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China has wealth of data on what individuals are doing at a micro level
- nunez 10y agoAs if this system didn't exist within the US. Credit and bank account spending records have long been a treasure trove of analytics on how people go about their day to day. Social media extends on this even further since there are many people who post EVERYTHING about them on these platforms.
- xena 10y agoIf people are being tracked by the IMEI number, can't you patch android to just return a random IMEI number unique for every day or hour? The parts of the phone that actually use that number have it hardcoded in, the rest is just for display.
- xja 10y agoPretty terrifying. I'd love to see a more detailed analysis of the datasets they received. It sounds like both governmental and private surveillance systems in China may be pretty leaky. I wonder if the information is leaked through hacks or compromised individuals.
- electic 10y agoThe article says they are through the government. This includes immigration records, telecom GPS information, financial transactions, etc. Most of it is not coming through social media sites.
- maxander 10y agoThe government collects and organizes the data, but presumably there's no Chinese government website offering citizens access to this database. Who exfiltrates the data and sells it? Corrupt officials is an obvious answer. Or hackers- given all the terrifying hacks of U.S. government databases that are reported, its likely as not Chinese databases are just as vulnerable, and they're much less likely to inform the public of breaches. In either event, its potentially an example of China's government stability efforts coming around to bite them- how many incriminating details of government officials are tucked away in this database, for sale to the highest bidder?
- res0nat0r 10y agoThis is a good video about the subject: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lHcTKWiZ8sI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lHcTKWiZ8sI
- sneak 10y agoIt is precisely the same in the United States, it is just somewhat deniable there due to things like the FISA court. It allows peoples' inherent belief in American virtue to doublethink themselves into believing that the NSA doesn't collect this high-res data in bulk from Facebook and Google and Amazon and Apple and the mobile carriers—when we have clear documents showing that they do. LOVEINT is real. The large social networks and communications providers are an official arm of the surveillance state, with all of the unfettered access to high resolution data that entails. Your doctor or hospital hosts data in AWS? Pretty sure HIPAA doesn't count in this case when they're just sucking up all of the traffic in bulk. Your social media and financial data are already being aggregated and sold—we know this, too.
- kposehn 10y agoSource? Data that supports this? There are certainly means of surveillance, but not likely to the same level or accessibility that is shown in the article. Please elaborate instead of making a blanket statement :)
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- rosser 10y ago> Your doctor or hospital hosts data in AWS? Pretty sure HIPAA doesn't count in this case. False. I work for a company in the education space that uses AWS. We're unambiguously bound by FERPA. It is inconceivable to me that a stricter law like HIPAA wouldn't also bind cloud-based companies. EDIT: Moreover: https://aws.amazon.com/compliance/hipaa-compliance/ https://aws.amazon.com/compliance/hipaa-compliance/
- privong 10y ago> False. I work for a company in the education space that uses AWS. We're unambiguously bound by FERPA. It is inconceivable to me that a stricter law like HIPAA wouldn't also bind cloud-based companies. I think the GP was asserting that the NSA doesn't care about HIPAA, not asserting something about HIPAA and Amazon & companies using AWS.
- yueq 10y agoMany people might not know, in US, credit card transactions/payments are on sale by various sources. There's a very active market for this and some fintech startups are solely based on this kind of data. Since most of our financial life is based on credit card, we are under surveillance at a micro level in a similar situation. The issue is we not only use 'services', we handle data to the service providers. Data under their custody is usually stored and transferred with less secure protection, like on a thumbdrive or sent by email attachments. I don't see this situation will get any better soon.
- edblarney 10y agoThis is true. AMEX tried to sell me access to that data. That said, I'm not sure if it goes down to name/card number or if it's aggregate - we never bought it.
- schuke 10y agoThe thing in China is that so many trivial daily activities require government-issued ID. Buying a coach/train ticket. Buying a SIM card. Every website/mobile app registration require a mobile phone number, which means any account is easily traceable to your government-issued ID, too. Hell, even visiting your friend in a hotel requires recording your ID before hotel staff will let you go upstairs (strictly enforced in cheap hotels). Internet cafes' administration system had been linked up to government ID systems more than a decade ago. This is the Polizeistaat that Hitler could only dream of. It's a whole other level over any credit card surveillance.
- yueq 10y agoThe key issue is the data is on sale or not or potentially could be sold. Agencies collecting data is totally fine. No one can avoid it in this world nowadays. Showing IDs seems very old-school. Remember PRISM? As long as one is using a smartphone, they are being tracked every single second.
- darpa_escapee 10y agoShowing ID is a reminder that you can't function in society without staying in line. You can't really fall back on dropping out of digital, financial and location tracking no matter where you are.
- chj 10y agoThe lesson is: even if you have nothing to hide, you are surely getting someone very rich.
- velodrome 10y agoIt's been around for ages. Better known as "Knowledge is Power." Scientia potentia est - Sir Francis Bacon Knowledge is power and it can command obedience. A man of knowledge during his lifetime can make people obey and follow him and he is praised and venerated after his death. Remember that knowledge is a ruler and wealth is its subject. - Imam Ali, Nahj Al-Balagha, Saying 146 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientia_potentia_est https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientia_potentia_est
- notliketherest 10y agoAs an American, I would never download a Chinese app like WeChat or use a digital service based in China.
- tomek_zemla 10y agoYour computer on which you typed this comment was most likely made in China...
- formula_ninguna 10y agomy clothers is made in China. so?
- tomek_zemla 10y agoThe point is that tracking systems are often embedded in hardware.
- verst 10y agoI'm German and (as stereotypes would have it) extremely privacy conscious. Having lived in the US for over a decade I've reluctantly come to terms with the lesser privacy standards here. For a long time I refused to keep a lot of information on Facebook as Facebook seemed to only consider privacy as an afterthought after users expressed outrage (I appreciate transparency about the use of data so I can make my own decision). I refused to use the sign-in with Facebook functionality as I had no interest in giving third parties access to my FB data. Eventually I just gave up and now use Facebook sign-in everywhere because it simply is much more convenient. When I traveled to China a year ago the utility of using WeChat or Baidu Maps was simply too great. I was well aware that using these applications almost certainly would surrender information to the Chinese government. Interestingly enough, because I assumed that this would happen one way or another during my 3 months stay I felt more inclined to use these applications. WeChat is the only viable way to keep in touch with all of my Chinese friends in China and in the US.
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- est 10y agoAnd it was leaked to telecom scams. It was rampant in China.
- suprgeek 10y agoThis our terrifying future in America - the incoming administration has very scant regard for civil liberties, and is filled with business insiders who worship money above all else. Add to this the fact that both legislative chambers are controlled by the same party who is "tough" on crime. For profit or to ostensibly address Terrorism expect surveillance to get much worse.
- velodrome 10y ago> the incoming administration has very scant regard for civil liberties Sorry, they were eroded long before. This is why people must remain vigilant whether it is the person they voted for or not. http://images.dailykos.com/images/330962/story_image/1249.png?1479837787 http://images.dailykos.com/images/330962/story_image/1249.pn...
- ricardonunez 10y agoThat's actually a problem. Most people defend the people they voted like is part of themselves just so they don't have to admit they made a mistake.
- dxhdr 10y ago> This our terrifying future in America - the incoming administration has very scant regard for civil liberties Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
- jilljennV 10y agoI was really surprised to see my Chinese friend pay the restaurant bill using WeChat, just by flashing a QR code. Which means they know all the data a typical social network can handle, but also how much you are paying where.
- plaguuuuuu 10y agoI keep voicing concerns about Google Wallet in that respect but nobody takes it seriously.
- arjie 10y agoThat's because everyone knows that nobody really uses Google Wallet.
- rconti 10y agosshhhh, if parent keeps voicing their concerns, sooner or later they're bound to be within earshot of someone who uses Google Wallet.
- greggman 10y agoIs any service better? Apple Pay?
- FabHK 10y agoMy understanding is that Apple Pay enables the payment, but Apple does not collect or retain any data such as to whom you paid how much. Here's what Apple's iOS Security Guide say: "Apple Pay is also designed to protect the user’s personal information. Apple Pay doesn’t collect any transaction information that can be tied back to the user. Payment transactions are between the user, the merchant, and the card issuer." https://www.apple.com/business/docs/iOS_Security_Guide.pdf https://www.apple.com/business/docs/iOS_Security_Guide.pdf
- skylark 10y ago
- throw2016 10y agoThe big difference is China is openly undemocratic and the citizens know what they are up against. Here its posturing, misdirection, propaganda, nebulous lists, secret process and the exact same thing only under cover and pretense all working like clockwork to lull the citizens into complacency. Dial back 10-15 years and try to imagine the response to a news item like this. Hysteria about totalitarianism from the media, endless interviews with academics, ngo and human rights organizations. Grandstanding by politicians and citizens. Where are all these noisy vocal folks? What is orchestrated and what is real?
- dcposch 10y agoChina is fascinating. On one hand... - China has done better than any other country on Earth at poverty reduction. Chinese policy since Deng Xiaoping lifted hundreds of millions of people out of subsistence poverty. Free markets were a big part of this, but so were Special Economic Zones starting with Shenzhen, a culture of sharing IP, massive govt investments in infrastructure, research and education. - China are also the most successful urbanists today. Many of those 100s of millions of former rural poor are in cities now. In the time it took California to debate building a single High Speed Rail line from SF to LA, China connected their whole country with trains that are much faster, much more useful (because they go directly into urban centers and connect to fast local transit), and much cheaper. Ours still isn't done. -- And yet, at the same time, China also seems to be prototyping some kind of grim meathook future. - Extremely aggressive surveillance. Near zero respect for privacy. Govt deputizing the tech sector to spy and censor on their behalf. - Cities with toxic air. Check out this glorious ad in Beijing right now: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C1JrMsKUAAAopPT.jpg https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C1JrMsKUAAAopPT.jpg - A closed, censored alternate internet - "Social Credit" Scores based on surveillance, which look like a frighteningly powerful way to neuter dissent China moves faster than we do, both for better and for worse. I guess our challenge is to emulate the things they're doing right (eg the vastly more efficient and effective way they build transit), while stopping our own governments from repeating China's mistakes and acts of authoritarian overreach.
- patmcguire 10y agoI like the phrase "grim meathook future"
- schoen 10y agoApparently its origin is https://nullrefer.com/?https://www.jwz.org/blog/2005/09/the-grim-meathook-future/ https://nullrefer.com/?https://www.jwz.org/blog/2005/09/the-... (which I didn't know). Edit: thanks to people in this thread for pointing out JWZ's anti-HN redirection and a workaround to hide the referer header.
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- HillaryBriss 10y agoEven though this article is about data on Chinese citizens, I kinda wonder if the Chinese government doesn't keep a big database of what American folks are doing, too. I mean, why not? They've the got the hackers. They've got the big DB. They've got the absence of laws preventing such a practice.
- coconutoperator 10y agoThe big problem is black market for data/identities. Not only in China but in the world. Identity theft is quite huge. And a lot of those data weren't even stolen but was sold by those corrupt officials or staffs in some firms.
- baybal2 10y agoHow much do they pay for a post these days?
- gersh 10y agoDoes the data include high-ranking government leaders and leading businessmen?
- baybal2 10y agoThis is what comes out of Google allowing apps to read phone IMEI in Android. I have no concrete proof, but the reason why all major Chinese apps snoop after phone IMEI is said to be that the commies have secretly demanded Chinese dotcoms to collect and report phone IMEIs. For example if you have a 6.0 or later Android, Alibaba app will block you if you disabled the permission to read IMEI or it detects spoofing. https://postimg.org/image/m5u0nmdxd/ https://postimg.org/image/m5u0nmdxd/ It is easy to see how they also use it for their own purposes: open a new taobao account, search for some items, do factory reset, install taobao and see that you are being shown same stuff you been searching before. This way they also clearly violate Google store rules that prohibit using IMEIs as tracking IDs for marketing purposes. It was reported over so many times, and Google clearly knows of this. I guess, they are afraid of antagonising "the premier Chinese dotcom" or still considering going back to China.
- Inconel 10y agoI'm on 7.1.1 and I don't feel like installing the Alibaba app to try this out but when you say it requires the permission to read IMEI is this under the phone permission setting that says "read phone status and identity" or something else?
- baybal2 10y agoappears that they put it into that now
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- peteretep 10y ago> Google allowing apps to read > phone IMEI in Android An unpopular sentiment, but this is why I love iOS. I genuinely don't think any of my apps can meaningfully spy on me without my having told them they may. I even get reminders if I've let an app read my location in the background, to check that's what I want to do.
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- TaylorAlexander 10y agoOracle maintains a database of personal information for billions of people. The US corporate surveillance web is rich in complexity. Before we judge China, lets make sure we know what we're comparing them to. I highly encourage anyone interested in the subject to watch this talk from last month's Chaos Computer Club Congress. "Corporate surveillance, digital tracking, big data & privacy: How thousands of companies are profiling, categorizing, rating and affecting the lives of billions" https://media.ccc.de/v/33c3-8414-corporate_surveillance_digital_tracking_big_data_privacy https://media.ccc.de/v/33c3-8414-corporate_surveillance_digi... https://youtu.be/kd6NKvwQVbM https://youtu.be/kd6NKvwQVbM You say the Chinese system is sinister because they force you to use ID cards. In the US corporate surveillance system, they can track you without ID cards.
- 20andup 10y agoYup. Here's the thing too. When people troll online, they think hiding behind an alias is enough. You can still be traced back. I am sure the government keep tabs of all your history, even if you are not a person of interest at the moment.
- ralfd 10y agoI would say that forcing someone to use an universal ID provides a way stronger and more reliable form of tracking, than a wibbly wobbly system which needs thousands of marketing companies which maybe fulfill their corporate promises and maybe not.
- 20andup 10y ago"wibbly wobbly system which needs thousands of marketing companies which maybe fulfill their corporate promise" I am afraid that's not how it works. This is not how the government tracks you. The mirror all traffic going brought your internet service provider, that's it. Then it's just a google search to see what websites you have visited. https://www.ixmaps.ca/nsa.php https://www.ixmaps.ca/nsa.php Government ID or not, you are being tracked quite easily by the government.
- simonh 10y ago
- contingencies 10y agoWhat a silly article: "download the controls to the private sector" indeed. The government already owns the telcos, half the banks, the only domestic interbank transfer system and the only domestic travel reservation system so they have your IMEI, real time location and history, network traffic, bank balance and payment and employment history and travel plans anyway. And that of your friends/relatives. They certainly don't need help from an app. That said, after 16 years in and out of China, I still feel safer here than the US.
- messick 10y agoSafer? I guess that Great Firewall does work: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiananmen_Square_protests_of_1989 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiananmen_Square_protests_of_1...
- contingencies 10y agoOh come on. 16 years is modern China not Maoist China.
- idra 10y ago1989 is also modern China ruled by Deng Xiaoping and in no way Maoist China.
- oblio 10y agoIf we judge them by their history and by their results, the image changes quite a bit. They were on the verge of a major economic breakthrough and they needed political stability. Also, historically political instability in China lead to millions of people dieing. I don't approve of their actions, they reacted way too late and were too violent. A faster intervention, something like mass arrests (+ releases after everyone cooled down) would have probably been the best compromise. It's easy to judge them from outside.
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- pjtr 10y agoI often wonder what's missing to create and simulate a detailed economic model down to the individual level for and entire country or even the world. There are only 7 billion people to simulate, that doesn't actually sound like that much anymore. Obviously one would not simulate every individual with realistic human-like AI, but with a statistical economic model. How much and what kind of data would one need for this to be useful, for example to predict if a certain new political initiative will actually work? Or is this already being done? Or is it not needed? Or just still too expensive?
- shalmanese 10y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychohistory_(fictional) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychohistory_(fictional)
- pjtr 10y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large-scale_macroeconometric_model https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large-scale_macroeconometric_m... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computational_economics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computational_economics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Living_Earth_Simulator_Project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Living_Earth_Simulator_Project
- rconti 10y agoDamn. No offense meant to the parent (because I wasn't even smart enough to come up with this on my own in 2017, much less the 1940s), but it's humbling to see someone having such insight 70 years ago.
- simonh 10y agoI read Asimov in my teens back in the 80s, but the fact that Chaos Theory had already pretty much killed a lot of those ideas as a plausible possibility took the edge off a bit.
- pja 10y ago
- delegate 10y ago> Now every picture posted, every comment made, every driving infraction could go into a central database to produce a person's 'trustworthiness' score. How is this China-only ? Can't Facebook do the same ? Can't the government force Facebook, Microsoft, etc to give out all the information that we generate in their networks ? Can't they compute such a "trustworthiness" score and sell it to your (potential) employer ? Of course they can and they will if they don't already. I've agreed to countless "license agreements" which I haven't read - I might have given some company my exclusive permission to monitor my every move... What if your agreement contained a special clause not present in other user's agreements ? There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that what is going on in China will become the status quo in a lot of other countries and this will accelerate as shit gets tougher due to all the global problems that we now face. What's even more disappointing is that these surveillance systems are most probably built on top of open source software and libraries - which have been ideologically released in order to increase the user's 'freedom', yet who would have thought ... Unfortunately the dream of a better, closer, freer world is now passing through a nightmare phase - we've built the perfect tools for crazies to do their crazy thing...
- krona 10y agoIn the EU you can instruct a company to divulge everything it knows about you. Facebook will give it to you on a DVD (or at least they used to). As an instrument of control and coercion, however, there is a massive difference between a government collecting data and not telling you, and a government collecting the data and telling you they use it to calculate your worth to society. The latter seems utterly tyrannical.
- kartan 10y agoI prefer to know. If intelligence agencies are collecting data of citizens without their knowledge, how can they protest it? What was noteworthy about Edward Snowden leak was the confirmation of the data collection. He made public something that everybody knew.
- wu-ikkyu 10y agoHow can you know what the "massive" difference is between the two cases since in the former case you are left in the dark as to what the information is being used for? Both cases utilize the tools of tyranny, and Facebook has shown they are more than willing to comply with whatever the host nations government wishes, lest they lose profits for their shareholders.
- throwaway99128 10y agoMuch the same as in The Netherlands, where the police is proud to be able to track any move of any citizen through big cities (using installed cameras) and which is the country with the most telephone taps per citizen. Really, many countries in Europe are basically run like Singapore.
- FabHK 10y agoTruly dystopian. Reminiscent of the Black Mirror episode "Nosedive" (Season 3, Episode 1), but worse.
- asdfGUYasdfn 10y agoThe data is one thing, actionable knowledge about that data is another. Just look at the US and how data is processed by the intelligence community. Not to say anything has come of it, but the proliferation of information is still an issue of computing power and well designed algorithms that can sniff it. Just imagine China .... it's still way under the curb.