5 ms·

Just offering another perspective than most others had done here: I grew up in China and have been in China a few times in the past 10 years - the amount of Ro

by devy 7y ago

Just offering another perspective than most others had done here: I grew up in China and have been in China a few times in the past 10 years - the amount of Robocalls and phone scams was overwhelming (in fact, it was so bad that dual SIM mobile phones became popular because you can have a disposable SIM card for non-essential website registrations and one for family members that you keep private use). I had my identity stolen after somehow I went into China Mobile pop-up service storefront in PEK airport to get a local SIM card. People on the line on my back was so close to the counter and peeking application forms with all sorts of private data, which made me very uncomfortable. There are also organized gangs that are operating in selling people's private identity data like mobile phone numbers. Later it made sense how my identify was stolen in retrospect. Also, mobile phone number is essentially Chinese citizen's digital identity in a way in that 99% of the website/online services use mobile phone number instead of emails for authentications and 2FA. It's nearly impossible to sign up for any Chinese website without giving your mobile phone number to complete the sign up. Given China's mobile-centric Internet boom, the amount of phone scams and frauds and identity thefts going on and all businesses (including financial institutions) are relying heavily on, it's a reasonably measure to counter fraud with real identity tying in with mobile phone number issuance. So no I don't think it's a political motivated move, even though the side effect is making the abuse much more convenient.

Enginerrrd 7y ago
>It's nearly impossible to sign up for any Chinese website without giving your mobile phone number to complete the sign up. No wonder the robocalls and phone scams are overwhelming.
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  It's essentially the equivalent to western use of e-mail addresses, and e-mail spam was solved by a combination of technical hurdles, deep message inspection, bayesian statistics and penalization of anonymity.
  - Enginerrrd 7y ago
    I don't think e-mail spam is solved. It's largely just evolved to a non-competitive market where if you don't go with a major provider you'll forever be battling overzealous spam detection which flags your organization's email as spam. ...And you've lost some anonymity and flexibility.
    - TeMPOraL 7y ago
      It's solved for an average person. If you go with a major provider, spam barely exists at all. And even if you go with a smaller provider (like e.g. Fastmail), you barely notice any spam either.
      - CaptainZapp 7y ago
        I think he's more referring to the problem, where your email sent from a small(ish) provider is flagged by the big boys as spam. Google is quite notorious for their ever changing goal posts regarding email reception. And if your mail is flagged as spam (and based on my own experience the AI behind it is not very intelligent) the only thing you get back is an automated response with completely and utterly useless "support" links. So while spam may be solved on an individual user level, it's certainly not on the meta level.
      - finnthehuman 7y ago
        No, it’s not. My gmail inbox is overflowing with spam to the point that I frequently miss important messages because they’re buried in marketing garbage. That’s not even counting the business related ham google classifies as spam because the sender doesn’t buy email services from people that specialize in making sure marketing trash hits gmail inboxes.
      - asdff 7y ago
        Counterpoint: my burner gmail for account creation with 30k unread emails, mostly spam. Also so much spam gets into my university email accounts, much of it from predatory journals offering to publish anything and everything. For the university accounts, I'd say only 80% gets trapped into the spam folder (my gmail is an absolute mess, however), but so does 5% of actual relevant emails and conversations, so I'm forced to inspect my spam folder pretty regularly which kinda defeats the purpose of hiding it from view.
datashow 7y ago
I think you gave too much benefit of doubt to the CCP. The CCP can't care less about phone scams and frauds. As a totalitarian state having total control of the society, the government can track down the scammers anytime they want to. There is no reason to believe the CCP does this to solve the robocalls or phone scams. It would be laughable to think XiJinping and his gangs put this issue on his priority list. The only reason is to locate every individual has a different thought against the government.
- mc32 7y ago
  I’m curious about one thing here. And maybe someone has ideas. Both China and Soviet Union (probably others too but I don’t know), pre-liberalization were your typical socialist state with lots of means to control people, so they did but... but people didn’t engage in much petty crime or gang crime. Those types of crimes were more or less very unusual. But in those same states today with more tools to control people, petty crime and gang-related crime (as well as corruption but that kind of always existed), are through the roof. And it’s not like either are soft on crime. So what has given a rise to that criminal activity which for practical purposes didn’t exist before. Is it opportunity? That is there was nothing to gain from it before?
  - andy9775 7y ago
    Of course they did. Parents grew up in a former communist country and smuggling in goods, stealing, were all pretty common. The reason you don't hear about it is because if people did those things that would mean that communism is bad and doesn't work. I wouldn't trust the data coming out of a communist country. During the chernobyl disaster the USSR kept providing false numbers to the world in order to downplay the significance of the event - to the point of sabotaging the cleanup effort and themselves.
    - mc32 7y ago
      Yes they had to fib and lie about production and all their 5-year Plans... but on the other hand most police in those states were unarmed (of course the sentences for being an armed criminal were “prohibitive”)...
heavyset_go 7y ago
Scammers and spammers aren't using cell phones to make their calls, they abuse VoIP services to do so.
rodneyzeng 7y ago
True but it will from the first moment go to political motivated move for sure.
the8472 7y ago
> it's a reasonably measure to counter fraud with real identity tying in with mobile phone number issuance. Perhaps it achieves the goal, but is it the best approach? Isn't it doubling down on an already problematic scheme? User names and email addresses are more easily swapped than phone numbers, with facial recognition you're locking yourself even more to the phone number, making it even harder to switch when it becomes compromised. At least here you need a legal address for bank account anyway, so financial institutions can just mail (the dead tree kind) you an unlock code for online banking, this makes a stolen identity far less useful. There are ways to solve these kinds of problems that don't also feed the surveillance machinery.

by devy 7y ago

Enginerrrd 7y ago

>It's nearly impossible to sign up for any Chinese website without giving your mobile phone number to complete the sign up. No wonder the robocalls and phone scams are overwhelming.

TeMPOraL 7y ago
It's essentially the equivalent to western use of e-mail addresses, and e-mail spam was solved by a combination of technical hurdles, deep message inspection, bayesian statistics and penalization of anonymity.
- Enginerrrd 7y ago
  I don't think e-mail spam is solved. It's largely just evolved to a non-competitive market where if you don't go with a major provider you'll forever be battling overzealous spam detection which flags your organization's email as spam. ...And you've lost some anonymity and flexibility.
  - TeMPOraL 7y ago
    It's solved for an average person. If you go with a major provider, spam barely exists at all. And even if you go with a smaller provider (like e.g. Fastmail), you barely notice any spam either.
    - CaptainZapp 7y ago
      I think he's more referring to the problem, where your email sent from a small(ish) provider is flagged by the big boys as spam. Google is quite notorious for their ever changing goal posts regarding email reception. And if your mail is flagged as spam (and based on my own experience the AI behind it is not very intelligent) the only thing you get back is an automated response with completely and utterly useless "support" links. So while spam may be solved on an individual user level, it's certainly not on the meta level.
    - finnthehuman 7y ago
      No, it’s not. My gmail inbox is overflowing with spam to the point that I frequently miss important messages because they’re buried in marketing garbage. That’s not even counting the business related ham google classifies as spam because the sender doesn’t buy email services from people that specialize in making sure marketing trash hits gmail inboxes.
    - asdff 7y ago
      Counterpoint: my burner gmail for account creation with 30k unread emails, mostly spam. Also so much spam gets into my university email accounts, much of it from predatory journals offering to publish anything and everything. For the university accounts, I'd say only 80% gets trapped into the spam folder (my gmail is an absolute mess, however), but so does 5% of actual relevant emails and conversations, so I'm forced to inspect my spam folder pretty regularly which kinda defeats the purpose of hiding it from view.

datashow 7y ago

I think you gave too much benefit of doubt to the CCP. The CCP can't care less about phone scams and frauds. As a totalitarian state having total control of the society, the government can track down the scammers anytime they want to. There is no reason to believe the CCP does this to solve the robocalls or phone scams. It would be laughable to think XiJinping and his gangs put this issue on his priority list. The only reason is to locate every individual has a different thought against the government.

mc32 7y ago
I’m curious about one thing here. And maybe someone has ideas. Both China and Soviet Union (probably others too but I don’t know), pre-liberalization were your typical socialist state with lots of means to control people, so they did but... but people didn’t engage in much petty crime or gang crime. Those types of crimes were more or less very unusual. But in those same states today with more tools to control people, petty crime and gang-related crime (as well as corruption but that kind of always existed), are through the roof. And it’s not like either are soft on crime. So what has given a rise to that criminal activity which for practical purposes didn’t exist before. Is it opportunity? That is there was nothing to gain from it before?
- andy9775 7y ago
  Of course they did. Parents grew up in a former communist country and smuggling in goods, stealing, were all pretty common. The reason you don't hear about it is because if people did those things that would mean that communism is bad and doesn't work. I wouldn't trust the data coming out of a communist country. During the chernobyl disaster the USSR kept providing false numbers to the world in order to downplay the significance of the event - to the point of sabotaging the cleanup effort and themselves.
  - mc32 7y ago
    Yes they had to fib and lie about production and all their 5-year Plans... but on the other hand most police in those states were unarmed (of course the sentences for being an armed criminal were “prohibitive”)...

heavyset_go 7y ago

Scammers and spammers aren't using cell phones to make their calls, they abuse VoIP services to do so.

rodneyzeng 7y ago

True but it will from the first moment go to political motivated move for sure.

the8472 7y ago

> it's a reasonably measure to counter fraud with real identity tying in with mobile phone number issuance. Perhaps it achieves the goal, but is it the best approach? Isn't it doubling down on an already problematic scheme? User names and email addresses are more easily swapped than phone numbers, with facial recognition you're locking yourself even more to the phone number, making it even harder to switch when it becomes compromised. At least here you need a legal address for bank account anyway, so financial institutions can just mail (the dead tree kind) you an unlock code for online banking, this makes a stolen identity far less useful. There are ways to solve these kinds of problems that don't also feed the surveillance machinery.