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219 points thisisit | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.204s | source
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le-mark ◴[] No.16126594[source]
Last paragraph is terrifying, does China not have privacy laws at all?

More interesting than prospects for some may be the sheer volume of intimate data available and leeway to experiment in China. Tencent’s now-ubiquitous WeChat, built by a small team in months, has become a poster-child for in-house creative license. Modern computing is driven by crunching enormous amounts of data, and generations of state surveillance has conditioned the public to be less concerned about sharing information than Westerners. Local startup SenseTime for instance has teamed with dozens of police departments to track everything from visages to races, helping the country develop one of the world’s most sophisticated and extensive surveillance machines.

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1. guiltygatorade ◴[] No.16126775[source]
People don't view privacy the same way we view them in the west. The government is obviously not too keen on passing Privacy Laws that itself has no intention of obeying.

I still attribute the success of Tencent and Alibaba significantly to both the public perception of privacy as well as what I expect to be a tacit compliance with the government on making available the data that they gather.

The Chinese government can find ways to shut down any company pretty much at will. I can't imagine Tencent or Alibaba or Baidu got to where they are today without playing ball with the government.