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Jailed for a Text: China’s Censors Are Spying on Mobile Chat Groups

161 points by NN88 9y ago

bhhaskin 9y ago
Not sure why this is any surprise. It is only a matter of time before it is done in the US as well (at least done openly)
- alexasmyths 9y ago
  The NSA is watching, but they are not censors.
  - asquabventured 9y ago
    The problem is that the NSA is watching us all, and we know it, so we self censor. The question is: Do you trust your/any government in 'x' years to not treat your communication and thoughts sent today as criminal in the future?
    - johncolanduoni 9y ago
      If people are self-censoring their opinions about the US government currently, it's hard to imagine how strongly they really feel.
    - alexasmyths 9y ago
      " so we self censor." I don't. I mean - you'd have to literally indicate you wanted to cause harm to a government official to get in trouble with the US Feds - and it's not unreasonable they do come after you as that is rightly a crime. But you can say almost anything you want against Trump or the US Government otherwise, and nobody will care.
  - code_duck 9y ago
    The NSA collects the data - they're not the ones who take action about it. They supply the info to the CIA, FBI, DEA, and so forth. Their data sharing was expanded just before Obama left office: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/12/us/politics/nsa-gets-more-latitude-to-share-intercepted-communications.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/12/us/politics/nsa-gets-more... "Previously, the N.S.A. filtered information before sharing intercepted communications with another agency, like the C.I.A. or the intelligence branches of the F.B.I. and the Drug Enforcement Administration. The N.S.A.’s analysts passed on only information they deemed pertinent, screening out the identities of innocent people and irrelevant personal information. Now, other intelligence agencies will be able to search directly through raw repositories of communications intercepted by the N.S.A. and then apply such rules for “minimizing” privacy intrusions."
    - opportune 9y ago
      Constitutionality aside, while this does make some sense for the FBI and CIA - because they have people skilled enough to analyze the data and "legitimate" uses in counter-terrorism - it makes no sense to give all that data to agencies like Homeland Security and the DEA, and I also have little confidence that their agents are good enough to even make sense of basic raw data. Just imagine some TSA agent finding a knife you left in your bag and then getting passed to some moron who detains you for hours because he saw that you liked some communist memes on FB and your friend sent you a 9/11 joke.
    - alexasmyths 9y ago
      The CIA, FBI, DEA etc are not 'censors' either. They are law enforcement. Censorship of US citizens for the purposes of state propaganda is a whole other different thing than anything the CIA/FBI/DEA does. And FYI the CIA may be proactively involved involved in propaganda, like helping some Hollywood movies ... but they are not running around tell you not to say bad things about Trump on Facebook, is my point.
      - code_duck 9y ago
        My point is that if there were to be any censor/like actions conducted by the government, it would not be the NSA carrying it out. It would be law enforcement.
- indubitable 9y ago
  We're already experiencing the start of this. This [1] article discusses an event when prosecutors in New York simultaneously subpoenaed Reason Magazine for information on commenters to an article, and also gagged them preventing them from being able to discuss it. The commenters were upset about the judge who chose to sentence Ross Ulbricht, founder of Silk Road, to life without the possibility of parole -- a sentence even greater than what the prosecution was seeking. The comments range from innocuous like "I hope there is a special place in hell reserved for that horrible woman" to ones that are more vile, but still come nowhere near even remotely close our 'imminent criminality' first amendment exception. Given what happened the first time that line was stated, I'm hesitant to quote it. What freedom... [1] - https://reason.com/reasontv/2015/07/07/ken-white-on-how-he-broke-reason-subpoen https://reason.com/reasontv/2015/07/07/ken-white-on-how-he-b...
- musage 9y ago
  > Now the police dreams that one look at the gigantic map on the office wall should suffice at any given moment to establish who is related to whom and in what degree of intimacy; and, theoretically, this dream is not unrealizable although its technical execution is bound to be somewhat difficult. If this map really did exist, not even memory would stand in the way of the totalitarian claim to domination; such a map might make it possible to obliterate people without any traces, as if they had never existed at all. -- Hannah Arendt, "The Origins of Totalitarianism" But it can't happen here, regardless of where "here" is. And when it does happen, it can't be discussed or resisted, especially when "here" became everywhere. > We’re going to live in a world unless we do something quickly in which our media consume us and spit in the government’s cup. There will never have been any place like it before and if we let it happen, there will never be any place different from it again. and > What will they say when they realize that we lived at the end of a thousand years of struggling for freedom of thought. At the end, when we had almost everything, we gave it away, for convenience, for social networking. Because Mr. Zuckerberg asked us to. Because we couldn’t find a better way to talk to our friends. Because we loved the beautiful pretty things that felt so warm in the hand. Because we didn’t really care about the future of freedom of thought, because we considered that to be someone else’s business. Because we thought it was over. Because we believed we were free. Because we didn’t think there was any struggling left to do. That’s why we gave it all away. > Is that what we're gonna tell them? > Free thought requires free media. Free media requires free technology. We require ethical treatment when we go to read, to write, to listen and to watch. Those are the hallmarks of our politics. We need to keep those politics until we die. Because if we don’t, something else will die. Something so precious that many, many of our fathers and mothers gave their life for it. Something so precious, that we understood it to define what it meant to be human; it will die. -- both by Eben Moglen in "Freedom of thought requires free media"
- hungerstrike 9y ago
  It won't be done in the US because they're going to use China as a model for a new world government and that can't happen until we're gone.
  - pavlov 9y ago
    Who is they?
    - hungerstrike 9y ago
      The international financiers that hold leverage over every nation - http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-07-12/new-world-order-takeover-very-real-and-will-begin-germany-and-china http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-07-12/new-world-order-tak...
tr4cefl0w 9y ago
This is Bob. Bob doesn’t link articles with a paywall. Be like Bob (or at least don’t upvote them). Anybody has the full text?
- asquabventured 9y ago
  https://pastebin.com/UVHJbQ6P https://pastebin.com/UVHJbQ6P
  - magpi3 9y ago
    Thank you.
  - tr4cefl0w 9y ago
    Thanks!!!
- frahs 9y ago
  I kinda hate advertisements. News generates value and requires resources to write. The advertisement model was alright, but clearly WSJ decided that they're better off just forcing you to subscribe to get their news, and frankly it's not a bad deal. I do wish there was a "metanews" subscription I could pay to get access to every news source collated together and summarized.
  - tyfon 9y ago
    Not to get too far into meta discussions, but It sucks when only part of this forum is able to discuss an article because of access issues like this. I see that WSJ wants to make money, but at least not link those articles in a discussion forum when only a small portion of the participants can access it.
asquabventured 9y ago
This article only highlights the importance of end-to-end encryption.
- rqs 9y ago
  I'm not sure what you mean by end-to-end encryption. It's a group chat, so it's more likely all messages are processed on server and then relayed to every people in the group. The easiest way to monitoring that kind of chat messages is .... install monitoring software directly on server. And as far as I know, many (If not all) commonly used domestic chat software in China are monitored by the government. So, it's a rather common sense in China to NOT chat on some specific topic during some specific period (Or, don't talk about it at all) online. It's not an end-to-end encryption problem, it is the problem of National security (What ever that means to CCP) v.s. Individual freedom.
  - magpi3 9y ago
    OP must mean GPG or something like that (where users control their own keys), but there is nothing to stop the government from holding you to demand your private key and the passphrase you use to unlock it. The only real answer is to avoid using the internet for any meaningful political or community dialogue if you live in an authoritarian state that might use that dialogue against you. That is a truly depressing thought.
    - jstanley 9y ago
      They can't demand your keys if they can't find you.
    - rqs 9y ago
      If you look though the history, you will found democracy in the entire history of China is very rare thing (Republic Of China is short lived). So, I'm not so surprised that we Chinese end up with an authoritarian government model we currently have here. First, let me clear one thing: It's not saying you can't blame the government for any wrong doing at all. In fact, I (and other people) do that all the time on the online forum operated by local government (I consider our local government is a fairly open one, so it's may not apply to other local governments). But you have to learn to avoid some topic that may get you into trouble. This case is an example. If my guess is right: He's talking about a high ranking official of central government, who recently got exposed by a guy call GuoWengui[0] and been removed from a very important position. In China, this kind of case by nature is very sensitive, CCP don't want to see anyone talking about it. I'm not saying everybody should follow CCP's No Talk Rule though, I believe all kinds of censorship is bad. However, consider is very hard to change people's (Including government officials) mindset after thousands of years of authoritarianism, sometime it's better to save yourself from those troubles, and let time do it's work to upgrade the society first. The hope is that, through years of advancement on science and economy etc (in short, productivity), the importance of individual can eventually out weight authoritarianism, and force the government to reform to an more advanced one. Until then though, that censorship will stay. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guo_Wengui https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guo_Wengui And, hey, there are lot's of places people can talk about those very sensitive topic, like ... Twitter? Why doing so on a domestic online service and then worrying about getting trouble because of that.
magpi3 9y ago
A chilling read. I use WeChat because I have a few friends in China. I am glad I have read this. I have never talked to them about China's internal politics for fear that something like this might exist. Now I know it is worse than I even thought possible. I cannot even tell them this article exists. I believe (hope?) that this will be the death of social media in the long run, at least in authoritarian states. No one is going to use these forums if it means they or their family members can be put in jail for a joke. This is straight out of 1984, and that can be said with 0 hyperbole. When they start using ML to detect dissidents who speak in coded language, we will truly have a real live thought police. Christ almighty.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- opportune 9y ago
  It's heading there in other countries, it's just not done by the government yet except in extreme cases. I already can't do anything on social media which could piss off my employer. It makes sense that I can't talk shit about them or leak info, but I also can only share certain political opinions - for example, while I'm sure my employer would be fine if I told them I voted for Hillary and supported gay marriage, I'm not so sure they would be fine if I told them I voted for Trump or was involved in union/labor politics. Of course there would be no direct consequences to either, but HR and managers would know (because they check) and it would affect their opinions of me negatively. And now it's happening with advertisement too. Tell your friend you just took a pregnancy test via FB messenger and now every advertiser on the internet knows just what to sell you. Most people don't really care about this yet, but most people don't realize that this kind of thing could be used in the future for all sorts of dystopian shit. All this data is being stored. I think Google is treating my data pretty responsibly at the moment, but I could see it being used for anything from background checks (e.g. checking search history or message logs for indicators of illegal activity) to blackmail. On a tangential sidenote, I read an article about Snap recently about how they're trying to position themselves as a different kind of social media company. They don't (yet) perform highly sophisticated targeted advertising and don't save a lot of actual content data. You typically are only connected to your actual friends, not some random guy from your high school class, your aunt, your ex-girlfriend, and your coworker. There's also no public profile for employers to search for and snoop around. Of course these are typically the case for any tool focused on direct messaging but I hope as Snap expands they can be both successful and keep these fantastic qualities.
songco 9y ago
Not surprised by this, for a long time, China's official policy is: all UGC must under control, or just blocked by GFW. So the real-name system applied to weibo(twitter)/zhihu(quora)/wechat/phone numbers/forums.....
piiswrong 9y ago
the US is already shutting down "Russian-backed" twitter accounts that tries to "sabotage the government". Who is to decide what's backed by Russia, eh?
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- kercker 9y ago
  In a democratic country like U.S., they will not jail you for your tweets that try to sabotage the government, besides closing your account. You can say anything in a democratic country, except when you are forced to shut up.
  - thedoctor79 9y ago
    In US, if you say anything bad about US leaders, maybe you have trouble at the border when you go on holiday. In Russia, you can say anything about US leaders, and nobody will care.
icsrutil 9y ago
It's not a big deal in China. We all said "Big brother is watching you guys.". The first thing occurred to my mind that somedays ago I posted a thread for R.I.P someone, and you know what? Account have been banned just a few seconds. WhatsApp & telegram & VPN are blocked in China for a very long time. WeChat is the most popular app in China, the chat group is oversaw by the brother for some reason named "for country and people security". What a big joke. YES, Apple is helping spying people for the GOV :(
50CNT 9y ago
For whoever this is news to, check out this XinhuaNet[0] article on holding group administrators accountable for things said in their groups. That they're able to view things is implicit in that. Then check out the pushes for Real Name Identification with online services[1] and phone numbers [2]. Check out the social credit system[3], mandatory by 2020[4]. The national face recognition system [5]. Its actually kinda incredible. [0]http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2017-09/08/c_136592568.htm http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2017-09/08/c_136592568.htm [1]https://ifex.org/china/2017/09/06/ban-anonymous-content/ https://ifex.org/china/2017/09/06/ban-anonymous-content/ [2]https://www.techinasia.com/china-start-enforcing-realname-mobile-registration-government-claims# https://www.techinasia.com/china-start-enforcing-realname-mo...! [3]https://www.wired.co.uk/article/chinese-government-social-credit-score-privacy-invasion https://www.wired.co.uk/article/chinese-government-social-cr... [4]https://investmentwatchblog.com/in-china-every-citizen-is-being-assigned-a-credit-score-that-drops-if-a-person-buys-and-plays-video-games-or-posts-political-comments-online-without-prior-permission-or-even-if-social-me/ https://investmentwatchblog.com/in-china-every-citizen-is-be... [5]https://technode.com/2017/10/13/china-makes-progress-on-its-national-facial-recognition-surveillance-system/ https://technode.com/2017/10/13/china-makes-progress-on-its-...
- pc86 9y ago
  If by "incredible" you mean "a dystopian hellscape" then yes, it is. And with this comment I probably just eliminated any possibility of a Chinese visa!
  - 50CNT 9y ago
    See, that's why you just say that it's an incredible technological achievement. Gotta work on those Social Credit scores.
katastic 9y ago
But what if it's for a good cause, like deplatforming Nazis? Oh, I see, what's going on, nevermind.
- cuckcuckspruce 9y ago
  Tencent is one of the backers of Discord, a service that os very...flexible about who the rules are enforced on. Now i think we can see why.
ojbyrne 9y ago
Currently in Beijing traveling and I’m surprised HN isn’t blocked. The link (obviously) is.
- vfulco 9y ago
  or slack or github for that matter although intermittent outages are part of the hair pulling fun
  - ojbyrne 9y ago
    Or (amazingly) reddit.
bovermyer 9y ago
Just one more bit of evidence that China's current government is anathema to a peaceful, progressive world.
mtgx 9y ago
Paywall bypass: https://archive.is/20171208003957/https://www.wsj.com/articles/jailed-for-a-text-chinas-censors-are-spying-on-mobile-chat-groups-1512665007 https://archive.is/20171208003957/https://www.wsj.com/articl...
microcolonel 9y ago
If you intend to spend any time in China, and your friends are intelligent and decent people, your friends are probably already censoring themselves (even outside of China), fearing it may have repercussions toward you.
danjoc 9y ago
It's not just China, http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-27616696 http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-27616696
gurkendoktor 9y ago
I can't figure out how to get past the WSJ paywall. In any case, here is another relatively high-profile case of being detained for using WeChat: http://www.zeit.de/feature/freedom-of-press-china-zhang-miao-imprisonment http://www.zeit.de/feature/freedom-of-press-china-zhang-miao...

161 points by NN88 9y ago

Not sure why this is any surprise. It is only a matter of time before it is done in the US as well (at least done openly)

alexasmyths 9y ago
The NSA is watching, but they are not censors.
- asquabventured 9y ago
  The problem is that the NSA is watching us all, and we know it, so we self censor. The question is: Do you trust your/any government in 'x' years to not treat your communication and thoughts sent today as criminal in the future?
  - johncolanduoni 9y ago
    If people are self-censoring their opinions about the US government currently, it's hard to imagine how strongly they really feel.
  - alexasmyths 9y ago
    " so we self censor." I don't. I mean - you'd have to literally indicate you wanted to cause harm to a government official to get in trouble with the US Feds - and it's not unreasonable they do come after you as that is rightly a crime. But you can say almost anything you want against Trump or the US Government otherwise, and nobody will care.
- code_duck 9y ago
  The NSA collects the data - they're not the ones who take action about it. They supply the info to the CIA, FBI, DEA, and so forth. Their data sharing was expanded just before Obama left office: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/12/us/politics/nsa-gets-more-latitude-to-share-intercepted-communications.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/12/us/politics/nsa-gets-more... "Previously, the N.S.A. filtered information before sharing intercepted communications with another agency, like the C.I.A. or the intelligence branches of the F.B.I. and the Drug Enforcement Administration. The N.S.A.’s analysts passed on only information they deemed pertinent, screening out the identities of innocent people and irrelevant personal information. Now, other intelligence agencies will be able to search directly through raw repositories of communications intercepted by the N.S.A. and then apply such rules for “minimizing” privacy intrusions."
  - opportune 9y ago
    Constitutionality aside, while this does make some sense for the FBI and CIA - because they have people skilled enough to analyze the data and "legitimate" uses in counter-terrorism - it makes no sense to give all that data to agencies like Homeland Security and the DEA, and I also have little confidence that their agents are good enough to even make sense of basic raw data. Just imagine some TSA agent finding a knife you left in your bag and then getting passed to some moron who detains you for hours because he saw that you liked some communist memes on FB and your friend sent you a 9/11 joke.
  - alexasmyths 9y ago
    The CIA, FBI, DEA etc are not 'censors' either. They are law enforcement. Censorship of US citizens for the purposes of state propaganda is a whole other different thing than anything the CIA/FBI/DEA does. And FYI the CIA may be proactively involved involved in propaganda, like helping some Hollywood movies ... but they are not running around tell you not to say bad things about Trump on Facebook, is my point.
    - code_duck 9y ago
      My point is that if there were to be any censor/like actions conducted by the government, it would not be the NSA carrying it out. It would be law enforcement.
indubitable 9y ago
We're already experiencing the start of this. This [1] article discusses an event when prosecutors in New York simultaneously subpoenaed Reason Magazine for information on commenters to an article, and also gagged them preventing them from being able to discuss it. The commenters were upset about the judge who chose to sentence Ross Ulbricht, founder of Silk Road, to life without the possibility of parole -- a sentence even greater than what the prosecution was seeking. The comments range from innocuous like "I hope there is a special place in hell reserved for that horrible woman" to ones that are more vile, but still come nowhere near even remotely close our 'imminent criminality' first amendment exception. Given what happened the first time that line was stated, I'm hesitant to quote it. What freedom... [1] - https://reason.com/reasontv/2015/07/07/ken-white-on-how-he-broke-reason-subpoen https://reason.com/reasontv/2015/07/07/ken-white-on-how-he-b...
musage 9y ago
> Now the police dreams that one look at the gigantic map on the office wall should suffice at any given moment to establish who is related to whom and in what degree of intimacy; and, theoretically, this dream is not unrealizable although its technical execution is bound to be somewhat difficult. If this map really did exist, not even memory would stand in the way of the totalitarian claim to domination; such a map might make it possible to obliterate people without any traces, as if they had never existed at all. -- Hannah Arendt, "The Origins of Totalitarianism" But it can't happen here, regardless of where "here" is. And when it does happen, it can't be discussed or resisted, especially when "here" became everywhere. > We’re going to live in a world unless we do something quickly in which our media consume us and spit in the government’s cup. There will never have been any place like it before and if we let it happen, there will never be any place different from it again. and > What will they say when they realize that we lived at the end of a thousand years of struggling for freedom of thought. At the end, when we had almost everything, we gave it away, for convenience, for social networking. Because Mr. Zuckerberg asked us to. Because we couldn’t find a better way to talk to our friends. Because we loved the beautiful pretty things that felt so warm in the hand. Because we didn’t really care about the future of freedom of thought, because we considered that to be someone else’s business. Because we thought it was over. Because we believed we were free. Because we didn’t think there was any struggling left to do. That’s why we gave it all away. > Is that what we're gonna tell them? > Free thought requires free media. Free media requires free technology. We require ethical treatment when we go to read, to write, to listen and to watch. Those are the hallmarks of our politics. We need to keep those politics until we die. Because if we don’t, something else will die. Something so precious that many, many of our fathers and mothers gave their life for it. Something so precious, that we understood it to define what it meant to be human; it will die. -- both by Eben Moglen in "Freedom of thought requires free media"
hungerstrike 9y ago
It won't be done in the US because they're going to use China as a model for a new world government and that can't happen until we're gone.
- pavlov 9y ago
  Who is they?
  - hungerstrike 9y ago
    The international financiers that hold leverage over every nation - http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-07-12/new-world-order-takeover-very-real-and-will-begin-germany-and-china http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-07-12/new-world-order-tak...

tr4cefl0w 9y ago

This is Bob. Bob doesn’t link articles with a paywall. Be like Bob (or at least don’t upvote them). Anybody has the full text?

asquabventured 9y ago
https://pastebin.com/UVHJbQ6P https://pastebin.com/UVHJbQ6P
- magpi3 9y ago
  Thank you.
- tr4cefl0w 9y ago
  Thanks!!!
frahs 9y ago
I kinda hate advertisements. News generates value and requires resources to write. The advertisement model was alright, but clearly WSJ decided that they're better off just forcing you to subscribe to get their news, and frankly it's not a bad deal. I do wish there was a "metanews" subscription I could pay to get access to every news source collated together and summarized.
- tyfon 9y ago
  Not to get too far into meta discussions, but It sucks when only part of this forum is able to discuss an article because of access issues like this. I see that WSJ wants to make money, but at least not link those articles in a discussion forum when only a small portion of the participants can access it.

asquabventured 9y ago

This article only highlights the importance of end-to-end encryption.

rqs 9y ago
I'm not sure what you mean by end-to-end encryption. It's a group chat, so it's more likely all messages are processed on server and then relayed to every people in the group. The easiest way to monitoring that kind of chat messages is .... install monitoring software directly on server. And as far as I know, many (If not all) commonly used domestic chat software in China are monitored by the government. So, it's a rather common sense in China to NOT chat on some specific topic during some specific period (Or, don't talk about it at all) online. It's not an end-to-end encryption problem, it is the problem of National security (What ever that means to CCP) v.s. Individual freedom.
- magpi3 9y ago
  OP must mean GPG or something like that (where users control their own keys), but there is nothing to stop the government from holding you to demand your private key and the passphrase you use to unlock it. The only real answer is to avoid using the internet for any meaningful political or community dialogue if you live in an authoritarian state that might use that dialogue against you. That is a truly depressing thought.
  - jstanley 9y ago
    They can't demand your keys if they can't find you.
  - rqs 9y ago
    If you look though the history, you will found democracy in the entire history of China is very rare thing (Republic Of China is short lived). So, I'm not so surprised that we Chinese end up with an authoritarian government model we currently have here. First, let me clear one thing: It's not saying you can't blame the government for any wrong doing at all. In fact, I (and other people) do that all the time on the online forum operated by local government (I consider our local government is a fairly open one, so it's may not apply to other local governments). But you have to learn to avoid some topic that may get you into trouble. This case is an example. If my guess is right: He's talking about a high ranking official of central government, who recently got exposed by a guy call GuoWengui[0] and been removed from a very important position. In China, this kind of case by nature is very sensitive, CCP don't want to see anyone talking about it. I'm not saying everybody should follow CCP's No Talk Rule though, I believe all kinds of censorship is bad. However, consider is very hard to change people's (Including government officials) mindset after thousands of years of authoritarianism, sometime it's better to save yourself from those troubles, and let time do it's work to upgrade the society first. The hope is that, through years of advancement on science and economy etc (in short, productivity), the importance of individual can eventually out weight authoritarianism, and force the government to reform to an more advanced one. Until then though, that censorship will stay. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guo_Wengui https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guo_Wengui And, hey, there are lot's of places people can talk about those very sensitive topic, like ... Twitter? Why doing so on a domestic online service and then worrying about getting trouble because of that.

magpi3 9y ago

A chilling read. I use WeChat because I have a few friends in China. I am glad I have read this. I have never talked to them about China's internal politics for fear that something like this might exist. Now I know it is worse than I even thought possible. I cannot even tell them this article exists. I believe (hope?) that this will be the death of social media in the long run, at least in authoritarian states. No one is going to use these forums if it means they or their family members can be put in jail for a joke. This is straight out of 1984, and that can be said with 0 hyperbole. When they start using ML to detect dissidents who speak in coded language, we will truly have a real live thought police. Christ almighty.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
opportune 9y ago
It's heading there in other countries, it's just not done by the government yet except in extreme cases. I already can't do anything on social media which could piss off my employer. It makes sense that I can't talk shit about them or leak info, but I also can only share certain political opinions - for example, while I'm sure my employer would be fine if I told them I voted for Hillary and supported gay marriage, I'm not so sure they would be fine if I told them I voted for Trump or was involved in union/labor politics. Of course there would be no direct consequences to either, but HR and managers would know (because they check) and it would affect their opinions of me negatively. And now it's happening with advertisement too. Tell your friend you just took a pregnancy test via FB messenger and now every advertiser on the internet knows just what to sell you. Most people don't really care about this yet, but most people don't realize that this kind of thing could be used in the future for all sorts of dystopian shit. All this data is being stored. I think Google is treating my data pretty responsibly at the moment, but I could see it being used for anything from background checks (e.g. checking search history or message logs for indicators of illegal activity) to blackmail. On a tangential sidenote, I read an article about Snap recently about how they're trying to position themselves as a different kind of social media company. They don't (yet) perform highly sophisticated targeted advertising and don't save a lot of actual content data. You typically are only connected to your actual friends, not some random guy from your high school class, your aunt, your ex-girlfriend, and your coworker. There's also no public profile for employers to search for and snoop around. Of course these are typically the case for any tool focused on direct messaging but I hope as Snap expands they can be both successful and keep these fantastic qualities.

songco 9y ago

Not surprised by this, for a long time, China's official policy is: all UGC must under control, or just blocked by GFW. So the real-name system applied to weibo(twitter)/zhihu(quora)/wechat/phone numbers/forums.....

piiswrong 9y ago

the US is already shutting down "Russian-backed" twitter accounts that tries to "sabotage the government". Who is to decide what's backed by Russia, eh?

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
kercker 9y ago
In a democratic country like U.S., they will not jail you for your tweets that try to sabotage the government, besides closing your account. You can say anything in a democratic country, except when you are forced to shut up.
- thedoctor79 9y ago
  In US, if you say anything bad about US leaders, maybe you have trouble at the border when you go on holiday. In Russia, you can say anything about US leaders, and nobody will care.

icsrutil 9y ago

It's not a big deal in China. We all said "Big brother is watching you guys.". The first thing occurred to my mind that somedays ago I posted a thread for R.I.P someone, and you know what? Account have been banned just a few seconds. WhatsApp & telegram & VPN are blocked in China for a very long time. WeChat is the most popular app in China, the chat group is oversaw by the brother for some reason named "for country and people security". What a big joke. YES, Apple is helping spying people for the GOV :(

50CNT 9y ago

For whoever this is news to, check out this XinhuaNet[0] article on holding group administrators accountable for things said in their groups. That they're able to view things is implicit in that. Then check out the pushes for Real Name Identification with online services[1] and phone numbers [2]. Check out the social credit system[3], mandatory by 2020[4]. The national face recognition system [5]. Its actually kinda incredible. [0]http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2017-09/08/c_136592568.htm http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2017-09/08/c_136592568.htm [1]https://ifex.org/china/2017/09/06/ban-anonymous-content/ https://ifex.org/china/2017/09/06/ban-anonymous-content/ [2]https://www.techinasia.com/china-start-enforcing-realname-mobile-registration-government-claims# https://www.techinasia.com/china-start-enforcing-realname-mo...! [3]https://www.wired.co.uk/article/chinese-government-social-credit-score-privacy-invasion https://www.wired.co.uk/article/chinese-government-social-cr... [4]https://investmentwatchblog.com/in-china-every-citizen-is-being-assigned-a-credit-score-that-drops-if-a-person-buys-and-plays-video-games-or-posts-political-comments-online-without-prior-permission-or-even-if-social-me/ https://investmentwatchblog.com/in-china-every-citizen-is-be... [5]https://technode.com/2017/10/13/china-makes-progress-on-its-national-facial-recognition-surveillance-system/ https://technode.com/2017/10/13/china-makes-progress-on-its-...

pc86 9y ago
If by "incredible" you mean "a dystopian hellscape" then yes, it is. And with this comment I probably just eliminated any possibility of a Chinese visa!
- 50CNT 9y ago
  See, that's why you just say that it's an incredible technological achievement. Gotta work on those Social Credit scores.

katastic 9y ago

But what if it's for a good cause, like deplatforming Nazis? Oh, I see, what's going on, nevermind.

cuckcuckspruce 9y ago
Tencent is one of the backers of Discord, a service that os very...flexible about who the rules are enforced on. Now i think we can see why.

ojbyrne 9y ago

Currently in Beijing traveling and I’m surprised HN isn’t blocked. The link (obviously) is.

vfulco 9y ago
or slack or github for that matter although intermittent outages are part of the hair pulling fun
- ojbyrne 9y ago
  Or (amazingly) reddit.

bovermyer 9y ago

Just one more bit of evidence that China's current government is anathema to a peaceful, progressive world.

mtgx 9y ago

Paywall bypass: https://archive.is/20171208003957/https://www.wsj.com/articles/jailed-for-a-text-chinas-censors-are-spying-on-mobile-chat-groups-1512665007 https://archive.is/20171208003957/https://www.wsj.com/articl...

microcolonel 9y ago

If you intend to spend any time in China, and your friends are intelligent and decent people, your friends are probably already censoring themselves (even outside of China), fearing it may have repercussions toward you.

danjoc 9y ago

It's not just China, http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-27616696 http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-27616696

gurkendoktor 9y ago

I can't figure out how to get past the WSJ paywall. In any case, here is another relatively high-profile case of being detained for using WeChat: http://www.zeit.de/feature/freedom-of-press-china-zhang-miao-imprisonment http://www.zeit.de/feature/freedom-of-press-china-zhang-miao...