<story><title>Drone Maker D.J.I. May Be Sending Data to China, U.S. Officials Say</title><url>https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/29/technology/dji-china-data-drones.html?_r=0</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>GCU-Empiricist</author><text>Considering that China has the great firewall due to it&amp;#x27;s government censorship I&amp;#x27;m a bit shocked to see this as the top comment.  The United States has distasteful problems with ubiquitous monitoring, but implying it is equivalent to China seems like failing to consider that there are qualitatively different levels of totalitarianism.</text></item><item><author>crappybird</author><text>All android phone are definitely sending data to United States. Why is sending data to one country better than sending data to another?&lt;p&gt;For US citizens, this might be irrelevant (not so much if we go by the leaks). But for everyone living anywhere else on the globe, owning a smartphone means usually owning an endpoint for one of the giant corporate data sinks which its government can easily access.&lt;p&gt;I understand that it is the price I have to pay for a free (sic) OS and play services. But I use it because of a lack of viable libre and open alternative.&lt;p&gt;And I have about as much choice as someone in the market for a decent quadcopter unwilling to send data to China.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>TaylorAlexander</author><text>I don’t fully understand your argument. Because China has the great firewall they’re worse? I don’t really see how the firewall relates to surveillance in this way. I agree the firewall is a human rights issue in the way that US prisons are a human rights issue, but I’d be hesitant to say that because China is bad in this one way, the fact that they perform surveillance is made worse. The US is the global leader in surveillance as far as I’m aware. We keep 0-day backdoors in computer hardware that was designed here, and there’s some uncertainty as to whether we arranged for those backdoors or only found them (NSLs make it difficult&amp;#x2F;impossible to know).&lt;p&gt;Further you dismiss the parent comment as implying the US and China’s surveillance are equivalent, but I don’t see that as the claim. There is a lot of shocked surprise in the news when we find that China is doing something we don’t like with our data or computers, but we ignore that the NSA builds massive data centers for data on the global population, we kill people based on that data, and we also engage in a global hacking war. And I think it’s important to make sure that when we talk about China, we’re also willing to talk about the US. If we never talk about what we do, someone else’s bad behavior will look warped.&lt;p&gt;The US and China are not equivalent, but it’s hard to talk about one fairly in this context without mentioning the other.</text></comment>
<story><title>Drone Maker D.J.I. May Be Sending Data to China, U.S. Officials Say</title><url>https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/29/technology/dji-china-data-drones.html?_r=0</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>GCU-Empiricist</author><text>Considering that China has the great firewall due to it&amp;#x27;s government censorship I&amp;#x27;m a bit shocked to see this as the top comment.  The United States has distasteful problems with ubiquitous monitoring, but implying it is equivalent to China seems like failing to consider that there are qualitatively different levels of totalitarianism.</text></item><item><author>crappybird</author><text>All android phone are definitely sending data to United States. Why is sending data to one country better than sending data to another?&lt;p&gt;For US citizens, this might be irrelevant (not so much if we go by the leaks). But for everyone living anywhere else on the globe, owning a smartphone means usually owning an endpoint for one of the giant corporate data sinks which its government can easily access.&lt;p&gt;I understand that it is the price I have to pay for a free (sic) OS and play services. But I use it because of a lack of viable libre and open alternative.&lt;p&gt;And I have about as much choice as someone in the market for a decent quadcopter unwilling to send data to China.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>justinjlynn</author><text>As though the invasion of privacy might be acceptable depending on who&amp;#x27;s committing the act... and how much or how often they do it and for what reasons. If it unjust, it&amp;#x27;s unjust; it doesn&amp;#x27;t matter if its China or any of the Five Eyes members doing it, it&amp;#x27;s still just as wrong.</text></comment>