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Comment by l5870uoo9y | Hacker News Reader

The advantages that the article claims China has aren't unattainable for the West, but it does – as with other political issues — require new political movement that allows us to change our society to benefit from vast opportunities that technology brings and to avoid the dangers. China's ruthless pragmatism and decisiveness highlights the lack of political leadership and visions in the West. And those political movements we have are of little use, be it right or left.

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You can get most of the social benefits without throwing away the notion of privacy.

In the West, all sorts of data are already available to those with legitimate interests. Traffic data is used to optimise city planning; police can track your phone, with a warrant; power networks read your smart meter and so on. The key difference to the situation described in the OP is that there are controls around it.

In terms of reaping the benefits of AI, a willingness to discard privacy isn't as important as building the capability in data collection, warehousing, analytics, and so on. A lackadaisical attitude to privacy such as handing everything over to the private sector will just make it easier to commit all sorts of crimes: identity theft, blackmail, stalking, etc. Rather than a structural advantage to the Chinese system, it sounds more like technical (legal?) debt that may take years to pay back once it's acknowledged that privacy controls actually have a legitimate purpose.

Devils advocate here: by stripping away privacy controls and monitoring every bit and byte on the Chinese internet, the government would also have an easier time identifying and tracking down blackmailers, stalkers, etc.

As for the likelihood that these un-safeguarded powers will be abused for personal or political gain, well, like you said, technical/legal debt.

Haven't we already kinda thrown away privacy? Yes the police can track your cell phone with a warrant, but many times they've been shown to use stingrays instead. On top of that we have the snowden revelations showing that all our communication is tracked by the government. We appear to currently have the worst of both worlds where the privacy is gone but it's mostly being used for purposes that are against our interests.

>China's ruthless pragmatism and decisiveness highlights the lack of political leadership and vision

It highlights the disregard for individual rights and privacy. Giving your data away to a bunch of people trying to build new business is not something I want to be a part of.

Possibly, but given the potential benefits of exposing data, I think we should develop a system for granting access to proper anonymized data. Besides oversigt and restrictions in such a process, companies gaining access should also have a product that is "broadly beneficial" to society.

> proper anonymized data

Until it's not.

>to proper anonymized data

Good luck with that. It's not an easy problem.[1][2] AOL thought they were clever enough and release a bunch of search query data in 2006 only to find out it wasn't anonymous.[3]

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K-anonymity

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differential_privacy

3. http://theory.stanford.edu/~sunabar/papers/setanon.pdf

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