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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 ordin

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.
- alisonatwork 1y ago
  If you are starting from the point of view that Chinese society is a panopticon, and that no other society has ever experienced or had to deal with anything comparable, but totalitarian laws are about to make it inevitable in the west, and therefore it's important for someone to ask questions on HN if people in China can obtain phones that allow them to avoid state spyware... I don't know what to say. The line of questioning comes across as nonsequitous in a discussion of the proposed regulations and how they might affect people in the EU. The answer you seem to be looking for is that in China, just like in every other country, there are devices that exist which do not come with a state spyware component that is constantly transmitting everything to the authorities. Some devices are locally manufactured, others are imported, some are regulated, others are not, and people communicate using those devices and others, across all forms of media, including face-to-face. To elaborate: China isn't a totalitarian hellscape where everyone has a gun pointed at their head and they're all forced to use the same, identical, CCP-branded phone or else face execution. It's a huge, diverse country filled with millions of hackers and entrepreneurs, people with different interests, people with different means. There are countless devices and app stores and popular trends. Regulations are often unclear and are enforced differently in different regions and by different layers of the bureaucracy. Not everybody's threat model is the same. Just as in the west, people find ways to communicate that meet their comfort level - sometimes that's through systems monitored by the authorities, other times not. There's no one special technology or technique. The main difference in China is that citizens can be disappeared without much recourse because the legal system is opaque and there is no free press or democratic process to hold the government to account. But that's not the case in most of the EU. There is certainly democratic backsliding happening in parts of the EU, but that's a separate discussion.

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.

alisonatwork 1y ago
If you are starting from the point of view that Chinese society is a panopticon, and that no other society has ever experienced or had to deal with anything comparable, but totalitarian laws are about to make it inevitable in the west, and therefore it's important for someone to ask questions on HN if people in China can obtain phones that allow them to avoid state spyware... I don't know what to say. The line of questioning comes across as nonsequitous in a discussion of the proposed regulations and how they might affect people in the EU. The answer you seem to be looking for is that in China, just like in every other country, there are devices that exist which do not come with a state spyware component that is constantly transmitting everything to the authorities. Some devices are locally manufactured, others are imported, some are regulated, others are not, and people communicate using those devices and others, across all forms of media, including face-to-face. To elaborate: China isn't a totalitarian hellscape where everyone has a gun pointed at their head and they're all forced to use the same, identical, CCP-branded phone or else face execution. It's a huge, diverse country filled with millions of hackers and entrepreneurs, people with different interests, people with different means. There are countless devices and app stores and popular trends. Regulations are often unclear and are enforced differently in different regions and by different layers of the bureaucracy. Not everybody's threat model is the same. Just as in the west, people find ways to communicate that meet their comfort level - sometimes that's through systems monitored by the authorities, other times not. There's no one special technology or technique. The main difference in China is that citizens can be disappeared without much recourse because the legal system is opaque and there is no free press or democratic process to hold the government to account. But that's not the case in most of the EU. There is certainly democratic backsliding happening in parts of the EU, but that's a separate discussion.