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All android phone are definitely sending data to United States. Why is sending data to one country better than sending data to another? For US citizens, this m

All android phone are definitely sending data to United States. Why is sending data to one country better than sending data to another? For US citizens, this might be irrelevant (not so much if we go by the leaks). But for everyone living anywhere else on the globe, owning a smartphone means usually owning an endpoint for one of the giant corporate data sinks which its government can easily access. I understand that it is the price I have to pay for a free (sic) OS and play services. But I use it because of a lack of viable libre and open alternative. And I have about as much choice as someone in the market for a decent quadcopter unwilling to send data to China.

astebbin 9y ago
The U.S. has strong legal protections against unreasonable search and seizure, as shown in the Apple vs. FBI case after the San Bernardino attack. My understanding is that China has no such privacy protections, either in principle or in practice.
- jlgaddis 9y ago
  Yeah, it's not like the U.S. can get a top-secret blanket order for call records of everyone in the country or anything. /s
  - chronic824 9y ago
    Having a requirement for a blank order is better than no requirement, as is in China. Would you rather live in China?
- tehlike 9y ago
  patriot act is rather broad for ensuring strong legal protections.
- Veratyr 9y ago
  Sure but the US also has a very broad definition of "reasonable", where just about any kind of information you share through or with a business is a "business record" and doesn't require a warrant. Not to mention the blanket surveillance, use of Stingrays without a warrant and near total lack of privacy law. The US might not be as _bad_ as China but it's still far from _good_.
- rodgerd 9y ago
  Yeah, unless you're in the constitution-free zone within what is it, 100 miles of a port?
- trhway 9y ago
  >The U.S. has strong legal protections against unreasonable search and seizure i don't think these protections apply to the people outside of US. The same way whatever laws China has wouldn't apply to for example the people in US, ie. outside of China. Also it reminded about that typical arrangement when UK spies on the people inside US at the request of US government and vise versa in order to workaround those domestic legal protections.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - wbl 9y ago
    That last part doesn't happen: it's part of the intelligence agreements not to do that.
    - kuschku 9y ago
      The snowden leaks, 4 years ago, offer proof that this happened, and you still deny it? Officials of the BND admitted it in a parliamentary hearing, too.
      - wbl 9y ago
        What proof did Snowden show of this?
        willstrafach 9y ago
        None. People refuse to let this myth die, yet cannot provide any evidence. It is very strange.
        kuschku 9y ago
        I don’t have his documents on hand, but I’d instead recommend you read the transscripts of the NSA-Untersuchungsausschuss of the German Bundestag, which investigated the NSA and BND affairs. They’re official government documents, and are transscripts of people testifying under oath. The head of the BND stated that the BND did not record any information about Germans, and the NSA did not record any information about Americans, but that the BND shared whatever it collected about Americans with the NSA, and in reverse.
- StreamBright 9y ago
  A great example of how reasonable is this when you need to unlock your phone, laptop, etc. at the US border and hand it over. I guess we have a very different definition of reasonable.
- titzer 9y ago
  > The U.S. has strong legal protections against unreasonable search and seizure > The U.S. has strong legal language against unreasonable search and seizure which is usually ignored when inconvenient for the various intelligence and law enforcement agencies. Fixed that for you.
- tgragnato 9y ago
  Those protections apply only to US citizens: the 4th amendment doesn't apply to foreigners. US ‘authorities’ arrogated to themselves the right to siphon the data and metadata of people around the world for this exact reason. This means that based on the current applied interpretation of the norms, there are two classes of people: those who ‘deserve’ rights, and have them, and those who do not. And if you are a foreigner, you do not. Correct me if I'm wrong.
  - greeneggs 9y ago
    No, the Fourth Amendment applies to non-citizens, even those who are in the US illegally. > The court ruled in Almeida-Sanchez v. United States (1973) that all criminal charge-related elements of the Constitution's amendments (the First, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth and the 14th) such as search and seizure, self-incrimination, trial by jury and due process, protect non-citizens, legally or illegally present. http://thehill.com/blogs/pundits-blog/immigration/255281-yes-illegal-aliens-have-constitutional-rights http://thehill.com/blogs/pundits-blog/immigration/255281-yes... (I am not an expert and would appreciate a better source or explanation.)
    - tgragnato 9y ago
      Thank you for the clarification. This is still limited to people on us soil :/
- giobox 9y ago
  San Bernardino did demonstrate this to some degree, but I could easily have imagined that event pushing Congress to pass some pretty draconian legislation if the FBI hadn't found an alternate path into the phone, things got pretty heated with that one. I'd go as far as to say the surprisingly tough public stance Tim Cook took against the government's position was pretty unusual too. I would be worried about what would happen if a similar highly public spat over an encryption issue happens under the current US administration - it's abundantly clear that the politics of this issue and the facts are not in alignment, Trump would doubtless adore the publicity of it. At any rate, I'd imagine San Bernadino is almost certainly not the last time this is going to be a national political issue, in the USA or elsewhere. This of course pales in comparison to China though. > The U.S. has strong legal protections against unreasonable search and seizure So long as you stay the hell away from an airport...
leggomylibro 9y ago
In a nutshell: DJI is primed to obey authorities. It's in their genes. They're happy to geofence your drone for the simple reason of, 'we were asked,' which means that it isn't your drone. Sure, it seems reasonable when they keep you from straying into an airfield, but just wait until they prevent you from filming the violent crackdown on a protest. Although I do think that there's something to the idea of, 'if any country is going to have extremely personal data about me, it had may as well be a country that cannot easily and immediately imprison me without evidence or charge.'
- Normal_gaussian 9y ago
  > 'if any country is going to have extremely personal data about me, it had may as well be a country that cannot easily and immediately imprison me without evidence or charge. Don't forget parallel construction and planted evidence.
- philtar 9y ago
  > 'if any country is going to have extremely personal data about me, it had may as well be a country that cannot easily and immediately imprison me without evidence or charge.' I don't know if you're referring to the US or China
  - kaffeemitsahne 9y ago
    I guess he's referring to "the country I don't currently reside in"
prdonahue 9y ago
Why would you put a "(sic)" [sic] in your own comment?
- aaronbrethorst 9y ago
  I think "crappybird" is being ironic and making some sort of meta-comment about how Android may be free-as-in-beer, and somewhat free-as-in-speech, but it isn't really free because REASON GOES HERE.
- pavlov 9y ago
  It's not uncommon to use "sic" as a sort of irony punctuation mark.
  - prdonahue 9y ago
    Interesting. I've always known "sic" by it's canonical usage: to point out an error in someone else's quotation (perhaps with some sneer). Wikipedia actually shows this newer usage of it. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sic#.22Ironic_use.22_of_sic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sic#.22Ironic_use.22_of_sic: "Ironic use" of sic[edit] Occasionally a writer places [sic] after his or her own words, to indicate that the language has been chosen deliberately for special effect, especially where the writer's ironic meaning may otherwise be unclear.[18] Bryan A. Garner dubbed this use of sic "ironic", providing the following example from Fred Rodell's 1955 book Nine Men:[2] [I]n 1951, it was the blessing bestowed on Judge Harold Medina's prosecution [sic] of the eleven so-called 'top native Communists,' which blessing meant giving the Smith Act the judicial nod of constitutionality.
- SomeStupidPoint 9y ago
  I think the implication is that "free" is being quoted from elsewhere and the author doesn't necessarily agree that it is without cost just because such cost is not denominated in dollars.
DKnoll 9y ago
The concern isn't about US consumers, it's about the US government (law enforcement, defence, etc.) using the drones and having data sent back.
- jessaustin 9y ago
  That sounds excellent to me. China could just start publishing these data, and then we lowly USA citizens could have some idea what the cops are getting up to with these drones. I'm anticipating a fair amount of "pretty woman undressed in her bathroom" footage...
jstanley 9y ago
CopperheadOS and LineageOS are examples of android-derived mobile OS's that don't send a firehose of data back to the mothership.
bolololo12 9y ago
I'm not sure if EU customers send data back to US - please correct me if I'm wrong.
GCU-Empiricist 9y ago
Considering that China has the great firewall due to it's government censorship I'm a bit shocked to see this as the top comment. The United States has distasteful problems with ubiquitous monitoring, but implying it is equivalent to China seems like failing to consider that there are qualitatively different levels of totalitarianism.
- justinjlynn 9y ago
  As though the invasion of privacy might be acceptable depending on who's committing the act... and how much or how often they do it and for what reasons. If it unjust, it's unjust; it doesn't matter if its China or any of the Five Eyes members doing it, it's still just as wrong.
  - arcticfox 9y ago
    > As though the invasion of privacy might be acceptable ... depending ... for what reasons. If it's unjust, it's unjust I don't really agree with this. Intentions matter; the act of breaking into a house is way different if it's done to stop an in-progress assault vs. commit one. It can obviously be argued in the actual scenario we're discussing how benevolent / evil / potentially unknowable the actors we're talking about actually are, but I don't think intention is irrelevant.
    - justinjlynn 9y ago
      Justification means it is not unjust. That's the point. That's going to vary depending on the culture in which the violation is occurring - as it should. It's not really the intention that matters, but the circumstances motivating the action initially. Example: murder in the course of self defence as "justifiable homicide" or the warranted tapping of someone's phone under supervision of the judiciary The issue occurs here because those traditional national lines, which happen to also include cultural lines, are themselves being violated and we have no effective incidental means of addressing or justifying the act.
  - godelski 9y ago
octothorp3 9y ago
Bad analogy with the quadcopter, plug a few cheap parts together and load the open source flight controller software and you are ready to fly. Much harder to build/compile a phone atm, I haven't even seen where this is possible without an inordinate amount of time and expertise.
Sir_Cmpwn 9y ago
>But I use it because of a lack of viable libre and open alternative. In what universe is LineageOS not a viable alternative?
- sli 9y ago
  LOS does nothing for proprietary binary blobs included on phones.
  - Sir_Cmpwn 9y ago
    But it does do something for this: >owning a smartphone means usually owning an endpoint for one of the giant corporate data sinks which its government can easily access. At least as much as you can while carrying around a radio transmitter. Replicant is also a thing.
mmagin 9y ago
Nice use of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism
slackingoff2017 9y ago
Android phones are not widely used for surveying critical infastructure unlike these drones. The fact that a Chinese product sends data to China is hardly surprising, but US intel is warning that such a thing is dangerous considering what these drones are frequently used for. And those Android phones are made by companies around the world. Samsung phones send data to South Korea, Hauwei to China, etc... Some Android phones are sold without Google's apps and send nothing to their servers, so you're not really correct on that.

astebbin 9y ago

The U.S. has strong legal protections against unreasonable search and seizure, as shown in the Apple vs. FBI case after the San Bernardino attack. My understanding is that China has no such privacy protections, either in principle or in practice.

jlgaddis 9y ago
Yeah, it's not like the U.S. can get a top-secret blanket order for call records of everyone in the country or anything. /s
- chronic824 9y ago
  Having a requirement for a blank order is better than no requirement, as is in China. Would you rather live in China?
tehlike 9y ago
patriot act is rather broad for ensuring strong legal protections.
Veratyr 9y ago
Sure but the US also has a very broad definition of "reasonable", where just about any kind of information you share through or with a business is a "business record" and doesn't require a warrant. Not to mention the blanket surveillance, use of Stingrays without a warrant and near total lack of privacy law. The US might not be as _bad_ as China but it's still far from _good_.
rodgerd 9y ago
Yeah, unless you're in the constitution-free zone within what is it, 100 miles of a port?
trhway 9y ago
>The U.S. has strong legal protections against unreasonable search and seizure i don't think these protections apply to the people outside of US. The same way whatever laws China has wouldn't apply to for example the people in US, ie. outside of China. Also it reminded about that typical arrangement when UK spies on the people inside US at the request of US government and vise versa in order to workaround those domestic legal protections.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- wbl 9y ago
  That last part doesn't happen: it's part of the intelligence agreements not to do that.
  - kuschku 9y ago
    The snowden leaks, 4 years ago, offer proof that this happened, and you still deny it? Officials of the BND admitted it in a parliamentary hearing, too.
    - wbl 9y ago
      What proof did Snowden show of this?
      - willstrafach 9y ago
        None. People refuse to let this myth die, yet cannot provide any evidence. It is very strange.
      - kuschku 9y ago
        I don’t have his documents on hand, but I’d instead recommend you read the transscripts of the NSA-Untersuchungsausschuss of the German Bundestag, which investigated the NSA and BND affairs. They’re official government documents, and are transscripts of people testifying under oath. The head of the BND stated that the BND did not record any information about Germans, and the NSA did not record any information about Americans, but that the BND shared whatever it collected about Americans with the NSA, and in reverse.
StreamBright 9y ago
A great example of how reasonable is this when you need to unlock your phone, laptop, etc. at the US border and hand it over. I guess we have a very different definition of reasonable.
titzer 9y ago
> The U.S. has strong legal protections against unreasonable search and seizure > The U.S. has strong legal language against unreasonable search and seizure which is usually ignored when inconvenient for the various intelligence and law enforcement agencies. Fixed that for you.
tgragnato 9y ago
Those protections apply only to US citizens: the 4th amendment doesn't apply to foreigners. US ‘authorities’ arrogated to themselves the right to siphon the data and metadata of people around the world for this exact reason. This means that based on the current applied interpretation of the norms, there are two classes of people: those who ‘deserve’ rights, and have them, and those who do not. And if you are a foreigner, you do not. Correct me if I'm wrong.
- greeneggs 9y ago
  No, the Fourth Amendment applies to non-citizens, even those who are in the US illegally. > The court ruled in Almeida-Sanchez v. United States (1973) that all criminal charge-related elements of the Constitution's amendments (the First, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth and the 14th) such as search and seizure, self-incrimination, trial by jury and due process, protect non-citizens, legally or illegally present. http://thehill.com/blogs/pundits-blog/immigration/255281-yes-illegal-aliens-have-constitutional-rights http://thehill.com/blogs/pundits-blog/immigration/255281-yes... (I am not an expert and would appreciate a better source or explanation.)
  - tgragnato 9y ago
    Thank you for the clarification. This is still limited to people on us soil :/
giobox 9y ago
San Bernardino did demonstrate this to some degree, but I could easily have imagined that event pushing Congress to pass some pretty draconian legislation if the FBI hadn't found an alternate path into the phone, things got pretty heated with that one. I'd go as far as to say the surprisingly tough public stance Tim Cook took against the government's position was pretty unusual too. I would be worried about what would happen if a similar highly public spat over an encryption issue happens under the current US administration - it's abundantly clear that the politics of this issue and the facts are not in alignment, Trump would doubtless adore the publicity of it. At any rate, I'd imagine San Bernadino is almost certainly not the last time this is going to be a national political issue, in the USA or elsewhere. This of course pales in comparison to China though. > The U.S. has strong legal protections against unreasonable search and seizure So long as you stay the hell away from an airport...

leggomylibro 9y ago

In a nutshell: DJI is primed to obey authorities. It's in their genes. They're happy to geofence your drone for the simple reason of, 'we were asked,' which means that it isn't your drone. Sure, it seems reasonable when they keep you from straying into an airfield, but just wait until they prevent you from filming the violent crackdown on a protest. Although I do think that there's something to the idea of, 'if any country is going to have extremely personal data about me, it had may as well be a country that cannot easily and immediately imprison me without evidence or charge.'

Normal_gaussian 9y ago
> 'if any country is going to have extremely personal data about me, it had may as well be a country that cannot easily and immediately imprison me without evidence or charge. Don't forget parallel construction and planted evidence.
philtar 9y ago
> 'if any country is going to have extremely personal data about me, it had may as well be a country that cannot easily and immediately imprison me without evidence or charge.' I don't know if you're referring to the US or China
- kaffeemitsahne 9y ago
  I guess he's referring to "the country I don't currently reside in"

prdonahue 9y ago

Why would you put a "(sic)" [sic] in your own comment?

aaronbrethorst 9y ago
I think "crappybird" is being ironic and making some sort of meta-comment about how Android may be free-as-in-beer, and somewhat free-as-in-speech, but it isn't really free because REASON GOES HERE.
pavlov 9y ago
It's not uncommon to use "sic" as a sort of irony punctuation mark.
- prdonahue 9y ago
  Interesting. I've always known "sic" by it's canonical usage: to point out an error in someone else's quotation (perhaps with some sneer). Wikipedia actually shows this newer usage of it. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sic#.22Ironic_use.22_of_sic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sic#.22Ironic_use.22_of_sic: "Ironic use" of sic[edit] Occasionally a writer places [sic] after his or her own words, to indicate that the language has been chosen deliberately for special effect, especially where the writer's ironic meaning may otherwise be unclear.[18] Bryan A. Garner dubbed this use of sic "ironic", providing the following example from Fred Rodell's 1955 book Nine Men:[2] [I]n 1951, it was the blessing bestowed on Judge Harold Medina's prosecution [sic] of the eleven so-called 'top native Communists,' which blessing meant giving the Smith Act the judicial nod of constitutionality.
SomeStupidPoint 9y ago
I think the implication is that "free" is being quoted from elsewhere and the author doesn't necessarily agree that it is without cost just because such cost is not denominated in dollars.

DKnoll 9y ago

The concern isn't about US consumers, it's about the US government (law enforcement, defence, etc.) using the drones and having data sent back.

jessaustin 9y ago
That sounds excellent to me. China could just start publishing these data, and then we lowly USA citizens could have some idea what the cops are getting up to with these drones. I'm anticipating a fair amount of "pretty woman undressed in her bathroom" footage...

jstanley 9y ago

CopperheadOS and LineageOS are examples of android-derived mobile OS's that don't send a firehose of data back to the mothership.

bolololo12 9y ago

I'm not sure if EU customers send data back to US - please correct me if I'm wrong.

GCU-Empiricist 9y ago

Considering that China has the great firewall due to it's government censorship I'm a bit shocked to see this as the top comment. The United States has distasteful problems with ubiquitous monitoring, but implying it is equivalent to China seems like failing to consider that there are qualitatively different levels of totalitarianism.

justinjlynn 9y ago
As though the invasion of privacy might be acceptable depending on who's committing the act... and how much or how often they do it and for what reasons. If it unjust, it's unjust; it doesn't matter if its China or any of the Five Eyes members doing it, it's still just as wrong.
- arcticfox 9y ago
  > As though the invasion of privacy might be acceptable ... depending ... for what reasons. If it's unjust, it's unjust I don't really agree with this. Intentions matter; the act of breaking into a house is way different if it's done to stop an in-progress assault vs. commit one. It can obviously be argued in the actual scenario we're discussing how benevolent / evil / potentially unknowable the actors we're talking about actually are, but I don't think intention is irrelevant.
  - justinjlynn 9y ago
    Justification means it is not unjust. That's the point. That's going to vary depending on the culture in which the violation is occurring - as it should. It's not really the intention that matters, but the circumstances motivating the action initially. Example: murder in the course of self defence as "justifiable homicide" or the warranted tapping of someone's phone under supervision of the judiciary The issue occurs here because those traditional national lines, which happen to also include cultural lines, are themselves being violated and we have no effective incidental means of addressing or justifying the act.
- godelski 9y ago

octothorp3 9y ago

Bad analogy with the quadcopter, plug a few cheap parts together and load the open source flight controller software and you are ready to fly. Much harder to build/compile a phone atm, I haven't even seen where this is possible without an inordinate amount of time and expertise.

Sir_Cmpwn 9y ago

>But I use it because of a lack of viable libre and open alternative. In what universe is LineageOS not a viable alternative?

sli 9y ago
LOS does nothing for proprietary binary blobs included on phones.
- Sir_Cmpwn 9y ago
  But it does do something for this: >owning a smartphone means usually owning an endpoint for one of the giant corporate data sinks which its government can easily access. At least as much as you can while carrying around a radio transmitter. Replicant is also a thing.

mmagin 9y ago

Nice use of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism

slackingoff2017 9y ago

Android phones are not widely used for surveying critical infastructure unlike these drones. The fact that a Chinese product sends data to China is hardly surprising, but US intel is warning that such a thing is dangerous considering what these drones are frequently used for. And those Android phones are made by companies around the world. Samsung phones send data to South Korea, Hauwei to China, etc... Some Android phones are sold without Google's apps and send nothing to their servers, so you're not really correct on that.