[rpmcmurdo]

The irony is that the people complaining about this are the same ones who are gleefully sharing their personal details and narrative on social media, and Facebook in particular. The only difference between mass surveillance in the US and China is that 99% of the US population happily opts in or doesn't care.

[JPKab]

I don't disagree with you, but government compulsion makes this a different animal entirely.

The bigger context is that in the US, there is SUPPOSED to be a system in which companies can successfully resist government demands (remember that Apple did this to the FBI when they wanted to crack a criminal's phone passcode), whereas in China, that cannot happen. So yes, people give away their data for stupid conveniences, but Facebook/Google etc aren't supposed to share the data with the government. They have done so, as Snowden revealed, so this is by no means a perfect system.

What really upsets me about China's system is the bigger system of social credit this ties into. You can't get on flights want your score gets too low. The guy exposing fake martial arts masters isn't allowed to leave the country.

[mindslight]

There is much less "government compulsion" in the US, but in its place is still de facto compulsion. In general, comparisons with the US are difficult because in the US large corporations are given the power of defining much of societal policy.

Saying that "Facebook/Google etc aren't supposed to share the data with the government" only makes sense in some abstract sense of it wasn't supposed to be like this. But power tends to coalesce - the only "supposed to" is in some abstract moral stewardship sense, a responsibility that has been long forgotten by the business community, if it ever existed in the first place. Facebook/Google want to agglomerate data from the financial surveillance bureaus, and the (nominal) government buys the proceeds from both of them in a "free market" transaction. And then on the output/control side, companies use these surveillance databases to weed out "undesirable" customers, with their competitors following in lock step lest they end up with even more undesirables.

[gruez]

> So yes, people give away their data for stupid conveniences, but Facebook/Google etc aren't supposed to share the data with the government. They have done so, as Snowden revealed, so this is by no means a perfect system.

Can you elaborate on what you mean by "aren't supposed to"? The phrase sounds like there's a law prohibiting them from giving data to the government. But AFAIK the third party doctrine says you have no expectation of privacy for data that you hand over to third parties, so they're free to hand over data to the government. The only reason they don't is because of possible blowback from customers.

[Qub3d]

But the US population does opt in, at least to the degree that ignoring social pressure allows someone to say no.

Of course its difficult to go around "off the grid"; most of these services became big precisely because they make aspects of life easier -- ergo not using them means life is more difficult. But it is feasible to refuse adding data to them without actively violating the law, which is the point of concern.