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Questions for people who have used phones in China: How hard is it to disable the state spyware on a phone you buy there? Can you buy a phone from outside Chi

Questions for people who have used phones in China: How hard is it to disable the state spyware on a phone you buy there? Can you buy a phone from outside China, put in a Chinese SIM card, and do everything over a VPN? Or will they shut down your connection?

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betaby 1y ago
> How hard is it to disable the state spyware on a phone you buy there? Are you referring to something specific? Or you are just guessing?
svachalek 1y ago
As someone who's only visited, a foreign phone with foreign SIM will get you out. But I think using VPN on a Chinese SIM is somewhere on the range of very difficult to completely impossible these days.
- oefrha 1y ago
  > somewhere on the range of very difficult to completely impossible these days. It’s completely fucking trivial, there are a gazillion services and a number of well supported v2ray/ss/etc. capable VPN apps. SIM has nothing to do with VPNs after all (except in the DPI sense but various protocols already bypass that).
anikom15 1y ago
The Chinese SIM is the key. If you are a foreigner and want to use a phone, either use a burner phone with a Chinese SIM or use international roaming with a non-Chinese SIM. You should not use a Chinese SIM. Other restrictions are tied to the account which are based on the region of the Apple account, so any phone with a Chinese account will have various restrictions.
alisonatwork 1y ago
You're not thinking about it the right way. Of course there are mechanisms to defeat privacy-invading software (and hardware), but the point is that most ordinary people don't want to. Most ordinary people actually want to hang out on the same social networks that all their friends and family are on, they want to watch the same TV shows, they want to be able to easily make payments at their local restaurants and the grocery store, they want to be able to use public transport etc etc. When forced to choose, it turns out that convenience beats privacy for almost everyone.
- Nursie 1y ago
  Add to that - most normal, everyday people are entirely in favour of invasive government monitoring if it can be painted as being 'for the children' or 'to catch terrorists'. So it's not a case that convenience beats privacy, AFAICT they're largely in favour of giving up that privacy anyway.
- noduerme 1y ago
  >> You're not thinking about it the right way. I'm well aware of the tendency of societies to accept convenience over privacy, of the underlying risk of surveillance at scale and of the stripping of privacy from off-the-shelf applications that users are unlikely to abandon. You seem to be assuming I was making a case that people will just get around these invasions of privacy en masse, and I'm not making any such case. Nor were my questions designed to undermine the original article or to dismiss the harms or the totalitarian nature of these laws. More difficult privacy means less privacy for everyone, and it means no privacy for the bulk of the population. I agree. So I don't need a lecture in how my questions misalign with the absolute need to preserve encryption. My questions are geared toward understanding what individuals can do in a society which has already turned completely into a panopticon. And I don't think it's useless to ask those questions, nor to educate people in how to protect themselves in such a situation, even if the task seems hopeless on a mass scale. Such a situation appears increasingly inevitable in the West, and I think it's valuable to take whatever lessons we can from societies that are already further down this road. My family fled a totalitarian dictatorship long before such powerful surveillance technologies could even be imagined. I think knowing how people cope with and attempt to preserve a modicum of provacy under the present conditions in modern dictatorships is instructive in preparing at least some part of our population for it.

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betaby 1y ago

> How hard is it to disable the state spyware on a phone you buy there? Are you referring to something specific? Or you are just guessing?

svachalek 1y ago

As someone who's only visited, a foreign phone with foreign SIM will get you out. But I think using VPN on a Chinese SIM is somewhere on the range of very difficult to completely impossible these days.

oefrha 1y ago
> somewhere on the range of very difficult to completely impossible these days. It’s completely fucking trivial, there are a gazillion services and a number of well supported v2ray/ss/etc. capable VPN apps. SIM has nothing to do with VPNs after all (except in the DPI sense but various protocols already bypass that).

anikom15 1y ago

The Chinese SIM is the key. If you are a foreigner and want to use a phone, either use a burner phone with a Chinese SIM or use international roaming with a non-Chinese SIM. You should not use a Chinese SIM. Other restrictions are tied to the account which are based on the region of the Apple account, so any phone with a Chinese account will have various restrictions.

alisonatwork 1y ago

You're not thinking about it the right way. Of course there are mechanisms to defeat privacy-invading software (and hardware), but the point is that most ordinary people don't want to. Most ordinary people actually want to hang out on the same social networks that all their friends and family are on, they want to watch the same TV shows, they want to be able to easily make payments at their local restaurants and the grocery store, they want to be able to use public transport etc etc. When forced to choose, it turns out that convenience beats privacy for almost everyone.

Nursie 1y ago
Add to that - most normal, everyday people are entirely in favour of invasive government monitoring if it can be painted as being 'for the children' or 'to catch terrorists'. So it's not a case that convenience beats privacy, AFAICT they're largely in favour of giving up that privacy anyway.
noduerme 1y ago
>> You're not thinking about it the right way. I'm well aware of the tendency of societies to accept convenience over privacy, of the underlying risk of surveillance at scale and of the stripping of privacy from off-the-shelf applications that users are unlikely to abandon. You seem to be assuming I was making a case that people will just get around these invasions of privacy en masse, and I'm not making any such case. Nor were my questions designed to undermine the original article or to dismiss the harms or the totalitarian nature of these laws. More difficult privacy means less privacy for everyone, and it means no privacy for the bulk of the population. I agree. So I don't need a lecture in how my questions misalign with the absolute need to preserve encryption. My questions are geared toward understanding what individuals can do in a society which has already turned completely into a panopticon. And I don't think it's useless to ask those questions, nor to educate people in how to protect themselves in such a situation, even if the task seems hopeless on a mass scale. Such a situation appears increasingly inevitable in the West, and I think it's valuable to take whatever lessons we can from societies that are already further down this road. My family fled a totalitarian dictatorship long before such powerful surveillance technologies could even be imagined. I think knowing how people cope with and attempt to preserve a modicum of provacy under the present conditions in modern dictatorships is instructive in preparing at least some part of our population for it.