[Workaccount2]

>I don't think they're explicitly a CCP data-collection front

In China you cannot not be explicitly a CCP data-collection front.

China doesn't bring evidence to a judge in order to get a subpoena for data. They just go to DJI an get it. DJI has zero legal recourse if the CCP wants access to all DJI's stored data. Doesn't matter where that data is stored. Same thing for tiktok and why legislators are killing that too. You're a Chinese company? You ultimately work for the state. No discussion.

China is not the US. People need to stop fitting the way things work in the US to the way things work in China.

Edit: For the whataboutists: Yes, everyone is aware that american three letter agencies have backdoor access to every computer, broken RSA and AES, and control the USA's puppet government. Thanks.

[redserk]

To start: I do not trust the CCP, but my trust in the American legal system has been waning.

What's the legal recourse for a US Citizen served with a dodgy FISA-related subpoena/warrant?

Or if a government agency wants to purchase tracking data that includes my phone from a data collection agency? Say the state of Texas purchases geotracking data for app users who cross state lines.

[rainsford]

Apple famously told the FBI to go pound sand when asked to help access an iPhone in an actual terrorism case (i.e. it wasn't about going after dissidents or journalists or anything), even though such help was definitely within Apple's technical power.

Now, while admitting that I am no way claiming the US is perfect, does anyone actually think something even remotely similar would ever happen between a Chinese company and the Chinese government?

[janalsncm]

There is a good book on the American surveillance apparatus Means of Control by Byron Tau. People are a lot more watched than they think.

The Apple example is well-known because it is an exception. Much more common is not only compliance but making an entire business out of selling private data to the government.

https://theintercept.com/2022/04/22/anomaly-six-phone-tracki...

It really doesn’t matter that China is worse. It’s not a competition. The fact that people in other places have even less privacy doesn’t make me feel better.

[redserk]

> It really doesn’t matter that China is worse. It’s not a competition. The fact that people in other places have even less privacy doesn’t make me feel better.

This is exactly the sentiment I wanted to convey. I'd feel far more comfortable if we didn't settle for "at least we're not as bad as..." levels of rhetoric. Unsavory surveillance practices in one country shouldn't give us a justification to accept the declining status quo here.

[rchaud]

Whataboutery has become increasingly common post-Patriot Act America, especially as surveillance technology improved in the smartphone, always-connected age.

It was common to criticize the USSR/Iron Curtain countries for encouraging citizens to spy and report on each other. Today, in the world after the 2013 NSA revelations, Ring.com cameras, Alexa smart speakers, bossware apps and Palantir, surveillance is a "market opportunity".

[janalsncm]

Yes, and I think people take exactly the wrong lesson from pointing to worse places. Seeing pervasive surveillance should be taken as a warning about where we don’t want to go, not as a new limit. Having secret, private versions of everything the Chinese government is openly doing isn’t better, but that seems to be the trend.

[FormerBandmate]

This thread is about China?

[lmm]

> Now, while admitting that I am no way claiming the US is perfect, does anyone actually think something even remotely similar would ever happen between a Chinese company and the Chinese government?

Yes. We've seen the back and forth with e.g. Jack Ma. It doesn't happen as publicly because it's not such good marketing in China, but of course it happens.

[Sabinus]

Wasn't the result of this that Jack Ma disappeared for a while and when we reappeared he sang the praises of the government?

[lmm]

One of the results, yes. That's good marketing in China. What kind of things you see in the papers tells you something about a country operates, but not a whole lot about how much access TPTB are actually being given to your messages, which is presumably the thing you care about.

[herbst]

Apple famously positively answers 80% of all government data requests. No idea why people think Apple is somehow special with your privacy, it isn't.

Ex. https://www.statista.com/statistics/1412550/apple-share-user...

[taneq]

They sure did! They also (was it around that time? I forget...) pushed pretty hard for everything to be stored in iCloud, where coincidentally it's not protected by any of the on-device security and can (as I understand it) be legally requisitioned by the authorities. Happy to be corrected (with sources) if I'm wrong here but otherwise this seems very much on par.

[blessedwhiskers]

https://support.apple.com/en-us/102651

[moonlion_eth]

Chinese companies are the government heh

[toss1]

Whatever slim you want to think your recourse is in the US, it is FAR better and broader than in the country that has uncounted mobile execution vans with zero available records of who is executed.

At least the US is trying to be a democracy, and has largely functioning checks and balances.

CCP is flat-out 'you cannot even talk or access information on things that make us look bad, such as Tibet or Tiananmen Protests' and 'make the wrong criticism at the wrong time and it is over for you'.

There is a MASSIVE difference. Playing false equivalence games will end very badly.

[deciplex]

> Playing false equivalence games will end very badly.

Okay: Chinese report higher satisfaction with their government and the direction their country is headed in than virtually any Western nation and much more than in the US. The Chinese economy is doing the opposite of enshittification, whereas the US is openly embracing the trend at this point with inflation / capital strikes, shrinkflation, consolidation, rent-seeking, and overall lower quality of goods and services. The home ownership rate in China is about 90%. Real wages in China are steadily rising and have been for decades - in the US they are falling and have done for decades.

America's primary means of diplomatic leverage is military domination but it can't even prevent the Houthis from a virtual blockade of the Red Sea and sea traffic through there has dropped 90%. Meanwhile China is transforming entire continents with its superior industrial capacity and soft power. They are the world leader in clean energy research and production. They got kicked out of the International Space Station so they built a better one and left an open invitation to the nations that kicked them out of the ISS, to join them on the Tiangong Space Station after they come to their senses.

China has already won. Chinese socialism, won. If there is a positive future for humanity at this point, it is in China and China alone. The West is still coming to grips with this. Posts like yours are transparently cope.

[Workaccount2]

China is still a developing nation. China is winning at the junior economic Olympics. The same way all the major 1st world economies dominated it when they were developing.

Come back and waive your victory banner when China has a $60k GDP per capita and has the current growth trends it does. It needs to increase its GDP 500% before that happens though...

[redserk]

GDP per-capita only works if you're comparing places with similar costs to live and costs to produce.

It's nearly meaningless to use it as a measure of individual quality-of-life without correlating it to the price it costs to produce/consume goods.

This is why the military spending arguments are so weird comparing the US and China. Even omitting the weird bookkeeping that keeps their defense budget supposedly low, it costs much less to produce military goods/services than here.

[deciplex]

China is the workshop of the world what are you even talking about? Their infrastructure is more developed (and more advanced) than most places in the US.

You seemed to be confused by the fact that China hasn't financialized their economy and turned it into a giant Ponzi scheme / wealth extraction machine. That's the point: they're trying to avoid the terminal rent-seeking behavior endemic to Western economies.

[toss1]

>>China hasn't financialized their economy and turned it into a giant Ponzi scheme / wealth extraction machine.

OK, nevermind that China are struggling with massive real-estate and shadow banking issues that threaten collapse of their economy and serious global economic crisis. They may succeed, but it has been touch-and-go for years now.

And yes, their 'workshop of the world' initiative works when they can massively export at super-low prices, but that is ending for several reasons, in no small part due to the fact that they are an unreliable trading partner and have weaponized their trading position against partners in a variety of ways, including spying (e.g., Huawei), cutting off supplies (rare earths, etc.), and dumping goods under cost to corner markets.

You can get away with that for a while, and your numbers will look very good. But when you start to become a serious threat, you will find resistance. We are now at that point. China was supposed to have already surpassed the US as the worlds largest economy almost a decade ago. Now, it is no longer on that arc, despite having five times the population. Their BS is catching up with them.

[toss1]

I was not talking about false equivalence about their economic status; I was talking about falsely equating or 'whatabout-ing' their human rights status.

And if you think that polls of life satisfaction are meaningful among a population who are forbidden to criticize their govt except in limited ways (e.g., local officials), I'd like to talk about some fantastic oceanfront land in Kansas...

Economy? Of course people are happier to have a change from abject poverty, but it is entirely based on unfair export trade practices and highly leveraged investments both official and shadow-banking. At this point both are extremely fragile as the democracies start to catch on and the over-leverage starts to work against it. Even the massively over-inflated official growth numbers have tanked. On the economy, I'd choose to be in the USA over China, no hesitation.

"Transforming entire continents"? You mean making extortionate loans to impoverished countries to build their own ports and extract resources? Again, that has limited runway as people figure out that it isn't such a good deal.

And I notice that you entirely avoided the human rights citizen security issue. Yes, the US has corporate over-harvesting of data, and govt agencies can buy and/or demand access to the data. We also have court processes. Meanwhile, China has OFFICIALLY one party, a massive and highly intrusive surveillance and censorship apparatus second to none in the world, and mobile execution vans literally seizing and executing people on the street by the tens of thousand or more, but there are no public records. Again, no contest, USA is massively qualitatively and quantitatively better.

Serious question, if you don't think so, why haven't you moved to China? I'm sure they'd welcome such an advocate.

[deciplex]

> China has OFFICIALLY one party, a massive and highly intrusive surveillance and censorship apparatus second to none in the world

Second to ours.

> mobile execution vans literally seizing and executing people on the street by the tens of thousand or more

Absolute nonsense.

[toss1]

>>Absolute nonsense.

Ah, I se you are one of those who chooses to chooses to ignore the facts of the world [0,1,2,3,4,5]. This is just the top results of a 0.1second search

And I notice that you completely avoided my serious question: If it is so much better in China, why are you not moving there?

[0] https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2017/04/China-must-co... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Execution_van [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_punishment_in_China [3] https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/inside-chinese-deat... [4] https://panpacificagency.com/news/china/02/19/mobile-death-v... [5] https://www.news.com.au/world/asia/mobile-death-vans-inside-...

[2OEH8eoCRo0]

> my trust in the American legal system has been waning.

Why? We just watched a former POTUS and the current POTUS's son get convicted of felonies in courts with juries. Is there a better test of the legal system?

[celdon25]

Yikes, you must not have been following the cases or know the laws very well if that’s your takeaway from those.

[2OEH8eoCRo0]

Why yikes? I followed the former POTUS's trial closely.

[kanbara]

do you think that national security warrants and subpoenas actually stand up to evidentiary claims? it’s not like the US actually cares and does the right thing— it’s just force hidden behind “process”

[sofixa]

> China doesn't bring evidence to a judge in order to get a subpoena for data

Do you think that e.g. FISA courts or the CIA kidnapping random civilians based on their name/watch type have a high threshold of evidence?

[rrr_oh_man]

> China doesn't bring evidence to a judge in order to get a subpoena for data. They just go to DJI a get it. DJI has zero legal recourse if the CCP wants access to all DJI's stored data. Doesn't matter where that data is stored.

Is this an assumption or do you have first-hand knowledge of how this works operationally, in practice?

[fouc]

I remember reading somewhere that all large companies in China are effectively state-owned, they basically always have a CCP member of the party on their board, which even the CEO is beholden to.

[montag]

> In China you cannot not be explicitly a CCP data-collection front

Unintelligible.

Rewrite as “in China it’s very hard to avoid turning over data to the CCP.”

[snypher]

It's a written rebuttal mirroring the original wording. This is a common writing and debate style; please don't ask people to rewrite their posts when it is fairly clear what they meant¡

[BlobberSnobber]

> China is not the US

Not a very good comparison in terms of the state forcing companies to give out their customers' data...

Also love how, in your opinion, anyone pointing this out must of course be a conspiracy nut.

[deciplex]

> For the whataboutists: Yes, everyone is aware that american three letter agencies have backdoor access to every computer, broken RSA and AES, and control the USA's puppet government. Thanks.

You're deliberately overstating the issue, to the point of absurdity, to avoid legitimate criticism. Three-letter agencies do have a high level of access to this data, and in many cases that's because the companies involved just voluntarily hand it over (no need to get the courts involved). Even when the courts do get involved, these are secret courts where the decisions are classified, and in any case from what we do know they act as a rubber stamp anyway.

So, this is a matter of the US wanting access to that data in addition to, or possibly exclusive from, the CCP. Frankly, as I'm not currently under the jurisdiction of the Communist Party of China, I'd prefer they have unlimited access to that data as opposed to the US government, if I have to choose one or the other.

[andrepd]

Ahaha, as opposed to the US where... 3-letter agencies don't bring evidence to a judge, they just go to google/meta to get it.

[FactKnower69]

Pointing out obvious bad-faith hypocrisy is actually called "whataboutism", you're doing a hecking fallacy!!

[Brananarchy]

This is absolutely a false equivalence.

Google and Meta choose to give the government all sorts of data that they're not required by law to give, because they don't see it as worthwhile to go to bat for their users. You can choose to use a vendor who will protect your privacy and demand full due process on the part of government requestors.

In China there is no due process and no choice of vendors who would demand it, even if they could.