opposing.