This is what comes out of Google allowing apps to read phone IMEI in Android. I have no concrete proof, but the reason why all major Chinese apps snoop after phone IMEI is said to be that the commies have secretly demanded Chinese dotcoms to collect and report phone IMEIs.<p>For example if you have a 6.0 or later Android, Alibaba app will block you if you disabled the permission to read IMEI or it detects spoofing.<p><a href="https://postimg.org/image/m5u0nmdxd/" rel="nofollow">https://postimg.org/image/m5u0nmdxd/</a><p>It is easy to see how they also use it for their own purposes: open a new taobao account, search for some items, do factory reset, install taobao and see that you are being shown same stuff you been searching before. This way they also clearly violate Google store rules that prohibit using IMEIs as tracking IDs for marketing purposes. It was reported over so many times, and Google clearly knows of this. I guess, they are afraid of antagonising "the premier Chinese dotcom" or still considering going back to China.
Many people might not know, in US, credit card transactions/payments are on sale by various sources. There's a very active market for this and some fintech startups are solely based on this kind of data. Since most of our financial life is based on credit card, we are under surveillance at a micro level in a similar situation.<p>The issue is we not only use 'services', we handle data to the service providers. Data under their custody is usually stored and transferred with less secure protection, like on a thumbdrive or sent by email attachments. I don't see this situation will get any better soon.
> Now every picture posted, every comment made, every driving infraction could go into a central database to produce a person's 'trustworthiness' score.<p>How is this China-only ? Can't Facebook do the same ? Can't the government force Facebook, Microsoft, etc to give out all the information that we generate in their networks ?
Can't they compute such a "trustworthiness" score and sell it to your (potential) employer ?<p>Of course they can and they will if they don't already.<p>I've agreed to countless "license agreements" which I haven't read - I might have given some company my exclusive permission to monitor my every move...<p>What if <i>your</i> agreement contained a special clause not present in other user's agreements ?<p>There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that what is going on in China will become the status quo in a lot of other countries and this will accelerate as shit gets tougher due to all the global problems that we now face.<p>What's even more disappointing is that these surveillance systems are most probably built on top of open source software and libraries - which have been ideologically released in order to increase the user's 'freedom', yet who would have thought ...<p>Unfortunately the dream of a better, closer, freer world is now passing through a nightmare phase - we've built the perfect tools for crazies to do their crazy thing...
China is fascinating.<p>On one hand...<p>- China has done better than any other country on Earth at poverty reduction. Chinese policy since Deng Xiaoping lifted hundreds of millions of people out of subsistence poverty. Free markets were a big part of this, but so were Special Economic Zones starting with Shenzhen, a culture of sharing IP, massive govt investments in infrastructure, research and education.<p>- China are also the most successful urbanists today. Many of those 100s of millions of former rural poor are in cities now. In the time it took California to debate building a single High Speed Rail line from SF to LA, China connected their whole country with trains that are much faster, much more useful (because they go directly into urban centers and connect to fast local transit), and much cheaper. Ours still isn't done.<p>--<p>And yet, at the same time, China also seems to be prototyping some kind of grim meathook future.<p>- Extremely aggressive surveillance. Near zero respect for privacy. Govt deputizing the tech sector to spy and censor on their behalf.<p>- Cities with toxic air. Check out this glorious ad in Beijing right now: <a href="https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C1JrMsKUAAAopPT.jpg" rel="nofollow">https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C1JrMsKUAAAopPT.jpg</a><p>- A closed, censored alternate internet<p>- "Social Credit" Scores based on surveillance, which look like a frighteningly powerful way to neuter dissent<p>China moves faster than we do, both for better and for worse. I guess our challenge is to emulate the things they're doing right (eg the vastly more efficient and effective way they build transit), while stopping our own governments from repeating China's mistakes and acts of authoritarian overreach.
Oracle maintains a database of personal information for billions of people.<p>The US corporate surveillance web is rich in complexity.<p>Before we judge China, lets make sure we know what we're comparing them to.<p>I highly encourage anyone interested in the subject to watch this talk from last month's Chaos Computer Club Congress.<p>"Corporate surveillance, digital tracking, big data & privacy:
How thousands of companies are profiling, categorizing, rating and affecting the lives of billions"<p><a href="https://media.ccc.de/v/33c3-8414-corporate_surveillance_digital_tracking_big_data_privacy" rel="nofollow">https://media.ccc.de/v/33c3-8414-corporate_surveillance_digi...</a><p><a href="https://youtu.be/kd6NKvwQVbM" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/kd6NKvwQVbM</a><p>You say the Chinese system is sinister because they force you to use ID cards. In the US corporate surveillance system, they can track you without ID cards.
What a silly article: "download the controls to the private sector" indeed. The government already owns the telcos, half the banks, the only domestic interbank transfer system and the only domestic travel reservation system so they have your IMEI, real time location and history, network traffic, bank balance and payment and employment history and travel plans anyway. And that of your friends/relatives. They certainly don't need help from an app. That said, after 16 years in and out of China, I still feel safer here than the US.
This our terrifying future in America - the incoming administration has very scant regard for civil liberties, and is filled with business insiders who worship money above all else.<p>Add to this the fact that both legislative chambers are controlled by the same party who is "tough" on crime.<p>For profit or to ostensibly address Terrorism expect surveillance to get much worse.
It is precisely the same in the United States, it is just somewhat deniable there due to things like the FISA court.<p>It allows peoples' inherent belief in American virtue to doublethink themselves into believing that the NSA doesn't collect this high-res data in bulk from Facebook and Google and Amazon and Apple and the mobile carriers—when we have clear documents showing that they do.<p>LOVEINT is real. The large social networks and communications providers are an official arm of the surveillance state, with all of the unfettered access to high resolution data that entails.<p>Your doctor or hospital hosts data in AWS? Pretty sure HIPAA doesn't count in this case when they're just sucking up all of the traffic in bulk.<p>Your social media and financial data are already being aggregated and sold—we know this, too.
Pretty terrifying. I'd love to see a more detailed analysis of the datasets they received. It sounds like both governmental and private surveillance systems in China may be pretty leaky.<p>I wonder if the information is leaked through hacks or compromised individuals.
The big difference is China is openly undemocratic and the citizens know what they are up against. Here its posturing, misdirection, propaganda, nebulous lists, secret process and the exact same thing only under cover and pretense all working like clockwork to lull the citizens into complacency.<p>Dial back 10-15 years and try to imagine the response to a news item like this. Hysteria about totalitarianism from the media, endless interviews with academics, ngo and human rights organizations. Grandstanding by politicians and citizens. Where are all these noisy vocal folks? What is orchestrated and what is real?
Even though this article is about data on Chinese citizens, I kinda wonder if the Chinese government doesn't keep a big database of what American folks are doing, too.<p>I mean, why not?<p>They've the got the hackers. They've got the big DB. They've got the absence of laws preventing such a practice.
I was really surprised to see my Chinese friend pay the restaurant bill using WeChat, just by flashing a QR code. Which means they know all the data a typical social network can handle, but also how much you are paying where.
I often wonder what's missing to create and simulate a detailed economic model down to the individual level for and entire country or even the world.<p>There are only 7 billion people to simulate, that doesn't actually sound like that much anymore.<p>Obviously one would not simulate every individual with realistic human-like AI, but with a statistical economic model.<p>How much and what kind of data would one need for this to be useful, for example to predict if a certain new political initiative will actually work?<p>Or is this already being done? Or is it not needed? Or just still too expensive?
As if this system didn't exist within the US. Credit and bank account spending records have long been a treasure trove of analytics on how people go about their day to day. Social media extends on this even further since there are <i>many</i> people who post EVERYTHING about them on these platforms.
If people are being tracked by the IMEI number, can't you patch android to just return a random IMEI number unique for every day or hour? The parts of the phone that actually use that number have it hardcoded in, the rest is just for display.
The big problem is black market for data/identities. Not only in China but in the world. Identity theft is quite huge. And a lot of those data weren't even stolen but was sold by those corrupt officials or staffs in some firms.
Much the same as in The Netherlands, where the police is proud to be able to track any move of any citizen through big cities (using installed cameras) and which is the country with the most telephone taps per citizen.<p>Really, many countries in Europe are basically run like Singapore.