Post

this is very rapidly becoming the standard American opinion, and our lawmakers have absolutely not figured this out yet

blippy@blippy.bsky.social

everyone else is already spying on me, why do i care if it's some chinese guy or some dickhead in silicon valley

279 reposts1.7K likes

I am stating to think "I'm running on a constitutional amendment that you have a right to privacy and control of your personal data" could hit 90% of the vote.

Yeah there just is not a way to make a data privacy argument to the American public without significantly limiting the data that American companies are allowed to collect and government is unwilling to limit the American companies

No but it was a pretty predictable outcome, and instead of learning anything from it, Dems are about ready to concede autos and the internet in the same way.

The snatch-and-grab read is the one that tracks with the timeline. ByteDance divestiture was always designed to produce a fire-sale price for a US buyer. The national-security justification was real enough to be useful and convenient enough to be suspicious.

I'll give Democrats the benefit of the doubt that it wasn't their intent to hand Trump the opportunity for a corrupt bargain with Larry Ellison, et al, but to force a US spin off and private sale.

Nuanced TikTok discussion is hard because the security case and the civil-liberties case point in opposite directions and Congress wants a clean story. The Bytedance ownership question is real. The solution-through-divestiture theory requires a buyer who doesn't exist at the right price.

No, I do not agree with this opinion and I think it’s very bad that many Americans seem to think (incorrectly) that our privacy is already hopelessly compromised by evil tech companies and the government, and that there’s no point in fighting back.

I'm in this kinda weird ambivalence like "privacy is good, personal data can be devastating in the wrong hands, but people are at least right to see the hypocrisy here. Like if anything the DOGE data smash n grab was *way worse* than BYD handing anything to Beijing where I *do not* live"

I'll believe privacy is dead when the person saying it isn't a white guy from the valley with a financial incentive for people to believe it

I strongly agree. Unfortunately, I think like many things, people won't care until it *actually* bites them. For most people, this is still a very abstract problem, and most people just don't care about abstract problems. It's why almost nobody backs up important data.

I am starting to wonder if the domestic actors are the more malicious threats. Well, maybe not overall, obviously there are scam centers and such overseas that would love to steal enough data to trick you, etc. But China's government? What are they going to do to me? I'm more worried about ours!

The way I think about the Chinese government threat to ordinary Americans in a situation like this is akin to the hacker threat to an HVAC contractor to Target: they’re not interested in you as yourself, but as a step to a bigger prize.

I directionally agree with this thread, but one thing the PRC likes to do is to keep track of its citizens and emigres living abroad to exert pressure on them (or worse) as needed. Imagine the scenario that you, an American, have a partner who is from there....

Now imagine this partner participated in a pro-democracy activity there. Please note that you the idea that this capability in cars is bad for *multiple* reasons, and ought to be addressed as a general principle, but it's also good to be aware there is a real risk out there.

I am mostly joking, but I think my stance is that if American anti-China politicians cared about security they would work on an all encompassing privacy law instead of just banning Chinese products from America

the TikTok thing was entirely based on GenZ and Millenials seeing the reality of what is happening in Gaza. you can’t tell me you are worried about internet privacy and national security while not bringing up Meta & X, which have been much more destructive to American democracy

I actually super do care joking aside but I just find the way that the topic is discussed is annoyingly nationalistic given it’s often the same hardware. Basically every security camera is evil for example and many just rebadge the same SoC, I’m gonna just get the Chinese one and sideload firmware

The NSA is literally just looking at peoples' Facebook or Instagram feeds. Cause I always thought it was weird how people were so concerned about privacy being violated by tech while announcing they were taking a dump on social media..

I think they theoretically have access to everything about me through various data but the haystack is galactically large and I am a smol bb needle

The issue isn't that they are likely actively paying attention to you. It's that all of this data, tied directly to you, is being collected passively all the time, so if for some reason the government ever DOES develop an interest in you, it's all there for them to grab.

I tell people the only smart device in my home is my phone. They look at me like I'm crazy. I don't need devices tracking my information dammit.

“But can you win?” “Every time I say…’No’.”

Wraithe@wraithe.bsky.social

It doesn't get as much play as the captain Picard "there are FOUR lights" scene, but I often think about this scene from "Babylon 5" about resisting "The system" and the question: "But can you win?" "Every time I say…no."

Ya there's no universe where this person would be waving away concerns about privacy as cringe if it were liberals and Democrats responsible for the invasion of privacy

Yah, like as someone who works around the data privacy space, most companies do not actually want to be breaking the law. Obviously lot of pushing at grey areas and bad faith behavior but most big companies do have legal teams that push them to not be doing illegal things.

"Would you like to be punched in the face by a nice patriotic, apple pie loving, American? Or by a nasty, foreign, Chinese person?" "Can I, instead, choose not to be punched in the face at all?" A radical proposition! ;-)

There's a philosophical "joke" about this, claimed to be about identifying prejudice (it isn't, obviously): You have two buttons in front of you. If you push the red button you kill 100 million white people. If you push the blue button you kill 1 million black people. Which button do you push? 1/2

"But you're posting on a social media website!" Yes, where I dictate exactly what parts of me I share with the rest of you. I do not like the wave of verification bills, the ubiquitous surveillance infrastructure, the spyware bloat that jacks up my phone's data plan every month, etc.

oh god, it's like the people who say "why would I care if Amazon/Meta/Google mine my data? if I'm getting ads I want them to be for things I'm interested in!"

so weird to see pundits and politicians being like, wouldn't you rather have a wholesome, American data scrape over one from those nasty foreigners? Unless you're important on the international scale, the Americans knowing yr every fart is MORE threatening than the Chinese knowing same

Ngl, this has been my stance since forever. I used WeChat to communicate with a classmate I dated like a decade ago, even though we knew it’s absolutely compromised. We used to joke about the possibility Xi Jinping getting off to the nudes we sent back and forth.

i would honestly rather be spied on by a chinese guy than an american tech guy, all the chinese guy is gonna do is try to sell me things, the rest of the stuff he would do with the info is separated by several thousand miles of ocean

It's why I was laughing at Tiktok/RedNote spying concerns. So what? China sees that I like brain rot cat videos. Okay? Take the rest of the data from my phone too. Okay. Now what? Big deal. They can just buy my data from some data harvesting op in Silicon Valley.

"Spying on me" has a lot more impact if you're a non citizen and not a white South Africaner. Or trans. Or dissents. People who're not going to get thier lives wrecked by spying aren't good at considered the consequences for others. It's an empathy deficit or the idea that those people deserve it

i think it’s frankly dangerous that “everyone is already spying on me” is becoming the default position, not least because that is only a small fraction of the reasonable security concerns about… anything with a computer chip.

Honestly, it's how I feel. When people were freaking about TikTok being backed by a Chinese company I was like... I'm way more concerned about my sociopathic government watching me than Xi Jinping. The fuck does he care about me? Oh he's going to sell me some more cheap home goods? Idgaf

I worked in ad tech and the most infuriating thing is how everyone always insists The Phones are constantly hot micing but won't believe the myriad much easier ways we are being tracked. It doesn't help that it's all a house of cards built on trading data and inference but it's still spooky

A great example of criti-hype steering discourse. People believing that a hypothetical and wildly impractical thing is actually widely done, regardless of industry specialists adamantly saying that it would make no sense.

I suggest this is cultural awareness lagging by a generation. Back in the 20th century the primary surveillance tool was audio bugging. Old idea sticks, new ones take a while. Likewise up until about 10 years ago a common line was "cameras everywhere? they can't hire enough people to watch them"

Haha and then computer vision finally starts to get good and you see stories about Undesirables being automatically tracked in Madison Square Garden. I would go live in a cave but I don't want to learn to make my own liquor

Chat room if you want a very easy example, click a link here in the mobile app and ask yourself why it opens in a special little browser inside the app instead of your actual web browser. Hint: it is not for your convenience

remembering a VN called "Don't Take It Personally, Babe, It Just Ain't Your Story" where you're a teacher given surveillance tools to read all your students' private messages the twist is <rot13>gur xvqf *XABJ* guvf, gurl unir ab rkcrpgngvba bs cevinpl, naq gurl hfr gung xabjyrqtr gb chax lbh