Sucks, but the so-called “second world” is witnessing what sees as brisk business, deals with anyone from Canada to Taliban Afghanistan.
However I do not sugarcoat the fact that some countries are now handing themselves from one falling hegemony with another, one that allows greater reckless capitalism but devalues individual personal freedoms.
From what I heard, in US or EU people are supposed to have some privacy, they have a right to privacy. Police should get a warrant to be able to obtain information about you. And if those are violated, news articles are written, people get outraged and sometimes someone is even punished. In China, you have no right to privacy. Everyone knows the government is following their every step, every action, and they are ok with having no privacy.
My opinion on China is also mixed. On one hand, their policies seem reasonable, they do not engage in proxy wars, support green energy, etc. On the other hand, workers have desparate lives, threaten their neighbours, restrict much more freedom of citizens …
If the US has a right to privacy, it’s basically nonexistent.
Almost every piece of technology is tracked through identifiers, tracking cookies, location services, cellular data transmission, nearby devices/services, facial recognition or license plate recognition, and more.
Data brokers buy, sell, and trade data in the PBs, and a lot of AI is useful on is training on our data to adjust wages, pricing of goods and services, or premiums like insurance rates, etc. Pair that with the media, they feed you only enough to be a distraction or just enough to mislead. They track how much you watch and what times so they can keep you in an echo chamber or keep you supressed if you go against the grain.
They know all about you, height, weight, age, sex, who you hang out with, where you’ve lived, your income, your spending habits, driving patterns and habits, where you’ve visited and how often, where you get groceries, where you shop online. They figure out what ads to display for you, what times it works best, what might be controversial enough to get you to click a link. They use algorithms to share upsetting or conflicting into to get people sucked into the content they want you to consume.
There is so much subliminal and subconscious control, it’s hardly noticeable. It probably sounds super “tinfoil hat”, but when you have enough information on how its gathered and executed, you realize with how much you know and have learned, there probably so much more you don’t know or haven’t learned.
And of course, there’s surely a cutout or a shell company belonging to some hostile intelligence apparatus waving millions to buy that data, so that eventually they get to know whom to target for stealing information by hacking whatever they have, or start a blackmail operation.
No doubt!
I have meant goverment tracking, police shouldn’t have access to this data without a permission (but don’t know, if it is true). Also, people don’t know about the tracking, and would be surprised if they would discover this. In China they know they are tracked by everything by companies /government. That’s the difference, in the west people at least expect to have a privacy.
Well, yeah maybe in theory the US supposedly has privacy.
The NSA over 20 years ago began to surveil all citizens post 9/11
https://www.aclu.org/issues/national-security/privacy-and-surveillance/nsa-surveillance
Police, specifically federal ICE agents, use Stingrays aka IMSI simulators to hijack cell signals to spy on users nearby and track them down.
https://sls.eff.org/technologies/cell-site-simulators-imsi-catchers
Maybe the US is worse for misleading its citizens into thinking they’re safe and have privacy, but it is far from the truth. Is not about whether or not you have anything to hide, it’s about having peace of mind of actual security in data. Or hell just your day to day.
It’s like a cheater in a relationship. They accuse you of all these nasty things because they do it themselves and think if they do it so must everyone else be doing it too. Every accusation is an admission of guilt…