And now it's happening with advertisement too. Tell your friend you just took a pregnancy test via FB messenger and now every advertiser on the internet knows just what to sell you. Most people don't really care about this yet, but most people don't realize that this kind of thing could be used in the future for all sorts of dystopian shit. All this data is being stored. I think Google is treating my data pretty responsibly at the moment, but I could see it being used for anything from background checks (e.g. checking search history or message logs for indicators of illegal activity) to blackmail.

On a tangential sidenote, I read an article about Snap recently about how they're trying to position themselves as a different kind of social media company. They don't (yet) perform highly sophisticated targeted advertising and don't save a lot of actual content data. You typically are only connected to your actual friends, not some random guy from your high school class, your aunt, your ex-girlfriend, and your coworker. There's also no public profile for employers to search for and snoop around. Of course these are typically the case for any tool focused on direct messaging but I hope as Snap expands they can be both successful and keep these fantastic qualities.

Regarding Snapchat - the company that cares about privacy wouldn't require so many permissions (including a permission to receive SMS messages).

Also, you can opt out of Wechat just as you can opt out of FB, so I'm not sure I see your point. Sure you can't opt out of chinese censorship in general but the chilling effect in both cases is where I see the analogy. It's bad for online platforms to do that whether by coercion or direct force.

At present, in Western nations, it is somewhat easy to, say, self-host certain social media platforms (from Wordpress to Mastodon) for friends and family and whatnot that could be used for more private, less advertiser-monitored social media interaction. Assuming you get buy in among your friends, this pretty much avoids issues with advertiser and employer snooping that you have on large social media sites. You can then keep your Facebooks and Twitters for your "public face" (or ditch them entirely).

I don't know if the same applies in China.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICP_license

Losing a job can be just as catastrophic as a jail term.

Especially if it brands you for future job positions too, as "that person that was fired because X".

Not everybody has it as good as in-demand developers, job wise.

And employer blacklists (e.g. of union types) have been a thing for ages, and can wreck havoc to a person's life (killing their economic prospects) in the way that a jail sentence might not.

Is it a guarantee that you will get quality food in a democratic country's prison, like prisons of US?

So while Snap takes the high road here and tells people they're not bleeding or collecting information on their users (which is true), what they don't say is that still all the info that has been bleeding from mobile users through any other of their weather and emoji apps can and will be used against them in Snapchat Advertising campaigns.

If they didn't play along, they'd be quickly out of any media planners' heads, and they're already struggling hard against Facebook in the ad ecosystem.

Source: I do this stuff for business. Throwaway obviously.

Well, the thing is that FB may have a real names policy but they really only occasionally enforce it.

Plus I think it's possible to just not be FB friends with anyone in your company or even use FB's permission system to hide controversial opinions. And I haven't heard of advertisers putting people in jail or firing them for their opinions. Here, it seems like you're confusing "creepy" and "actually has the ability to harm you".

But most people or many people, indeed connect their FB profile to their employer and wind-up censoring themselves accordingly. But that actually seems like the ordinary censoring of "peer pressure" that has always happened in among with the people who someone chooses to associate with.

If I went to the company picnic and hung-out with co-workers and boss, I would be self-censors like heck - fortunately, I'm able to avoid such situations which I find miserable experiences on all levels. God help me if I have to spend a lot of my social time like that.

It's easy to summarize this as "really what you mean is you're too lazy to set up communication which you're employer can't see" but I wouldn't want to imply the situation isn't a problem. That the medium requiring least effort broadcasts to people's employers, that is a problem, just a slightly different problem.

I understand what you're saying about your employer, but there are different levels of self-censorship. My level of self-censorship for friends who work at the same company as me would be very different compared to acquaintances at the company and my boss. I'm ok with the first one because it's what I would do for my friends anyway. I know there are ways to toggle privacy/whatever to affect what people can see but at the end of the day I'm always going to assume my employer can see any regular post I make on Facebook through one means or another.

Regulations are slow and won't necessarily protect the first people who are harmed (see subprime crisis) but they can make it much harder to do similar things in the future

Lawsuits don't always work and are heavily weighted against consumers but do provide some protection

Public goodwill is huge. If lots of people got really hurt from a Facebook or google data compromise, id bet people stop using them. Seems crazy now but there are alternatives and Facebook is not essential. All these companies (and many other non tech ones, like banks for example) are strongly incentivized to not harm the public in a large way because the execs would lose their jobs and careers

These protections are FAR from perfect and shouldn't prevent you from losing sleep, but imagine living in a country where the government is incentivized to not protect its citizens through regulation or enforce standard legal protections

More chilling is the potential social acceptance of such snooping in the name of social harmony, trust in government etc. if people no longer believe such censorship or oppression is bad, you have a real problem

Edit: The NSA is an analogous threat in the US, but to my knowledge that info isn't used to secure the reputations and positions of government leaders. Also there is a huge public backlash against them, not sure if the same exists in china

It's one thing to fire someone for having a political opinion (like Google recently) and just to have an opinion about people you work with.

You can't help having an opinion. We're not logical robots. All we can hope to do is to be aware of or decision making process d not to let irrelevant opinions influence it.

I don't want to give HR any more reasons to mistrust me: say I supported candidate X, and HR think's X and their supporters are racist/misogynist/anti-immigrant. Now if someone raises a complaint about me, legitimate or not, and HR sees that, they're more likely to assume I'm guilty. And at the end of the day, all else being equal (and it often is with HR because they aren't really able to evaluate technical work well), who gets the promotion: the person HR sees as edgy, controversial, and potentially an asshole because of their political views, or the person who doesn't share their political views?

Things shouldn't be this way, but they are.

You are correct. However, I don't think that it can is even remotely close to China's censorship.

The censors didn’t like Jane’s posts? With the aid of some text generation AI that captures her writing style, rewriting her post history is much less conspicuous than deleting it outright.

You bring up a good point with text generation, which made me think of what can be ascertained by writing style. Certainly gender, nationality or regional location, education level, probably something akin to IQ. I'm not sure whether there exists such a thing as a "writer's fingerprint" but if there is, you wouldn't even be able to write things anonymously even with a fake/stolen/alternate account.

Nah, they will. The convenience factor far outweighs the risk for most people. Everyone thinks "well, they must've done something stupid", and if not that, "well, that was just one strange occurrence. It won't happen to me."

Furthermore, I have huge doubts whenever any US-based company says it's "secure". It's easy to say that. Even on their security page[1], they don't give a clear, straight "yes" to the "is it private?" question. Ask a farmer if his beef comes from real cows and he'll say "yes." Ask a company that makes secure apps if they read your messages, and they say "we use various encryption techniques to prevent unwanted man in the middle attacks and our specific organization name won't read your messages." So sure, they're safe from unwanted attacks and they won't personally read your messages. Governments, well, we won't reference the clear suspect of this question because you know why.

https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/212477768-Is-it...

My original point was just that technical solutions exist, not that there is a social will to use them.

And that's probably an accurate assessment for most individuals. Even in a borderline dystopian surveillance state like China, the chances that an average law-abiding citizen could ever see the chilling effects of surveillance and censorship materialize as a life-changing event in their own lives or the lives of someone close is admittedly rather slim. The chilling effects shrouding over their society is rarely ever felt to a significant enough degree by a significant enough portion of the populace for them to want to affect change at the risk of prosecution.

That said, the possibility that eventually Chinese internet products could by their own merit compete in the global market, outcompeting western alternatives in some cases, is the even more terrifying aspect to me. I wrote a lengthy post about it a while ago, and have copy pasted it a few times already, but here it is again anyways, because I feel it's still relevant:

To authoritarian governments all over the world, the censorship and surveillance frameworks built into many Chinese internet services like WeChat are actually extremely valuable features, rather than something they'd want to opt out of.

These features have been battle-tested in the largest and most ruthlessly robust surveillance state the world has ever seen, and have time and again proven their effectiveness in influencing public opinion and quelling dissent.

If an app like WeChat were to ever gain foothold in a nation with an authoritarian government, all they'd have to do is strike a deal with TenCent, and with the flip of a switch, that government can then enjoy unprecedented control and visibility into the "private" communications of its populace. All the friction involved in the decidedly difficult and costly exercise of building your own large-scale surveillance/censorship infrastructure will suddenly have been removed. The one thing Chinese internet services can offer that no western counterpart can reasonably compete with also makes them by far China's most dangerous export: authoritarianism as a service.

To those of us in democratic nations, we must also remember that authoritarianism usually doesn't manifest itself as a cliff, but rather as a gradual, slippery downward slope. Every government in the past has displayed authoritarian tendencies in their history, to varying degrees, and governments in the future will inevitably continue to do so. The natural tendency of government is to slide down the slope of authoritarianism, because government is power, and power corrupts. It takes diligence and continued effort on the part of the governing body and its citizenship to counteract this natural descent.

All it would take is another 911 type terrorist attack to sway public opinion enough to the point where enacting some kind of dragnet surveillance system in the name of national security would become politically feasible, in any democratic nation in the world. At that point, the horrible user experience and PR nightmare in having to rebalance the national budget or raise taxes to make room for improving your domestic spying infrastructure could be the only thing standing between us and an irreversible descent into authoritarianism. And if a significant portion of a democratic populace happens to be using WeChat at that point, well, let's just say I don't have a lot of faith that my own government could resist the temptation and take a principled stand against such a frictionless way to expand its own powers.

As Chinese offerings mature and become polished and innovative enough to compete with western counterparts in markets outside of China, we could easily start to see users around the world voluntarily start switching to them. That could very well mark the beginning of the end of this golden age of democracy as we know it.

I highly recommend taking a look at Nathan Freitas's excellent talk "The Great Firewall Inverts": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KEJGqNf2rgk. In it, he explores how China's so-called Great Firewall is actually a bit of a misnomer because it's most crucial functionality is its ability to control the flow of information inside its own borders as opposed of keeping information out, how this ability is readily available to be exported to countries around the world in the form of internet services like WeChat, and what we can do about it (which is unfortunately, not a whole lot, other than to educate others on the very non-obvious non-immediate consequences of using these services, and to be vigilant and proactively take stands against the spread of authoritarianism in our own governments).

This exists today. Virtually every single communication in every Western country is already being captured and stored indefinitely.

The saving grace is western countries can't be nearly as blatant as China when it comes to outright censorship, in fear of the political backlash that (one would hope) would still incite. So the chilling effects on speech won't be quite as dramatic as they are in China until that changes (i.e. people are still unaware that there are things they're not "allowed" to say due to lack of censorship, so they won't start to self-censor out of habit or fear).

And I think you can talk with them about China's internal politics through WeChat if they are interested in these talks, if there is not a third person will report your conversations to the authority.

The person in the article is 'jailed', because someone publicizes his comment or reports it to authority.