Context in the URL.
If WeChat is not sold to a US company by September 15th, it’ll be banned in the US. And, well, September 15th is nearly upon us…
Thoughts?
On one hand WeChat is a privacy nightmare (it refuses to run until you grant it all the permissions it want - reading your contacts, your phone logs etc.). I refuse to run it unless jailed in a fake work profile with the Island app.
On the other hand… the way it’s banned also smacks of tech protectionism. I’d rather have Google (and Apple) be required to require that apps work when denied permissions, and violating apps get removed temporarily until they fix that issue. Heck, make it stronger, apps that engage in dark anti-patterns like asking you if you want to upload contacts everytime you reinstall (hello Facebook Messenger) should also be banned.
I’m with you but I hate the CCP at least as much as big tech in the west so I’m happy for anything that hurts them.
On balance I’m fine with them being banned too, yup. Same as TikTok. The Citizen Lab has run many investigations into Internet surveillance in China that it boggles the mind how anyone outside China would want to use these apps (except for when they have to deal with people living there). Then again… most of the rest of the world use Facebook-owned apps, sigh.
I absolutely detest Facebook but at least in the US you theoretically get to choose who surveils you I guess? In practice not so much as they have a monopoly. But I think the Chinese economic and political model is far more dangerous to individual rights than the US.
Yeah, the choice is theoretical. Agreed that the Chinese model is more dangerous, but the US needs stronger regulation to control what tech companies can do with our data. I like one of the ideas suggested in The Social Dilemma that data hoarders get taxed on how much data they collect, as an incentive for them to get by with less.
I would use Messenger (either Lite or web, so no ads) to talk to people who are only on it but I draw the line at using Facebook Pay for sending or receiving money (unless it’s to a fellow Facebook employee). If you’ve seen how bad Facebook’s customer service is it’s obvious that end users are not our real customers – so using us for financial transactions is madness.
Regulation won’t fix this problem. Regulation fixes details. We are talking about a system that was designed from the ground up to exploit people for their money and their data. The only way to approach this is to have the public take free software seriously, and not fund or support companies which have power structures that care only about profit. We need non-profits and transparent worker co-operatives.
Furthermore the companies are the ones who really have the power in the west. Regulation to them is practically just guidelines that they choose to follow if they wish, and manipulate and lobby if they don’t feel like it.
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I’m in complete agreement there. We should try pushing on both fronts - build the replacement from the ground up, but anything that makes it a bit harder for attention economy platforms to maintain the status quo would help too.
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Make it progressive perhaps. Make it a multiple of userbase * data per user * number of privacy antipattern.
Facebook and Google **would*be affected if the fines amount to billions per year instead of haphazardly every decade or so
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An interesting argument I’ve heard is that if you’re an average American with no connections to China, being spied on by China is less likely to affect you personally than being spied on by the US. Something to think about.
No offense, this is an extremely flawed argument. A common argument that I hear given for why surveillance is okay is “if you’re a good person, you’ve got nothing to hide”. But it really shouldn’t matter how much the actual act of surveillance affects you directly. Facebook, the NSA and CCP aren’t going to blackmail you with compromising images or whatever anyway. It’s not about the embarrassment. It’s about power. We live in the information age, where information is everything, and information is everywhere. Companies like Google, Facebook, Amazon etc. make literally billions off the information that they have. And with this money comes more power. Information that they use to control people through advertising. And of course the information the NSA has gives them far more power than any government agency has right to obtain and use. It doesn’t need to be proven that China’s government uses the information it gets from surveillance in the “west” to prevent any outside challenge on their authoritarian, genocidal regime. Russia’s government has influenced elections and referendums in the US and UK as well as starting all sorts of conspiracy theories that divert the public’s attention away from the real villains: those in power.
Are we even sure Trump even can ban stuff like this? I have heard mixed information about what the president’s actual authorities are.
From a privacy perspective, WeChat is terrible. However, it’s clear that the actual reason for banning is political and economic (the US wants to control all the social media), so I have a hard time fully supporting it.
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For all its privacy problems, there is nothing like it made by a US company. With WeChat, you can make payments, transfer money, buy tickets, etc. It’s pretty amazing someone can scan a QR code on their phone to pay for most things, including riding the bus or shopping at a local market.
It would be great if there was an open source alternative that allowed for the add-ons and flexibility that WeChat does. Unfortunately, they appear to be taking the tired “security through obscurity” approach, and using fingerprints such as location to verify users’ actions, which doesn’t look great for privacy or security.
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