Surveillance Giants [pdf]
I view the real issue is the &quot;why&quot; behind the surveillance, rather than the tool itself. Examples:<p>- Consumer-based: Facebook and Google&#x27;s type of data collection is best handled through the use of GDPR-like legislation, in USA. It&#x27;s just a matter of these tech companies lobbying and watering down the statute so it&#x27;s ineffective.<p>When this conversation gets brought up in congress, I implore everyone to go to <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;congress.gov" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;congress.gov</a> and read the actual bill to make sure it covers everything they claim. Look at it side-by-side with GDPR. Is it <i>really</i> giving consumers the protections they feel they deserve from businesses (I guess we can use the term &quot;user&quot;)? Politicians are masters at making bills seem like they handle an issue when they&#x27;re stripping regulation and giving a deal to business interests at the expense of natural persons.<p>Business get bail outs all the time and are very hawkish making sure their legislation meets their interests. They have lawyers and team up to secure objectives, no care is given to making sure it&#x27;s not to the detriment of &quot;us&quot;. Natural persons are quelled by nice little platitudes, that&#x27;s why reading bills themselves instead of news articles&#x2F;tweets is so important.<p>- National security in terms of subversion: This is the one that worries me most because it depends on how national security is defined based on a countries policies. In China, this entails this Xinjiang and Hong Kong situation. From their view, they are quelling uprisings, but one could also intellectually argue HK &#x2F; Xinjiang &#x2F; so on should have self-rule and nation status.<p>If you want to talk about human rights and surveillance, what liberties do the people in Xinjiang have? Imagine being born in your ancestral homeland and find your own culture is being methodically destroyed from foreign oligarch bureaucrats thousands of miles away. If you were Uighur and born there, how would you make sense of life?<p>When people in Xinjiang are being watched closely, the backstory has such direct implication to people&#x27;s lives, and what options do they have to leave? To redress grievances? When does it finally end?<p>US and UK have a history of giving countries democratic self-rule and a rolodex of success stories. There will always be surveillance in various ways, hopefully in the future the backdrop with Xinjiang will be them 1. protecting their own independent nation and 2. consumer data protection laws? (not to say East Asia region are privacy sensitive as US&#x2F;EU, heh)<p>- What do people really feel?<p>Would an independent Xinjiang vote for a GDPR-like consumer regulation? If you look at Kazakhstan, it doesn&#x27;t feel like they care about surveillance at all. It&#x27;s not fashionable to pretend to care about, a la twitter, people have other pressures in live to worry about.<p>On a final note, the few people in US that scoff at surveillance are the same people who line up to get $1600 smart phones. They don&#x27;t wait for GDPR laws to pass before getting a phone, they hit &quot;I agree&quot; to the privacy policies on tons of apps&#x2F;websites. I wonder how much it <i>really</i> matters to them. :P It&#x27;s not easy to tell what a society feels.