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> I'd say most people already use local apps/services for almost everything, so having Apple moving servers to China won't practically have any impact on "priva

by rqs 9y ago

> I'd say most people already use local apps/services for almost everything, so having Apple moving servers to China won't practically have any impact on "privacy" or "human rights concerns" Does this mean anything? You also breathe polluted air like "most people", do you want new fresh air then? The reason of "__INSERT ACTION HERE__ won't practically have any impact on 'privacy' or 'human rights concerns'" is because "most people" unaware the importance of their privacy, NOT because their privacy is not important. So, their is a choice to make: To make people understand the importance of their privacy; OR, continue selling this unawareness (to make people ignorant). Which way you go?

tonylinn80 9y ago
Whichever way, it doesn't matter that much. At least where Apple wants to put their server makes no difference. It's not that we are "unaware" of anything, we just don't feel the same way about privacy (and many other western values as well). Not that they're bad, we just don't believe they're so important. Sure you think you "know the importance of privacy", but that's rather just an opinion, not a fact. In fact, another apparent trend in China is that people who have been studying and living in US for some time tends to become more agreeable with Chinese government afterwards.
- cromwellian 9y ago
  You'll feel different the first time the "social credit" system ends up denying you a loan because of something you said in a private message. Or you'd feel real different if you were a Uighur who lived in Xinjiang. Right now, thanks to a growing economy, no one cares about rocking the boat, or what the government does. That will all change when China experiences its first deep recession, and like the US, the government will have no choice but to stoke dangerous levels of nationalism to deflect anger away from it, while ratcheting up the amount of control it has.
  - tonylinn80 9y ago
    The current credit systems in China works very, very differently from what the western media describes. Major commercial systems like "Zhemaxinyong" are actually way more transparent than US credit system. You get to see a lot of the details about what's impacting your score at all time, and you have lots of control on where do you want to share your score to. The official "social credit" system that the government wants to build is still at a very early stage right now, and it'll be no where close to what the western media imagined (or rather, hoped) The fairy tales about Chinese social credit system denying loans because of private messages are malicious wishes of western media or Chinese activists at most
    - cromwellian 9y ago
      Right, it's all the delusions of the Western media as to how this could go wrong, because we never had any things go wrong with blacklists in the West? In the 1950s we had anti-communist blacklists that didn't work out too well. Today we have the terrorist watch list. It's our experience with government creating blacklists and the inherent injustice from false positives that make us very wary of it. People have accidentally gotten onto the terrorist watch list and had their lives ruined. In China, you have this combined with a President who seems bent on keeping power forever (removing term limits), a party which aggressively blocks and filters anything critical of the government, the installation of key-loggers, face recognition cams, firewalls, and a huge system of monitoring social media, that should raise alarms when there is talk about a universal social ranking, as it's pretty obvious how easy you could end up with a low ranking from off hand joke about the government on Weibo. (https://international.thenewslens.com/article/65955 https://international.thenewslens.com/article/65955) I assume you've been living abroad for a while, so you must know we that aggressively criticize our own governments because we don't trust them to do the right thing, and there is ample lessons from history that proves that out. While the Chinese government wants to credit a social credit system to keep the population "honest", there is no "good governance credit system" to keep the government "honest". In the West, we have independent court systems to try and achieve that, as well as democratic elections. It doesn't always work, and corruption still flourishes, (good lord, the fucking Trump administration) but at least there's some attempted check on government power and corruption. All I'd say is, a glass heart when China is criticized is probably not the best way to react, but I guess it may be the only way to react, since criticism of the government isn't really permitted publicly internally, the only Chinese widespread public criticism is from the external diaspora. My own feeling is that Xi is taking the country in the wrong direction and there appears to be no internal forces to stop him. Anyway, here's an example of the hell of disputing these kinds of lists. https://www.marketplace.org/2018/02/13/world/social-credit-score-china-blacklisted https://www.marketplace.org/2018/02/13/world/social-credit-s... "Lawyer Li Xiaolin was also not given advanced notice that he was blacklisted. In 2014, Li was sued for defamation and lost. A judge ordered Li to make an apology, which he submitted in writing in April 2015. Ten months later, when he was away on a work trip, he was blocked from buying a return flight home to Beijing. That’s when he found out he was blacklisted. It took him another three weeks before an official told him why. “The court said my apology was not sincere. I asked officials how they determined what is sincere.” Li said. Eventually Li wrote a second apology and the court removed him from the blacklist in 2016. Then last year, he tried to get a credit card. “The bank denied my application. I figured out that the bank might still have my name blacklisted and I was right,” Li said. The bank updated its records the next day, but by that point, he had spent almost a year to fully clear his name."
  - Griffinsauce 9y ago
    Americans really shouldn't be commenting on the credit system of other countries...
    - cromwellian 9y ago
      Why not? Because our's is very bad? Why does that preclude one from commenting on any credit system around the world? It's standard practice on HackerNews to comment on surveillance and tracking systems in general and point out the dangers of them. There are lots of European commentators discussing US government policy, and vice versa. All criticism is fair, where you are born or what your government has done in the past doesn't invalidate one's opinion. There's too much nationalism sensitivity in these kinds of discussions when someone takes offense to someone else criticizing their country. There are some aspects of China's proposal which are good in regards to giving scores to businesses in an effort to regulate them, similar to independent reputation systems in the West, but it is the promises of "holistic rating of character" they've made and the comments about introduction of big data deep learning techniques that have people concerned. Even if intentions were completely benign, you could end up with something very bad. The idea of using surveillance capitalism in a multipolar system is one thing, especially if there is a very transparent dispute system, but using it at the state level should scare everyone. People complain about being ruined by small tweaks to Google's ranking algorithm, but having a single ranking instituted by a government monopoly would be inescapable.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
sfifs 9y ago
Different cultures value things differently. In many societies east of Europe, things typically considered private in the west (work, salary, family, political affiliation/opinions etc., friends circle etc.) would be commonly accepted social knowledge. So what you consider "Important" may not be as important to them when you consider they may already expect society knows these things.
Markoff 9y ago
you can't do IT business in China without sleeping with gov in one bed, so it doesn't really matter what people want, whatever you want company it's not allowed to provide only reason gov doesn't care about imessage is either because everybody use Wechat or they know already how to read your conversations even there
- tonylinn80 9y ago
  That's primarily an excuse foreign companies use to explain their failures in China. They want to run their business in exactly the same way the do in their own country, they expect the users to behave in the same way as their existing users. Then when they fail, they blame everything on the government. The Chinese government certainly have different values and believes from western society, so do the 1 billion Chinese people. The truth is, Chinese government treats foreign companies much better than local ones. Foreign companies are much easier to get loans and tons of other resources. But it certainly defines rules that all players in the market needs to obey. Do Chinese people buy Apple products because Cook has been sleeping with Chinese gov? Did Baidu, Tencent, and Alibaba all succeed because they followed instructions of Chinese gov?

by rqs 9y ago

tonylinn80 9y ago

Whichever way, it doesn't matter that much. At least where Apple wants to put their server makes no difference. It's not that we are "unaware" of anything, we just don't feel the same way about privacy (and many other western values as well). Not that they're bad, we just don't believe they're so important. Sure you think you "know the importance of privacy", but that's rather just an opinion, not a fact. In fact, another apparent trend in China is that people who have been studying and living in US for some time tends to become more agreeable with Chinese government afterwards.

cromwellian 9y ago
You'll feel different the first time the "social credit" system ends up denying you a loan because of something you said in a private message. Or you'd feel real different if you were a Uighur who lived in Xinjiang. Right now, thanks to a growing economy, no one cares about rocking the boat, or what the government does. That will all change when China experiences its first deep recession, and like the US, the government will have no choice but to stoke dangerous levels of nationalism to deflect anger away from it, while ratcheting up the amount of control it has.
- tonylinn80 9y ago
  The current credit systems in China works very, very differently from what the western media describes. Major commercial systems like "Zhemaxinyong" are actually way more transparent than US credit system. You get to see a lot of the details about what's impacting your score at all time, and you have lots of control on where do you want to share your score to. The official "social credit" system that the government wants to build is still at a very early stage right now, and it'll be no where close to what the western media imagined (or rather, hoped) The fairy tales about Chinese social credit system denying loans because of private messages are malicious wishes of western media or Chinese activists at most
  - cromwellian 9y ago
    Right, it's all the delusions of the Western media as to how this could go wrong, because we never had any things go wrong with blacklists in the West? In the 1950s we had anti-communist blacklists that didn't work out too well. Today we have the terrorist watch list. It's our experience with government creating blacklists and the inherent injustice from false positives that make us very wary of it. People have accidentally gotten onto the terrorist watch list and had their lives ruined. In China, you have this combined with a President who seems bent on keeping power forever (removing term limits), a party which aggressively blocks and filters anything critical of the government, the installation of key-loggers, face recognition cams, firewalls, and a huge system of monitoring social media, that should raise alarms when there is talk about a universal social ranking, as it's pretty obvious how easy you could end up with a low ranking from off hand joke about the government on Weibo. (https://international.thenewslens.com/article/65955 https://international.thenewslens.com/article/65955) I assume you've been living abroad for a while, so you must know we that aggressively criticize our own governments because we don't trust them to do the right thing, and there is ample lessons from history that proves that out. While the Chinese government wants to credit a social credit system to keep the population "honest", there is no "good governance credit system" to keep the government "honest". In the West, we have independent court systems to try and achieve that, as well as democratic elections. It doesn't always work, and corruption still flourishes, (good lord, the fucking Trump administration) but at least there's some attempted check on government power and corruption. All I'd say is, a glass heart when China is criticized is probably not the best way to react, but I guess it may be the only way to react, since criticism of the government isn't really permitted publicly internally, the only Chinese widespread public criticism is from the external diaspora. My own feeling is that Xi is taking the country in the wrong direction and there appears to be no internal forces to stop him. Anyway, here's an example of the hell of disputing these kinds of lists. https://www.marketplace.org/2018/02/13/world/social-credit-score-china-blacklisted https://www.marketplace.org/2018/02/13/world/social-credit-s... "Lawyer Li Xiaolin was also not given advanced notice that he was blacklisted. In 2014, Li was sued for defamation and lost. A judge ordered Li to make an apology, which he submitted in writing in April 2015. Ten months later, when he was away on a work trip, he was blocked from buying a return flight home to Beijing. That’s when he found out he was blacklisted. It took him another three weeks before an official told him why. “The court said my apology was not sincere. I asked officials how they determined what is sincere.” Li said. Eventually Li wrote a second apology and the court removed him from the blacklist in 2016. Then last year, he tried to get a credit card. “The bank denied my application. I figured out that the bank might still have my name blacklisted and I was right,” Li said. The bank updated its records the next day, but by that point, he had spent almost a year to fully clear his name."
- Griffinsauce 9y ago
  Americans really shouldn't be commenting on the credit system of other countries...
  - cromwellian 9y ago
    Why not? Because our's is very bad? Why does that preclude one from commenting on any credit system around the world? It's standard practice on HackerNews to comment on surveillance and tracking systems in general and point out the dangers of them. There are lots of European commentators discussing US government policy, and vice versa. All criticism is fair, where you are born or what your government has done in the past doesn't invalidate one's opinion. There's too much nationalism sensitivity in these kinds of discussions when someone takes offense to someone else criticizing their country. There are some aspects of China's proposal which are good in regards to giving scores to businesses in an effort to regulate them, similar to independent reputation systems in the West, but it is the promises of "holistic rating of character" they've made and the comments about introduction of big data deep learning techniques that have people concerned. Even if intentions were completely benign, you could end up with something very bad. The idea of using surveillance capitalism in a multipolar system is one thing, especially if there is a very transparent dispute system, but using it at the state level should scare everyone. People complain about being ruined by small tweaks to Google's ranking algorithm, but having a single ranking instituted by a government monopoly would be inescapable.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]

sfifs 9y ago

Different cultures value things differently. In many societies east of Europe, things typically considered private in the west (work, salary, family, political affiliation/opinions etc., friends circle etc.) would be commonly accepted social knowledge. So what you consider "Important" may not be as important to them when you consider they may already expect society knows these things.

Markoff 9y ago

you can't do IT business in China without sleeping with gov in one bed, so it doesn't really matter what people want, whatever you want company it's not allowed to provide only reason gov doesn't care about imessage is either because everybody use Wechat or they know already how to read your conversations even there

tonylinn80 9y ago
That's primarily an excuse foreign companies use to explain their failures in China. They want to run their business in exactly the same way the do in their own country, they expect the users to behave in the same way as their existing users. Then when they fail, they blame everything on the government. The Chinese government certainly have different values and believes from western society, so do the 1 billion Chinese people. The truth is, Chinese government treats foreign companies much better than local ones. Foreign companies are much easier to get loans and tons of other resources. But it certainly defines rules that all players in the market needs to obey. Do Chinese people buy Apple products because Cook has been sleeping with Chinese gov? Did Baidu, Tencent, and Alibaba all succeed because they followed instructions of Chinese gov?