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Let's not fool ourselves. US companies have been doing the same thing, and they will continue to.
by Bud 4y ago
Let's not fool ourselves. US companies have been doing the same thing, and they will continue to.
- system2 4y agoAt least we can punish American companies if they do something shady.
- Bud 4y agoCan we? That seems to very much depend on who is in power and who has benefitted from the shadiness in question.
- ProAm 4y agoI think Ed Snowden proved to us this is not true. Room 614a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A
- LarryMullins 4y agoThat was revealed several years before Snowden's defection.
- lmm 4y agoAnd yet nothing was done about it.
- LarryMullins 4y agoNor since. ProAm clarified that these were intended as two separate examples, so fair enough. It just rubs me the wrong way when people seem to give credit to Snowden for revealing things which were already known.
- ProAm 4y agoI meant that as two different things, both were largely disregarded as punishable.
- MisterBastahrd 4y agoSure, but since we explicitly won't, I feel that a lot of this outrage is just BS. As a US citizen, I'm far more concerned with the US government knowing where I am at all times than China. We could pass a law that forbids the US government to consume any personally identifiable data from social media platforms without a warrant, but we won't.
- ffssffss 4y agoWhich US companies are tracking journalist locations for the Chinese government? Tesla?
- Bud 4y agoThe claim wasn't that they did so for the Chinese government. But Facebook, for example, did so, for its own purposes. This is just as bad. We can't really have journalism being threatened, regardless of whether it's threatened by China, or supposedly-loyal US companies.
- JumpCrisscross 4y ago> Facebook, for example, did so, for its own purposes. This is just as bad It’s in a totally different league. Domestic corporation spying for commercial purposes versus a militaristic dictatorship with a track record of extrajudicial harassment.
- lmm 4y agoLarge US corporations and their owners also have a track record of extrajudicial harassment.
- pksebben 4y agoFacebook perhaps, but it's hard to see the differences between China and the US in terms of spying/wiretapping/harassment. If we really wanted to avoid China spying on our citizens, we'd implement broad and strong encryption across our network - but we fight that (as a country) because it would weaken our own surveillance. We could absolutely choose to deescalate in this field, we just don't.
- Jon_Lowtek 4y agoA book i can highly recommend is "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism" by Professor Shoshana Zuboff from the Harvard Business School. TLDR "commercial purposes" include selling data in bulk to government agencies, which could not seize such data without a warrant and judicial oversight, thus allowing them to circumvent the very protection mechanisms that are in place to prevent extrajudical harassment in favor of creating a state of mass surveillance.
- kranke155 4y agoUS has laws, independent courts and elections. You might want to debate it’s level of efficiency and fairness, but on the other side you have a dictatorship.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- biohacker85 4y agoIs the threat of a foreign adversary spying on US citizens the same as the US Government spying on its citizens? I'm in the camp that a foreign adversary is a more dangerous situation.