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> is listening to you and siphoning all data on your local network to China. How is it any different from western apps listening to you and siphoning all data
by jesterson 8mo ago
> is listening to you and siphoning all data on your local network to China.
How is it any different from western apps listening to you and siphoning all data on your local network to 3 letter agencies?
- tatersolid 8mo ago[citation needed] Please stop with the hyperbole. Shit is bad enough; more fake news from any direction doesn’t help.
- jesterson 8mo agoI am not sure where hyperbole is - if your believe it is "fake news", it's your choice. Do chinese apps make use of all data they can access? Absolutely. Do western apps make use of all data they can access? Absolutely. Both concepts are evil. Talking one is evil while dropping off the other is skew of discussion towards vilifying one side and omitting the subject.
- dirasieb 8mo ago[flagged]
- jesterson 8mo agoYou have nothing to say on the substance I'll take it. Appreciate if you can point where I "defended chinese spyware" otherwise I would have reasons to call a lie here.
- Pay08 8mo agoChina and Chinese companies flaunt every single law that at all hinders them, IP law being the typical example. The EU has the Privacy Shield agreement with the USA. Such an agreement with China would be effectively impossible, since even if it existed, they'd simply ignore it. People criticise Five Eyes, and for good reason, but it's existence at least means that intelligence agencies are willing to follow domestic law. Not to mention the use of the word "Western", which is the kind of bullshit I could write a smaller book about.
- jesterson 8mo ago> but it's existence at least means that intelligence agencies are willing to follow domestic law Oh they break it alright whenever they please. And they have been caught handsomely.
- inventor7777 8mo agoI hear this theory being claimed so much, but I don't see any real evidence for it; we have routers that you can monitor traffic on, we have microphone use indicators on mobile, and I would imagine it would be pretty clear if an app was uploading audio with even very basic monitoring tools. Correct me if I'm wrong, however. I'm not denying that a lot of data is likely surreptitiously collected, but I'm talking microphone/camera in particular.
- jesterson 8mo agoI recall there were quite a few experiments where people use certain keywords heavily just to get closely related ads later on. I can totally relate my experience with it as well. Of course it is inconclusive - but if there is an incentive, management of big companies will venture into it. And chinese management is no different from western ones to that matter.
- gkbrk 8mo agoThey don't pick the keywords uniformly randomly from a list of all keywords though. They think they randomly picked something that popped up in their mind, but those keywords are either - stuff they saw online recently — ads or otherwise, which put the keywords in their mind - or stuff they were already interested in recently Not hard to imagine targeting algorithms picking up on either of these
- MadnessASAP 8mo agoAs I tell my friends You dont see those "coincidental" ads because your phone is listening to you, you see them because your freind showed interest in the product and theirs enough information to infer they talked to you about it. The good news is, your phone isn't listening to you without your consent. The bad news is, because it doesnt need to.
- jesterson 8mo agoAre those your assumptions or something that have been tested?
- debazel 8mo agoThere's a massive difference between having a country spying on it's own citizen versus having an adversarial country doing it. The three-letter agencies would likely not be trying to sabotage or destroy their own country's economy and global standing for one.
- fulafel 8mo agoYes, in the headlines the agencies playing adversaries to the common folk are definitely mainly chinese... /s
- chromehearts 8mo agoAs someone from the EU, could I not use the argument to argue that for me it's both an adversarial country?
- hxugufjfjf 8mo agoYou absolutely can. We see a huge uproar in European enterprises against US software/vendors/etc. Many companies are halting their cloud migration because they are now worried that the current US government could decide to just pull the plug or something otherwise inane.
- deaux 8mo agoIt's concerning that someone from the EU is still asking this question. How is there any doubt left in you? Yes, of course both are adversarial countries, and shouldn't be treated all too differently. In the short-term, the US is the bigger threat, as they've shown they're much more willing to use the power they have to cut off access than China.
- Cieric 8mo agoAs someone from the US I would suggest viewing both as adversarial. I don't really trust my own government, but if I was born abroad I would trust them even less.
- chpatrick 8mo agoI don't know why you're being downvoted, the US has been way more belligerent towards the EU recently than China.
- anonym29 8mo agoThe difference is that the Chinese intelligence agencies abide by Chinese law and don't really pose any kind of threat to American citizens, while the American intelligence agencies engage in unconstitutional schemes (as ruled by a federal judge) to illegally spy on Americans and lie about it to both congress and the American people, murder American citizens, and can, at any moment they want, fabricate evidence to procure no-knock search warrants where a team of armed gunmen will throw flashbang grenades into the homes of journalists and political dissidents in the middle of the night before barging in with assault rifles. And yet, for reasons that remain beyond me, many Americans remain more fearful of the former than that latter.
- wildzzz 8mo agoThe consensus is usually "well the government only targets you when you probably deserve it" whereas china is spying on everyone regardless of your opinion of the actions of the current administration.
- deaux 8mo ago> The consensus is usually "well the government only targets you when you probably deserve it" Not sure where you got that consensus from, it sounds made up to me or at least outdated as of Feb 2026, especially on HN.
- Wingman4l7 8mo agoPerhaps because foreign governments with a known antagonistic stance would happily sell or hand over your data in order to cause large-scale economic instability via account attacks, political instability via fostering the prosecution of minority groups (as identified by said data)... get creative. Large-scale data on your enemy's citizenry is a new weapon in the modern arsenal, and we haven't seen anyone really try to use it yet, but I suspect the results when they do will be ugly.
- anonym29 8mo agoCare to elaborate on "known antagonistic stance"? Is there any evidence that China has ever actually performed any of these types of attacks you're discussing? "Get creative" might work well for fictional writing exercises, but is it such a sound strategy for assigning guilt? Surely you wouldn't like being prosecuted for crimes that someone "got creative" with in accusing you of, no?
- gruez 8mo ago>How is it any different from western apps listening to you and siphoning all data on your local network to 3 letter agencies? Examples?
- jamesnorden 8mo agoMore than one thing can be bad at once.