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219 points thisisit | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.206s | 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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jedberg ◴[] No.16126688[source]
You're not asking the right question. The answer was right in what you quoted:

> generations of state surveillance has conditioned the public to be less concerned about sharing information than Westerners

They are already so used to being watched that they don't find it odd to be watched.

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1. OkGoDoIt ◴[] No.16126845[source]
That has been my impression. Sometimes people find little ways to insulate themselves (I know a guy who doesn't put his license plate in the right place so his car can't automatically be tracked when he drives around the country), but in general lack of privacy is just the way it is. Kind of like taxes in the US. People may be annoyed with how much they pay and some people use dubiously clever means of reducing it, and people have concerns about the details, but not many people really think taxes overall are a bad thing and should be abolished or greatly restricted.