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WeChat is Watching: Living in China with the app that knows everything about me
- _sveq 7y agoI go to China often but it's been two years now. I don't look forward to the next visit for this very reason—I'll need this to pay for any and everything. I'm not going back.
- catherd 7y agoCash still works exactly the way it always has, (almost) nobody is going to turn down your business because you don't pay by an app.
- spectramax 7y agoBesides payments, WeChat is inextricably tied to everything you do in China from chatting with your friends to buying a movie ticket to visa renewals. I've spent over 400 nights in Chinese cities and I depend on WeChat like I depend on water. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WeChat#Features https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WeChat#Features
- loceng 7y agoAnd how long, if not already - likely once their people are acclimatized to the idea of 'social rating' system - before they start subtly or aggressively warning people, swaying their behaviour, of potential for their rating to go down if associating with X who isn't using apps. A digitized version of Nazi Germany with mass censorship capabilities really is terrifying.
- mc32 7y agoNot that is makes much difference, but the Stasi were DDR socialist East Germany.
- rjsw 7y agoThere is a TV series based on Ian Kershaw's work on Nazi Germany [1]. One Gestapo office had not been able to destroy their records and it was found that most arrests of people were done as a result of them being denounced by their neighbours not by any actions of Gestapo personnel. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nazis:_A_Warning_from_History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nazis:_A_Warning_from_Hist...
- mc32 7y agoI’m not surprised. Many totalitarian regimes set up systems where neighbors can report on “counterrevolutionary” activities in which an abusive system “gets abused” and people use it for personal revenge among other things.
- ggg2 7y agothey already have the little red book-esque app that solidifies Xi as their permanent leader. now I can't recall if that was a stand alone app or within the wechat ecosystem.
- adinobro 7y agoOut of curiosity do you change your behaviour because of your credit score (created by private companies)? Considering the fact that the private companies pitching social credit to the government are merchants (Tecent & Aligroup) that is the only data they have access to.
- loceng 7y agoCompanies spend money on advertising because it works. Edit: Realized after you asked about credit score. A credit score is quite different than what China's rating system is all about from my understanding. Being dependable on repaying money or paying money you've promised to pay is a very specific rating that aligns with a person's accountability and/or ability to predict and manage their situation.
- incompatible 7y agoI was curious about what happens to people who can't get WeChat accounts. Perhaps due to committing crimes (in the way that sex offenders may be banned from using social media) or maybe they offended WeChat in some way (in the way that people lose their Google accounts if Google so decides). Perhaps you could even be kicked off WeChat for having a social rating that was too low.
- rtpg 7y agoI mean wechat is useful for talking to Airbnb hosts, but so long as you don’t have just 100s you can still pay people with cash Also visa renewals? What is that in reference to?
- powerapple 7y agoThere are other apps. And you can still buy tickets from counter in cinema use Cash or WeChat or Alipay. People use it more often because of its convenience. But you can live without it. The main problem is that you will find it difficult to live without its convenience.
- loyukfai 7y agoNaturally, going onwards, places and things that one cannot buy and/or go without an e-wallet will gradually increase, right?
- yesforwhat 7y agoyes but only WeChat is tied to an authoritarian government's surveillance network
- teknologist 7y agoThere are shops in the big cities that are starting to refuse cash now (apparently, this is not illegal in China) and only accept the two big payment apps.
- dintech 7y agoThere are loads of coffee shops and cafes in the UK that don't take cash any more.
- yesforwhat 7y agoThey still take Visa, and don't insist on an authoritarian government's surveillance app.
- ohithereyou 7y agoWhat do you call the CCTV cameras everywhere other than "an authoritarian government's surveillance"?
- ubercow13 7y agoReally?
- pertymcpert 7y agoThey're mostly private, JFC...
- teknologist 7y agoNice strawman
- adinobro 7y agoIt is illegal to refuse cash in China but it takes a while for the shops to be found and fined.
- 7y ago
- yesforwhat 7y agoi've lost count of the amount of times i've been refused a coffee or beer because they don't except cash or visa card. It's only going to get worse.
- markplindsay 7y agoI was in China (Beijing and Wenzhou) in April. I had NO success finding a taxi in Beijing—the only way to get a ride was to use an app like Didi Chuxing. I was able to install and use it just fine. The problem was that it is impossible to link a non-PRC payment method to it. The same is true for WeChat Pay or Alipay—you've got to use a Chinese bank account or card as a source. I was not able to find a way around this despite over an hour of experimenting with the apps. In contrast, it was easy to get taxis in Wenzhou. The drivers all initially asked for electronic payment, though, so it's probably only a matter of regulation that is preventing them from going cashless.
- adinobro 7y agoIf you want to get a real taxi use Baidu maps. It is in Chinese but you can just drop a pin where you want to go and ask for a real taxi instead of a Didi. A Chinese person can show you the buttons to press then you can pay with cash.
- markplindsay 7y agoI'm pretty sure I tried this—I think the prompts were even in English, if I'm remembering correctly. However, I gave up after several tries of it looking for a taxi and not finding one while I was standing in the rain on a dark street corner. It would sit and look for minutes and appeared to be a broken feature. I ended up taking a BRT line to get back to my hotel and it was great. All of my experiences with transit in Beijing were excellent. I just wish taxis or car services were an option for tourists.
- baybal2 7y agoI think Didi does accept international visa cards. > despite over an hour of experimenting with the apps. You can link some HK and South African credit cards
- ubercow13 7y agoYou can link a foreign VISA card to Didi and pay with that easily. I did this in April this year. Actually it was the only thing I was able to pay for without cash while in China.
- dewey 7y agoI was there last month and it was almost impossible to get money on your WeChat account without a Chinese bank account. It was easy to fund my Malaysian WeChat account but the balance isn't transferable or usable in China. There's currently one remaining loop hole I know about which is to pay someone to send money via a red envelope / hóngbāo but it's getting increasingly harder. It's already asking you for a passport and right now it still works even if you cancel that but probably not for much longer. You can do that either if you know someone, ask someone in a store if they do it from their personal account or through some websites that take PayPal but with a hefty commission usually.
- usaar333 7y agoIs this a loop hole or intentional? I'm guessing wechat doesn't care to optimize the visitor experience. Has it ever been different? Afaik, it's as limited as it always was; they just added identity verification.
- dewey 7y agoIt's a relatively new change, the latest big change was in April when they removed one other way of sending a red envelope. So it doesn't seem like it's intentional. https://lerner.co.il/2018/12/28/the-foreigners-guide-to-wechat-payments-in-china/ https://lerner.co.il/2018/12/28/the-foreigners-guide-to-wech...
- srcmap 7y agoMight be related to some government regulations about money laundering. There is some problem with that in China.
- amaccuish 7y agoWhat's the point of this though? Surely it hurts tourism to China? Wouldn't it be better if foreigners could easily use wechat pay?
- 7y ago
- ghaff 7y agoAt least last time I was there, you needed a Chinese bank account to link. A quick search suggests there are a few workarounds but you probably still can't just add a foreign credit card.
- qrbLPHiKpiux 7y agoWhat an unintended consequence. Was there any way to have seen it?
- ajxs 7y agoIs this comment a joke?
- 292355744930110 7y agoThey are more like intended consequences.
- floor_ 7y agoNot to be confused with WeeChat. The curses terminal irc client.
- dewey 7y agoWould anyone really be confused by that?
- hn23 7y agoSo compared to this Google looks like a mom and pop shop when it comes to data collection..but now think about the frame here. It is done in China not in the /free/ world..
- ggg2 7y agoyes. nobody complained when US (and everyone else later on) required online forms for visa requests. full of google Analytics tags and all.
- afjl 7y agoThis is not true at all. There was an incredible amount of dissatisfaction and anger about this decision. In my own household, we discussed the implications of that decision. Please read through the comments on these 2 posts: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20065142 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20065142 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20075608 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20075608
- adinobro 7y agoA few things worth being aware of Alibaba does not own WeChat but rather's it's competition Alipay. It does not have any access to WeChat data. So far the "social credit" on seems to be mostly based on how much you buy and it only seems to give you discounts to massively overpriced products (similar to a credit card reward system). You don't really download apps in Wechat but rather add a link more like a Facebook App (JavaScript & HTML). Chinese people tend to like one app that does everything. Most of the services talked about in the article as separate services that you can open in WeChat but you can also open most of them in AliPay or Taobao or access them directly on their own websites. This is what Facebook tried to do but failed... What I find fascinating is that a lot of older people that use WeChat in China are illiterate apart from numbers. They do everything by remembering the pictures and other people help them to set up their account. That is part of the reason why they want a single app that does everything. You don't need to read since you can just send messages, look at pictures and iconography. Also, everyone in China still accepts cash but you generally need correct change. If you have any questions feel free to ask. I just found out my sesame-credit score is 622 (not that it does anything...)
- jstanley 7y ago> You don't need to read since you can just send messages How can illiterate people send messages?
- robjan 7y agoIn countries and regions where Chinese is spoken, people heavily use the voice message functionality.
- adinobro 7y agoThere is a button that you hold down and it sends a voice message (up to 60 seconds). They generally just send voice messages back and forth. There is also a + for extra features like: * Sending a photo * Sending a short video * Calling * Money * Location You don't need to be able to read to use any of them.
- ggg2 7y ago
- jcbrand 7y ago> At 9:27, once I’ve brushed my teeth, answered a few messages, and wiped the sleep from my eyes, I order a coffee through WeChat. There’s a payments window on the app, and when you click on it you see various options, some proprietary to WeChat and some which are independent apps that run on WeChat’s platform. I open the Meituan delivery app and scroll through all the coffee options around me. I order an Americano. I have my WeChat linked with the facial recognition scanner on my iPhone; when I pay, I just hold my phone up to my face and a green tick flicks across the screen. Seven minutes later, I get a message telling me the coffee is on the way, with the name and number of the delivery driver. It arrives at 9:53. Is it too much effort to just make your own coffee in your own apartment? Does that now also have to be delivered to you? The amount of waste involved in this just boggles my mind.
- sergiomattei 7y agoUh... What? It's the reason Starbucks exists. People are on the go, and they don't want to make their own coffee. This is literally the same as going to the corner coffee shop to buy a Frappuccino.
- jcbrand 7y agoGoing to Starbucks is not the same as having coffee delivered to your home, especially not if you walk there.
- mstaoru 7y agoIn China everything is delivered by electric scooters, delivery people get paid for it, more coffee shops can survive because otherwise they would have to provide more space which is very expensive, and most coffee is delivered in a paper bag with a paper cup stand.
- drubbo 7y agoThe paper cup won't be recycled though, and electricity isn't pulled from thin air.
- kylegordon 7y ago'It knows my biometric information; it knows the very contours of my face.' The iPhone does, WeChat doesn't.
- mstaoru 7y agoNope, in this case the camera is run by Wechat and they have their own biometric database.
- Tepix 7y agoCan you use a password instead?
- css 7y agoYes, but if you get deemed "malicious" it will be required: https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-china-blog-48552907 https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-china-blog-48552907
- m2zyi 7y agoFaceID or TouchID 's information is truely own by IPhone,Wechat use camera can only take photo or video,but when u login, speak six number to wechat,this is own by Wechat.
- mstaoru 7y agoBoth Alipay and Wechat Pay have those fancy terminals now in coffee shops, where you need to smile to the camera to pay. No iPhone involved. To set it up they use the same database as for the account verification.
- test1235 7y agoHow is the Chinese government with regards to IT quality? I've come to believe that most governments are inept when it comes to the management, security and general quality of their software. With the government holding so much critical information, it seems a very obvious and valuable target for hackers.
- helloindia 7y agoChina Facial Recognition Database Leak Sparks Fears Over Mass Data Collection https://www.forbes.com/sites/kateoflahertyuk/2019/02/18/china-facial-recognition-database-leak-sparks-fears-over-mass-data-collection/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/kateoflahertyuk/2019/02/18/chin...
- adinobro 7y agoWeChat is a private company owned by Tencent.
- rtpg 7y agoI mean.... the govt can check whatever they want on the WeChat logs. And the populace is pretty accepting of this for security reasons (if you aren’t going off the “government can be corrupt and abuse it’s powers” principle its actually kinda hard to make the privacy argument!)
- hutzlibu 7y ago"government can be corrupt and abuse it’s powers” The thing is, this is not some hypothetically argument, but governments ARE corrupt and abuse their powers. Even in our awesome democratic western systems. In china much more. And that the general chinese population is used to it and therefore does not mind so much, is just that they are used to it.
- adinobro 7y agoI didn't say anything about privacy just that it is a private company. It doesn't seem that different to the US government with AT&T. https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130901/23253224379/att-has-employees-embedded-govt-providing-near-realtime-searches-nearly-every-phone-call.shtml https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130901/23253224379/att-h...
- whoevercares 7y agoAs usual, as long as it does “greater good”, average Chinese people don’t really care about any “residual” moral/privacy related issue(given the average education level, most of them couldn’t even do a useful critical thinking of those topic)
- n1000 7y agoGoing to China soon and everybody tells me WeChat will help me a lot over there. However, I cannot create my account without a "voiceprint". It wants me to read some numbers to fingerprint my voice. Apparently I cannot skip this step and I am not very comfortable with that.
- adinobro 7y agoI actually find Alipay easier to use for payments and it is easier to set up. If you don't want to chat I would use it instead.
- yoz-y 7y agoI have created a WeChat account years ago and I can not actually use it for payments. I don't know why it is but the wallet option never appears.
- zrobotics 7y agoWe hat payments used to require a Chinese bank account, so we're essentially inaccessible to foreigners. This is secondhand knowledge, I've never used it, but I have heard this has changed. Perhaps since the account was created while this restriction was in place, the option was never enabled?
- adinobro 7y ago
- foozed 7y ago> It knows my biometric information; it knows the very contours of my face. I was under the impression that Face ID does not leak such information to whatever app is using it?
- _ropu 7y agoNo, FaceID doesn't leak informations about your face. Just like TouchID doesn't leak your fingerprint.
- NotPaidToPost 7y agoThis has nothing to do with FaceID, which isn't mentioned in the article. WeChat has its own face recognition system.
- foozed 7y agoAh ok, i thought the author meant FaceID in the passage: > I have my WeChat linked with the facial recognition scanner on my iPhone was not aware that WeChat has its own system. They don't get to use the "special" FaceID sensors/scanners though right? Just the camera?
- _ui4r 7y agoIt looks like depth data can be accessed through the AVFoundation framework provided by Apple. https://developer.apple.com/documentation/avfoundation/cameras_and_media_capture/streaming_depth_data_from_the_truedepth_camera https://developer.apple.com/documentation/avfoundation/camer...
- rcao 7y agoNo, WeChat and Alipay do use FaceID to do payment verification on iPhone.
- NotPaidToPost 7y agoMaybe they do but at least WeChat have their own face recognition technology, in which case they do hold people's biometric data. This is not that big a deal in China considering that people have photo ID card, which means that the government already had everyone's biometric data.
- ConfusedDog 7y ago> If it wasn’t for the fact that I grew up in London and use a VPN to jump the great firewall to keep in touch with my friends at home and use Google, I could go entire days without leaving WeChat. I wonder what VPN people use in China to access Google. When I was there last month, I couldn't find a single one that worked for more than a few days.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- parhaml 7y agoLast month would have been close to impossible. The leadup to the Tiananmen anniversary would see stronger crackdowns on VPN use.
- arnvald 7y agoI've been to China a couple of times and ExpressVPN works most of the time for me. However the most reliable way to have a decent connection was Algo VPN deployed to AWS. It was far superior both in terms of reliability and in terms of speed.
- ConfusedDog 7y agoThanks! I will try out Algo VPN. I had no idea AWS works in China.
- ubercow13 7y agoI tried this recently (Algo with wireguard) and it was probably the most reliable way, but still blocked very quickly on some ISPs, for example it never worked through my China Telecom phone.
- sreekanthr 7y agoExpress VPN work. Most of Tech Organizations have deal with Govt to allow them to access google & gmail. Best bet is to get International data roaming then use your phone to check email etc. If you are transiting via Singapore would recommend you to get a Singapore sim which supports international data roaming and using it in China.
- La-ang 7y agowhat about Wechat tracking you even though when not using its features? I don't think CPC would patiently wait until you launch the app to start logging your behavior.
- jw14 7y agoI've been wondering for a long time about this. My thinking has been that while apps should be sandboxed given China, its (apparent) goals and (apparent from media) past behavior I'm thinking they would invest as much manpower as it takes to figure out how to break iOS/Android sandboxes and turn the phone into a full time listening/tracking device. I'd love to hear from someone who knows more about mobile OS security regarding this. Is the above a likely or possible scenario or am I being too paranoid?
- adinobro 7y agoWhy bother? They already have access to cell phone location data and meta information. I'm sure in China it is direct access. In the US it is a two-step process. Not that it would make much difference in practice. https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130901/23253224379/att-has-employees-embedded-govt-providing-near-realtime-searches-nearly-every-phone-call.shtml https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130901/23253224379/att-h... There was a great article in Australia about this a few years back: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-08-16/metadata-retention-privacy-phone-will-ockenden/6694152 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-08-16/metadata-retention-pr...
- netsharc 7y agoA while ago I ran a thought experiment, Facebook could also track things like this. If my phone spent the night not at home, it can probably surmise that my relationship with (person who I've been exchanging FB/WhatsApp messages with increasing frequency the last few weeks) has progressed to the next level. Especially if it can see the phone spent the night connected to their SSID, but with both of us having zero interactions with FB apps. Is there FB analytics built into Netflix? Then they could even say what we watched on Netflix that night. A machine learning bot that can write just the right thing to a potential date is probably doable, albeit creepy. It's even easier if the bot can see their entire social media and IM history...
- mtrovo 7y agoWhere there's a way there's a will. So say US has interest on country X, can you 100% guarantee that none of the following data could be used to target some individuals of said country: - Facebook social graph - WhatsApp conversations - Skype voice and video chats - Google location history - visa credit card transactions IMHO it's just a matter of how big is the interest. Maybe it wouldn't happen to use this data for personal reasons but it would be very strange to imagine an army leader citing foreigners personal data protection when the country is at war.
- canada_dry 7y agoWhat's better... being in China knowing that everything you do is being watched, or living elsewhere and just suspecting that everything you do is being watched by some three letter agency? > (Tencent declined to comment for this article) More likely: (I didn't dare to request comment from Tencent or my social credit score would have plummeted).
- dawhizkid 7y agoWhy isn't anyone worried about TikTok? Yes, WeChat is largely contained to China, but TikTok/ByteDance is global and a top 10 app in the U.S. It would be naive to think that there isn't a backdoor to that app. And it's video. There's also precedence for this e.g. the U.S. forcing Grindr's Chinese owner to sell.
- majia 7y agoIt seems you don’t have a good idea about what a backdoor is. A tiktok app can’t spy on your email or Facebook message. It’s reasonable to worry about whatever data you give tiktok, but you should probably worry a lot more about Facebook or google which collects far more private data.
- dawhizkid 7y agoYou can DM people on TikTok just like most other social networking apps.
- rchaud 7y agoWe're in the phase now where we celebrate TikTok for being a launchpad for 15-minute celebrities who inspire us to buy more crap. Once it becomes passe, or once the app has a major security breach, that's when the Chinese origins of the app will be front and center in every news pub.
- m-p-3 7y agoI dunno, it feels like TikTok came in to swoop the void left by Vine I guess.
- scilro 7y agoI find WeChat and its aggressively centralized model fascinating, and something to keep eyes on, but this article falls into the familiar trap of playing a bit loose with the facts when it comes to how the Chinese government surveils its citizens. For example, this is from article: >People are regularly arrested for messages they send in supposedly “private” group chats. In 2017, two people were arrested in Nanjing for separate instances of making satirical comments referring the massacre in the city by the Japanese in 1937.5 But if you read the original source: http://www.sixthtone.com/news/1001901/more-nanjing-massacre-miscreants-detained-by-police http://www.sixthtone.com/news/1001901/more-nanjing-massacre-... >“Nanjing is a pit,” Wang wrote. “We should let the Japanese come slaughter again.” Local police were alerted to the incident after screenshots of Wang’s messages were circulated on social media, and they arrested him two days later. Clearly, a bit of a different story than what's implied in this article. I can easily see someone being questioned by police in almost any country if screenshots leaked where they joked about repeating a violent historical atrocity, like 9/11 for example. It's not clear to me why folks tend to advance the notion that Chinese citizens are under constant 1984-style 24/7 surveillance by their government. That's not quite how it works over there, at least, if people who live and work there are to be trusted.
- noja 7y agoIt depends who distributed the screenshots.
- deathhand 7y agoIn case anyone doesn't know about Parallel construction: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction
- yorwba 7y agoProbably one of the 314 other people in the group felt offended.
- beenBoutIT 7y ago
- temporory 7y ago>WeChat knows what I am reading. It would discover I am doing research for this article. Hate to say it, but this is the same with Facebook. The only difference is the government aspect. I think all social products ultimately aim for this. I can definitely see Facebook heading this direction very soon.
- ssnistfajen 7y agoFacebook, Google, and Apple would all do the same thing WeChat/AliPay did if regulations in the West moved faster and were more accommodating. Nobody mandated the author to order delivery, follow social media, buy movie tickets, do online shopping, pay rent, use bikeshare, call cabs, etc, etc, etc. through WeChat. They are, for the most part, services owned by companies other than Tencent. WeChat just compiles a giant menu for users to link their accounts from these services into WeChat. These gateways exist because consumers find it more convenient than quitting WeChat and opening another app/website. It's perfectly healthy to be concerned about the impact of centralized tech giants on our daily lives but so far all I'm seeing is fearmongering about this ever-more-elusive "dystopia" which coincidentally seems to only exist in a place that's easy for the English-speaking world to hate on.
- RandomGuyDTB 7y agoIf every one of my friends and even my employer used an app to conduct business and I refused to get it no matter how much they tried to tell me to because I was concerned about my privacy I'd be ostracized. This did happen to me with Facebook to an extent, and Facebook isn't nearly as much of a mammoth as WeChat. Stop pretending it's a choice.
- powerapple 7y agoJust choose to use wechat for messaging, and use apps for everything else. And stop complaining about why wechat is getting popular for other people. If your friends are on Facebook, it is not your problem to worry about. It is like if your friend is dating a girl you don’t like, get over it. People made their choices already.
- ssnistfajen 7y agoWhy did you assume I "pretended" it's a choice? It IS a choice and it has always been. Most people just decided the trade-off of being denied employment and other opportunities is not worth preserving whatever privacy these tech giants are trying to "steal" from you. Market economies rarely cater to the few. That has always been the exception and not the norm.
- quotz 7y agoI would highly recommend following @0xDUDE on twitter, he always posts surveillance leaks in China. He found out that WeChat conversations are sent to the local police depending where the user is, and there are employee farms manually reading the conversations... The same way factory workers in China are paid 2 dollars a day, employee farms for conversation/data reading are doing the same... 1. Link for @0xDUDE is: https://twitter.com/0xdude?lang=en https://twitter.com/0xdude?lang=en 2. Link for a great thread regarding China spying: https://twitter.com/docligot/status/1111293482629398528?lang=en https://twitter.com/docligot/status/1111293482629398528?lang...
- jagrsw 7y agoThere's a great Polish sci-fi novel - Paradyzja (~/Paradise/) (wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradyzja https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradyzja) which describes ever-eavesdropped society. In the end, the society develops a metalanguage (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koalang https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koalang) to evade automatic systems which record and analyze all written and spoken communications (even at peoples' homes). I wonder if WeChat users already developed something similar.
- max_im 7y agoIt's definitely getting closer to that point - for example winnie the pooh is a popular meme used to make fun of uncle Xi but it's hard to police given that it's a children's cartoon. It hasn't stopped the aggressive censoring of pictures of winnie the pooh (no joke) but it has definitely presented a challenge. Using vague historical anecdotes and rarely used imagery is a traditional Chinese mode of communication - in modern days you can see it in action via the aggressively close reading people do of CCP mouthpiece newspapers - the use of certain terms signal a greater ideological shift which people will then try to adapt to/guess at. Personally I'm curious about how this mode of communication will evolve given the current development of automated policing algorithms which will undoubtedly take context into account.
- mensetmanusman 7y agoThe Chinese already do that with regards to ‘winnie the pooh’ in reference to their leader (and when that was blocked, further obscure poetic language). I think the govt. is happy with this change, because it dramatically slows down communication rates if people have to have built-in encryption/decryption parsing in their speech. Also, if you accidentally inform a government agent of the code, so to say, you disappear and the in-group has to change their coding language again.
- m-p-3 7y agoI'm wondering if we could develop some kind of encryption / steganographic system that would hide the true meaning of a sentence behind somewhat sensical human-readable text to lower suspicion and automated detection.
- qwerty456127 7y agoBTW do Chinese phones let you turn GPS off? I never turn it on except when I actually need it so apps probably don't know where I am.
- millettjon 7y agoThey can still track you to some extent from cell towers and wifi.
- teslaberry 7y agoi have a fun game to play ---let's compare superpowers. i mean geopolitical superpowers! china has a much smaller government than the u.s. in so far as it's yet to become a beauracratically overgrown sovietized system. on the other hand , they have no rights, the state does as it pleases without legal need to explain itself, and there are no meaningful separations of power through regionalism (known as state soveriegnty in the u.s. ) nor through separation of powers. the ccp is the executive branch that openly rules all. in the u.s. no one openly rules all, and the shadow government is accountable to know one but most people don't really even acknowledge it's excistence. frankly, all states have shadow or wanna be shadow governments. only in the u.s. is it so firmly in charge .where as in china, it's out of the shaddows. i prefer my shaddow government staying int rhe shadows. I prefer my regional governments strong, and i prefer this becasue it empowers the most powerless individuals against the state. that being said, all mature institional systems are partially defined by how well they operate to drain the populace of wealth property and purchasing power. it seems like the u.s. is more mature than china at this point in time. but that could change in a heart beat. china could be worse and better. u.s. could be worse and better. bottom line is i wish my chinese language skills were better. i'm always impressed by how many chinese speak english but how many white skinned non-chinese don't speak chinese.
- evidencepi 7y agoI posted a bunch of pictures from the Hong Kong protests in the past couple days. It shocked me that all of my posts were blocked immediately, people can see my old posts but not those new posts with the "sensitive" pictures. I downloaded those pictures from bloomberg, so I am sure the wechat / tencent is running some web crawler and ML to identify the news picture from the online sources and block them automatically. Still there is some way to get around, by assembling a group of pictures together and adding some noise (adding words, etc). What's more, the regime is not only monitoring wechat or weibo, it's monitoring non-domestic social medias like twitter as well, for example here's a pictures showing a huge screen, where a lot of tweets are being process my some NLP algorithm, and outputs a result showing whether the tweet is positive, neutral or negative towards the regime [1]. This is how a totalitarianism would apply technology, it uses everything it could to control the people in order to survive. China is now going full throttle to become a nazi + commie country, it's THE CANCER for everyone else who loves freedom and democracy. There will be only two possibilities in the 21st century, either the Communist China crashed like USSR, or a war will happen between the China and the west. Hong Kong is literally the frontline of the battlefield. [1] https://chinadigitaltimes.net/chinese/2018/09/%E3%80%90%E7%AB%8B%E6%AD%A4%E5%AD%98%E7%85%A7%E3%80%91%E8%80%81%E5%A4%A7%E5%93%A5%E6%AD%A3%E5%9C%A8%E7%9C%8B%E4%BD%A0%E7%9A%84%E6%8E%A8%E6%96%87%EF%BC%9F%EF%BC%81%E8%AF%B7%E5%A4%9A%E5%8F%91/ https://chinadigitaltimes.net/chinese/2018/09/%E3%80%90%E7%A...
- evidencepi 7y agoI think it will take a long time for the west to really stand up against china, because of the economy interest, the lack of transparency and culture / language barrier. Until china hits the pearl harbor, it will get worse and worse. Disclaimer: I am from china, living in the US now.
- Iwan-Zotow 7y agolooks exactly like fecebook to me
- Norzuhata 7y agohttp://shdoubao.com/?1304360 http://shdoubao.com/?1304360