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Comment by _huayra_ | Hacker News Reader

Exactly. Considering how Samsung is coming out with cheaper phones these days due to competition, I don't think it's worth completely yeeting one's privacy out the window, even if the Xiaomi models have better specs. I know Android phones are still big Google spying devices, but given the state of the tech world, I'd prefer to have Google spy on me than a shadowy Chinese company.

Does it really matter if it has 4x the cameras of a cheap Samsung if it sends all the photos to some server in China on the sneak?

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It's interesting, because coming from a country that's been targeted by US interventionism in the past, I'm pretty ok with Xiaomi spying on me, not so much when it comes to Google.

I'm not too happy about anyone spying on me, and I'm also unhappy about corporations vetoing software I want to install.

Besides, one person's "targeted by interventionism" is another person's "liberated by democratic forces".

> Besides, one person's "targeted by interventionism" is another person's "liberated by democratic forces".

Does newspeaking it make it better?

And if one would look at the examples of "liberation by democratic forces" over the last decades I feel that it is somewhat difficult to find an instance that wasn't a prime example of securing natural ressources or ensuring of keeping the global power structure intact.

I might be naive (or even contrarian to the US policy) bbut wwere aare tthe purely humanistic examples of Uncle Sam mingling in foreign affairs?

Imho the US should keep their fingers out of others' proverbial cookie jars.

>Does newspeaking it make it better?

The difference in language is often just political rhetoric. The difference in substance became very clear to me talking to my grandfather who was liberated by democratic forces and would have been insulted by having that called "targeted by US interventionism".

There are good reasons for both sentiments based on actual, sometimes painful, experience. We should respect that.

It's a very complex and off-topic subject. That's why I'm not going into the details of the various conflicts in recent decades.

I am not denying that there are examples of democratic liberation. Especially from history. Take the Yugoslavia conflict. Intervention by an international force there was at the time probably the lesser evil. It stopped genocide (a great plus in my book) while at the same time generating hatred that created terrorism (a big minus).

There are no easy answers.

But most current interventions as well as many historic ones were not motivated by ulterior motives but by economic ones and questions of power.

Coming from Germany and having studied history I must ask myself when did liberation turn to intervention because of political or economical gains? While keeping the rhetoric more or less the same.

There is imho a difference between WW II or Yugoslavia and Kuwait. Or Irak. Or even Afghanistan. Or Serbia. Or different South American states were intervention is often less militaristic.

I feel we need to have a way to differentiate and look closer to be able to discuss without falling back to ideology or "party lines".

I agree completely. My intention wasn't to toe any party line. On the contrary, I think the history of many conflicts is so ugly and complex that people can legitimately feel very differently about the same event.

I can't even begin to imagine how various groups of people (ethnic groups, women, young men, ...) or individuals in Afghanistan may feel about the various interventions during the past half century.

Sure we were liberated by having a military junta take power for 21 years. Civil liberties vanished and people were secretly disappeared. Great democratic liberation!

I certainly don't claim that every intervention is liberation. My point is precisely that it's not that simple. It can be either or both at the same time for different people in different conflicts.

My point is that there's no such a thing as "liberation", since interventions are known to be used as a pretext to project power. Calling it "liberation" is an euphemism for what it really is. No nation should meddle in other's internal affairs.

I strongly disagree with that. In my opinion, the sovereignty of nation states does not have priority over all other concerns under all circumstances. But this is certainly a very complex issue.

And that's why countries have armies. Sovereignty is not a right that is granted by the UN Security council it's taken and held by military force.

Just slap Blokada on it. Personally I don't give a shit about privacy since I never see any advertising.

What use is it if a company knows everything about me when they can't use that information to sell me things?

Just install LineageOS on it and have nobody spy on you: https://wiki.lineageos.org/devices/#xiaomi

Just install ANOM

or Telegram

Or Signal

And have nobody spy on you

"Trust me, I'm Italian."

How does LineageOS stop the "little black box" which handles GSM/UTMS/etc traffic from spying on you? Or your telecom provider from tracking you?

Don't get me wrong, I like these free OS versions, but while I could teach my wife, my mother in law etc to manage Netguard, I couldn't teach them to handle Lineage, f-Droid all by themselves.

> How does LineageOS stop the "little black box" which handles GSM/UTMS/etc traffic from spying on you?

Is that part even made by Xiaomi?

Usually its made by Qualcomm.

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