Hacker News Reader

Comment by ryandrake | Hacker News Reader

Why does it matter whether the company is Chinese or not? Isn't it bad enough that there's a background process running, unbeknownst to the user, and presumably uncontrollable by the user, that monitors the device's clipboard and has methods like containsBankAccount(String)?

View on HN

Sure it's bad but there are a couple of reasons why it matters that it's a Chinese company.

1. It feeds into the suspicion many have that many (most? all?) large Chinese companies are effectively controlled by the Chinese government. This could go as far as having backdoors in, say, Huawei routing equipment.

2. Effectively disclosing a user's personal information to the Chinese government could, in some cases, imperil their liberty, even their life. I'm talking about people the Chinese governments views as "dissidents". The same would be true if it were a Russian, North Korean, Iranian, Syrian or Sudanese company.

>It feeds into the suspicion many have that many (most? all?) large Chinese companies are effectively controlled by the Chinese government.

All is the correct answer. Just like it's not legal to own property in China, all companies are ultimately owned and controlled by the Chinese government. They have shiny, pretty, Western-looking front ends to attract foreign investment, but from a strictly legal standpoint, they're all owned by the government.

For some reason people forget that China is still a communist country. Nothing's changed other than it's gone from exporting rice to exporting phones.

China does indeed have the concept of private property, to the extent that China de facto recognizes the rule of law (which admittedly isn't that much):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Property_Law_of_the_People's_R...

It's not accurate to say China is "still a communist country." It could be more closely defined as a capitalist one-party state. That one party is the CCP, and they still revere Mao, but it's an open secret that they have embraced capitalism under a veneer of socialist populism.

That being said, it's not wrong to say that information in the hands of a Chinese company is a trivial step away from being information in the hands of the Chinese state.

Because China's government has been known to lean on manufacturers in the past to include malware and backdoors.

to be fair though, the NSA has been known to inject malware into american products without even telling the manufacturers

Very good question indeed. European smartphones send tons of data to US companies with are known to proactively cooperate with the NSA and consors, which is the same kind of problem. But for some reasons this seems to be fine for our rulers whereas it’s becoming an issue when China or Russia is involved. Not that I what a free pass for these two countries; on the contrary I would like to see more regulations for every non EU companies.

One reason is court jurisdiction. A domestic company is subject to, and therefore vulnerable to, court action/rulings/judgements. Suing a foreign company (especially one in China) is hopeless.

https://abovethelaw.com/2016/03/suing-chinese-companies-in-u...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com