9 ms·

In China, consumers are becoming more anxious about data privacy

129 points by subsubsub 9y ago

b6 9y ago
Man, it's a strange article. Fraud of every kind is endemic in China. When I'm in China, it's reasonable to assume anyone who initiates conversation with me has some kind of scam in mind. Strangers are very wary of each other. It's common to receive scam texts from people saying they're your dad or your landlord and to send money to such and such a bank account. I think most Chinese people have never had the opportunity to use any computer other than perhaps an iPhone that has not been backdoored/rootkit'd/RAT'd in at least one way. What would data protection by Chinese companies even mean? They're already comprehensively cooperating with the CCP.
- stevenwoo 9y ago
  To be fair to China that scam has targeted me at least 15 years ago via email and so common in the USA that the FTC warns people about it. https://www.consumer.ftc.gov/articles/0204-family-emergency-scams https://www.consumer.ftc.gov/articles/0204-family-emergency-... Fraud is everywhere including the USA but not in the same way as China I imagine. There are some industries rife with fraud in the USA, how do you explain the following to people in China - auto repair (can't trust anybody until proven fair and have to get multiple estimates)/short term payday loans/that recent posting about elder guardianship abuse/multi level marketing systems/furniture rental. OTOH I don't worry about the food in the USA being tampered with in the infamous ways Chinese industries put poison in pet food or put plastic toxins in milk to cut costs.
  - superjambo 9y ago
    Or opium in the noodles... https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2014/09/26/chinese-noodle-shop-laces-noodles-with-opium-to-keep-customers-coming-back/?utm_term=.134760979444 https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2014/09/2...
  - seanmcdirmid 9y ago
    You don’t get scammed on the street like you do in china or Italy tourist areas. Ya, instead you have to believe a Nigerian prince really is contacting you by email or that Microsoft is really calling you about your windows PC.l, or there are really single girls in your area who are interested in you in the Internet. But really scams all over the world prey on people who don’t get “too good to be true.” That fancy shampoo you bought cheaply at the whole in the wall store below your apartment? Ya, it will definitely be fake!
    - anontoday126 9y ago
      > You don’t get scammed on the street like you do in china or Italy tourist areas. Yes you do. When I was in New York, Baltimore, New Orleans, Chicago, and other cities, I constantly had people come up to me and "ask for help." They would give some sob story about how they were tricked to come to the city and they are just trying to get some money to go back home. Or people would approach me at gas stations, saying they forgot their wallet and just needed to borrow some money for gas.
      - IntronExon 9y ago
        That’s not scamming, that’s begging.
    - aeriklawson 9y ago
      Have you spent time in NYC? I get scammed regularly here, it's not a Chinese or American thing. It's possible the rates are higher there in general, but I wouldn't say you "don't get scammed in the streets" in the USA.
      - seanmcdirmid 9y ago
        I haven't, but I've spent plenty of time in Beijing. I think Italy is worse though, especially Milan.
    - stevenwoo 9y ago
      Anecdotally in the Bay Area have been approached by strangers for both the three card Monte and the shell game. I think that if I did not have prior knowledge of these I would have been vulnerable to them as well.
- cinquemb 9y ago
  >What would data protection by Chinese companies even mean? They're already comprehensively cooperating with the CCP. Well even if it looked anything like the EU's GDPR, even then the CCP would still have a carte blanche to collect whatever they wanted, just as the BND [0], AVID [1] et al do so today, and at least the politicians could pat them selves on the back about how they are protecting their people, while continuing to subvert such protections. [0] https://electrospaces.blogspot.com/2016/09/secret-report-reveals-german-bnd-also.html https://electrospaces.blogspot.com/2016/09/secret-report-rev... [1] https://electrospaces.blogspot.com/2014/02/dutch-government-tried-to-hide-truth.html https://electrospaces.blogspot.com/2014/02/dutch-government-...
  - dogma1138 9y ago
    The GDPR specifically exempts governments from the regulation. In fact the GDPR would likely concentrate data collection to governments which would provide services to the market. In fact this has already happened in countries with strict regulation like Germany where if you want to look up someone’s details it’s much easier to simply access them from a government run DB than collect them on your own.
    - cinquemb 9y ago
      >if you want to look up someone’s details it’s much easier to simply access them from a government run DB Yes, it will be much easier to gain access to a compromised government DB if you want to have bulk access to such information a la shadowbrokers et al.
- TeMPOraL 9y ago
  > When I'm in China, it's reasonable to assume anyone who initiates conversation with me has some kind of scam in mind. That's pretty much true everywhere else, isn't it now? If a random stranger you don't know initiates a conversation with you, it's usually because they have something in mind that quite likely is not in your best interest. I believe what you called "having a scam in mind" for China is usually called "salesmanship" in the US.
  - b6 9y ago
    No, what I mean is that in China, anyone who comes up to me, especially if they are speaking English, intends to lie to me and maybe lead me to some place to be defrauded, and this is their job. It's not the same in the US or many other places at all.
    - yorwba 9y ago
      Strange. In my experience, when someone comes up to me, they are either trying to hand me a leaflet or they are some old dude who's amazed that he gets to see a real foreigner in his lifetime and wants to make some small talk. The one time someone spoke English, it was a student who wanted to practice. Obviously I'm not spending enough time in the right places to be targeted for a scam.
      - TeMPOraL 9y ago
        > Obviously I'm not spending enough time in the right places to be targeted for a scam. Or you don't look like an easy mark.
      - b6 9y ago
        Sorry, when I look back at my comment, it was overly broad. China is very diverse and every city is different. Part of my time in China was spent in probably one of the worst areas for that kind of behavior, at least towards foreigners: Shanghai.
        yorwba 9y ago
- earenndil 9y ago
  I wouldn't be so sure an iphone isn't backdoored. Apple did participate in PRISM[1], after all. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_(surveillance_program) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_(surveillance_program)
  - yorby 9y ago
    and Apple was denying PRISM before proofs were presented[1]... Apple has 100% control on your device and the government has 100% control over Apple. If you think that the device is unbreakable, you are foolish. But either way, they can transfer data while you are using the phone because it is unencrypted at that point. 1. https://www.cultofmac.com/230452/are-apple-and-other-tech-companies-lying-about-their-involvement-with-prism/ https://www.cultofmac.com/230452/are-apple-and-other-tech-co...
IBM 9y ago
Boy did Apple skate to where the puck was headed or what? I remember reading all those hot takes years ago insisting it was a mistake and thinking how short sighted that was [1][2]. It was also weird because even before the Apple Watch was announced there was plenty of evidence of their health ambitions, so it obviously made sense to be strong on privacy and security. Since then multiple high profile hacks have happened (and are bound to keep happening), the FBI fought Apple and lost (at least in lower courts), GDPR is being implemented in the EU, and antitrust regulators are taking a look at internet business models [3]. [1] https://dcurt.is/privacy-vs-user-experience https://dcurt.is/privacy-vs-user-experience [2] https://stratechery.com/2015/tim-cooks-unfair-and-unrealistic-privacy-speech-strategy-credits-the-privacy-priority-problem/ https://stratechery.com/2015/tim-cooks-unfair-and-unrealisti... [3] https://www.ft.com/content/9376eece-00e4-11e8-9650-9c0ad2d7c5b5 https://www.ft.com/content/9376eece-00e4-11e8-9650-9c0ad2d7c...
- tjoff 9y ago
  From [1]: The truth is that collecting information about people allows you to make significantly better products, and the more information you collect, the better products you can build That is a hilariously absurd statement. Collecting data has never been about making better products. And apple being pro-privacy is equally absurd, they just haven't gone full retard and started collecting everything they can. Which I guess is noteworthy of a company its size today, but don't confuse that with pro-privacy. It is just what everyone would expect of any sane entity. The climate of today just means we've set the bar so low that some confuse it for "pro-privacy" to care the slightest of it's consumers.
  - virgilp 9y ago
    > Collecting data has never been about making better products. That's a strong statement. Especially given that I know for sure data that is collected exactly for that purpose within my company.
    - taneq 9y ago
      Maybe you'd consider an alternate statement: "Collecting data is no longer solely about making better products."
sexydefinesher 9y ago
I hope this is a turning point in Chinese conscious of human rights
- oblio 9y ago
  Could be, but don't expect them to turn into the US any time now. The culture is different, fundamentally.
  - latch 9y ago
    Surely the US isn't what we're hoping other countries aspire to when it comes to human rights? High rate of incarceration, high rate of poverty (both symptoms of fundamental racial issues), death penalty, high youth incarceration, ongoing struggle for same sex marriages and abortions, the state of its health care, government attack on privacy ... and that's just on the domestic front.
    - gambiting 9y ago
      Out of all countries to turn into, US shouldn't be even in the top 5.
    - refurb 9y ago
      Name another country and I'll go ahead and list all the problems they struggle with too.
      - sexydefinesher 9y ago
        Iceland
        refurb 9y ago
        Took me about 5 seconds.[1] [1]https://grapevine.is/news/2016/10/27/unicef-red-cross-iceland-violating-child-human-rights/ https://grapevine.is/news/2016/10/27/unicef-red-cross-icelan...
IIAOPSW 9y ago
As someone who lived in China, I doubt it. Individual rights and limitations on government power are not taught in Chinese schools nor ingrained in Chinese culture. Politics is not natural part of the Chinese conversational diet in much the same way that bread is not a natural part of their nutritional diet. To the extent that such topics come up it is pragmatic to a fault. It is always in the context of fixing a specific problem in the here and now (Eg there is corruption therefore lets purge the corrupt) and never in the context of a broader political philosophy (Eg how should we structure the civil service to dis-incentivize corruption). Chinese ideas on what ought be legal are rooted in intuition for what we would call natural law rather than study of what we would call natural law. I can't imagine Chinese people being concerned about the general case of lax data protection. I can picture a near infinite string of ad hoc outcry over things like the strawberry adverts. Anyone from China disagreeing with my observations on your country, feel free to yell at me. I invite you.
- anontoday126 9y ago
  > Politics is not natural part of the Chinese conversational diet in much the same way that bread is not a natural part of their nutritional diet. What do you mean by natural? Because I hear Chinese people talk about politics all the time. It's an extremely popular topic and they love to get into the intricacies of it and compare how current leaders act compared to historical leaders. I definitely hear them talk about how society and philosophy influence current day politics. For example, how different would this political leader be if he followed the Mozi [1] school of thought. Of course, I understand Chinese so perhaps that's why? I know that many Chinese people dislike talking about politics with foreigners. Especially if they can't speak/understand Chinese. Also, not to be nit-picky, but mantou [2] and shaobing [3] are both a natural part of Northern Chinese diets. Of course I guess some people might not consider them true breads. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozi 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mantou https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mantou 3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shaobing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shaobing
  - IIAOPSW 9y ago
    What can I say. I guess we just knew different people.

129 points by subsubsub 9y ago

b6 9y ago

Man, it's a strange article. Fraud of every kind is endemic in China. When I'm in China, it's reasonable to assume anyone who initiates conversation with me has some kind of scam in mind. Strangers are very wary of each other. It's common to receive scam texts from people saying they're your dad or your landlord and to send money to such and such a bank account. I think most Chinese people have never had the opportunity to use any computer other than perhaps an iPhone that has not been backdoored/rootkit'd/RAT'd in at least one way. What would data protection by Chinese companies even mean? They're already comprehensively cooperating with the CCP.

stevenwoo 9y ago
To be fair to China that scam has targeted me at least 15 years ago via email and so common in the USA that the FTC warns people about it. https://www.consumer.ftc.gov/articles/0204-family-emergency-scams https://www.consumer.ftc.gov/articles/0204-family-emergency-... Fraud is everywhere including the USA but not in the same way as China I imagine. There are some industries rife with fraud in the USA, how do you explain the following to people in China - auto repair (can't trust anybody until proven fair and have to get multiple estimates)/short term payday loans/that recent posting about elder guardianship abuse/multi level marketing systems/furniture rental. OTOH I don't worry about the food in the USA being tampered with in the infamous ways Chinese industries put poison in pet food or put plastic toxins in milk to cut costs.
- superjambo 9y ago
  Or opium in the noodles... https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2014/09/26/chinese-noodle-shop-laces-noodles-with-opium-to-keep-customers-coming-back/?utm_term=.134760979444 https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2014/09/2...
- seanmcdirmid 9y ago
  You don’t get scammed on the street like you do in china or Italy tourist areas. Ya, instead you have to believe a Nigerian prince really is contacting you by email or that Microsoft is really calling you about your windows PC.l, or there are really single girls in your area who are interested in you in the Internet. But really scams all over the world prey on people who don’t get “too good to be true.” That fancy shampoo you bought cheaply at the whole in the wall store below your apartment? Ya, it will definitely be fake!
  - anontoday126 9y ago
    > You don’t get scammed on the street like you do in china or Italy tourist areas. Yes you do. When I was in New York, Baltimore, New Orleans, Chicago, and other cities, I constantly had people come up to me and "ask for help." They would give some sob story about how they were tricked to come to the city and they are just trying to get some money to go back home. Or people would approach me at gas stations, saying they forgot their wallet and just needed to borrow some money for gas.
    - IntronExon 9y ago
      That’s not scamming, that’s begging.
  - aeriklawson 9y ago
    Have you spent time in NYC? I get scammed regularly here, it's not a Chinese or American thing. It's possible the rates are higher there in general, but I wouldn't say you "don't get scammed in the streets" in the USA.
    - seanmcdirmid 9y ago
      I haven't, but I've spent plenty of time in Beijing. I think Italy is worse though, especially Milan.
  - stevenwoo 9y ago
    Anecdotally in the Bay Area have been approached by strangers for both the three card Monte and the shell game. I think that if I did not have prior knowledge of these I would have been vulnerable to them as well.
cinquemb 9y ago
>What would data protection by Chinese companies even mean? They're already comprehensively cooperating with the CCP. Well even if it looked anything like the EU's GDPR, even then the CCP would still have a carte blanche to collect whatever they wanted, just as the BND [0], AVID [1] et al do so today, and at least the politicians could pat them selves on the back about how they are protecting their people, while continuing to subvert such protections. [0] https://electrospaces.blogspot.com/2016/09/secret-report-reveals-german-bnd-also.html https://electrospaces.blogspot.com/2016/09/secret-report-rev... [1] https://electrospaces.blogspot.com/2014/02/dutch-government-tried-to-hide-truth.html https://electrospaces.blogspot.com/2014/02/dutch-government-...
- dogma1138 9y ago
  The GDPR specifically exempts governments from the regulation. In fact the GDPR would likely concentrate data collection to governments which would provide services to the market. In fact this has already happened in countries with strict regulation like Germany where if you want to look up someone’s details it’s much easier to simply access them from a government run DB than collect them on your own.
  - cinquemb 9y ago
    >if you want to look up someone’s details it’s much easier to simply access them from a government run DB Yes, it will be much easier to gain access to a compromised government DB if you want to have bulk access to such information a la shadowbrokers et al.
TeMPOraL 9y ago
> When I'm in China, it's reasonable to assume anyone who initiates conversation with me has some kind of scam in mind. That's pretty much true everywhere else, isn't it now? If a random stranger you don't know initiates a conversation with you, it's usually because they have something in mind that quite likely is not in your best interest. I believe what you called "having a scam in mind" for China is usually called "salesmanship" in the US.
- b6 9y ago
  No, what I mean is that in China, anyone who comes up to me, especially if they are speaking English, intends to lie to me and maybe lead me to some place to be defrauded, and this is their job. It's not the same in the US or many other places at all.
  - yorwba 9y ago
    Strange. In my experience, when someone comes up to me, they are either trying to hand me a leaflet or they are some old dude who's amazed that he gets to see a real foreigner in his lifetime and wants to make some small talk. The one time someone spoke English, it was a student who wanted to practice. Obviously I'm not spending enough time in the right places to be targeted for a scam.
    - TeMPOraL 9y ago
      > Obviously I'm not spending enough time in the right places to be targeted for a scam. Or you don't look like an easy mark.
    - b6 9y ago
      Sorry, when I look back at my comment, it was overly broad. China is very diverse and every city is different. Part of my time in China was spent in probably one of the worst areas for that kind of behavior, at least towards foreigners: Shanghai.
      - yorwba 9y ago
earenndil 9y ago
I wouldn't be so sure an iphone isn't backdoored. Apple did participate in PRISM[1], after all. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_(surveillance_program) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_(surveillance_program)
- yorby 9y ago
  and Apple was denying PRISM before proofs were presented[1]... Apple has 100% control on your device and the government has 100% control over Apple. If you think that the device is unbreakable, you are foolish. But either way, they can transfer data while you are using the phone because it is unencrypted at that point. 1. https://www.cultofmac.com/230452/are-apple-and-other-tech-companies-lying-about-their-involvement-with-prism/ https://www.cultofmac.com/230452/are-apple-and-other-tech-co...

IBM 9y ago

Boy did Apple skate to where the puck was headed or what? I remember reading all those hot takes years ago insisting it was a mistake and thinking how short sighted that was [1][2]. It was also weird because even before the Apple Watch was announced there was plenty of evidence of their health ambitions, so it obviously made sense to be strong on privacy and security. Since then multiple high profile hacks have happened (and are bound to keep happening), the FBI fought Apple and lost (at least in lower courts), GDPR is being implemented in the EU, and antitrust regulators are taking a look at internet business models [3]. [1] https://dcurt.is/privacy-vs-user-experience https://dcurt.is/privacy-vs-user-experience [2] https://stratechery.com/2015/tim-cooks-unfair-and-unrealistic-privacy-speech-strategy-credits-the-privacy-priority-problem/ https://stratechery.com/2015/tim-cooks-unfair-and-unrealisti... [3] https://www.ft.com/content/9376eece-00e4-11e8-9650-9c0ad2d7c5b5 https://www.ft.com/content/9376eece-00e4-11e8-9650-9c0ad2d7c...

tjoff 9y ago
From [1]: The truth is that collecting information about people allows you to make significantly better products, and the more information you collect, the better products you can build That is a hilariously absurd statement. Collecting data has never been about making better products. And apple being pro-privacy is equally absurd, they just haven't gone full retard and started collecting everything they can. Which I guess is noteworthy of a company its size today, but don't confuse that with pro-privacy. It is just what everyone would expect of any sane entity. The climate of today just means we've set the bar so low that some confuse it for "pro-privacy" to care the slightest of it's consumers.
- virgilp 9y ago
  > Collecting data has never been about making better products. That's a strong statement. Especially given that I know for sure data that is collected exactly for that purpose within my company.
  - taneq 9y ago
    Maybe you'd consider an alternate statement: "Collecting data is no longer solely about making better products."

sexydefinesher 9y ago

I hope this is a turning point in Chinese conscious of human rights

oblio 9y ago
Could be, but don't expect them to turn into the US any time now. The culture is different, fundamentally.
- latch 9y ago
  Surely the US isn't what we're hoping other countries aspire to when it comes to human rights? High rate of incarceration, high rate of poverty (both symptoms of fundamental racial issues), death penalty, high youth incarceration, ongoing struggle for same sex marriages and abortions, the state of its health care, government attack on privacy ... and that's just on the domestic front.
  - gambiting 9y ago
    Out of all countries to turn into, US shouldn't be even in the top 5.
  - refurb 9y ago
    Name another country and I'll go ahead and list all the problems they struggle with too.
    - sexydefinesher 9y ago
      Iceland
      - refurb 9y ago
        Took me about 5 seconds.[1] [1]https://grapevine.is/news/2016/10/27/unicef-red-cross-iceland-violating-child-human-rights/ https://grapevine.is/news/2016/10/27/unicef-red-cross-icelan...

IIAOPSW 9y ago

As someone who lived in China, I doubt it. Individual rights and limitations on government power are not taught in Chinese schools nor ingrained in Chinese culture. Politics is not natural part of the Chinese conversational diet in much the same way that bread is not a natural part of their nutritional diet. To the extent that such topics come up it is pragmatic to a fault. It is always in the context of fixing a specific problem in the here and now (Eg there is corruption therefore lets purge the corrupt) and never in the context of a broader political philosophy (Eg how should we structure the civil service to dis-incentivize corruption). Chinese ideas on what ought be legal are rooted in intuition for what we would call natural law rather than study of what we would call natural law. I can't imagine Chinese people being concerned about the general case of lax data protection. I can picture a near infinite string of ad hoc outcry over things like the strawberry adverts. Anyone from China disagreeing with my observations on your country, feel free to yell at me. I invite you.

anontoday126 9y ago
> Politics is not natural part of the Chinese conversational diet in much the same way that bread is not a natural part of their nutritional diet. What do you mean by natural? Because I hear Chinese people talk about politics all the time. It's an extremely popular topic and they love to get into the intricacies of it and compare how current leaders act compared to historical leaders. I definitely hear them talk about how society and philosophy influence current day politics. For example, how different would this political leader be if he followed the Mozi [1] school of thought. Of course, I understand Chinese so perhaps that's why? I know that many Chinese people dislike talking about politics with foreigners. Especially if they can't speak/understand Chinese. Also, not to be nit-picky, but mantou [2] and shaobing [3] are both a natural part of Northern Chinese diets. Of course I guess some people might not consider them true breads. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozi 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mantou https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mantou 3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shaobing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shaobing
- IIAOPSW 9y ago
  What can I say. I guess we just knew different people.