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Comment by redisman | Hacker News Reader

I find it funny how many people pick a random Chinese phone in their bid for privacy (???)

I think it's less about privacy and more about what the invading actor will/can actually do. People are less concerned about the Chinese government's reach vs. the NSA or other three letter agencies in the US. I suppose if you are important enough to the Chinese government whatever they have on you could be used as blackmail, but most 'regular' people don't fall into that category.

> People are less concerned about the Chinese government's reach vs. the NSA

Wait what? You’re 180 degrees wrong.

He is right. US has complete power over people on their soil and basically in Europe and Asia as well. They do a LOT of extraditions of other countries citizens when they go traveling or to business trips from their citizenship countries.

China, on the other hand, does not seem to give a single f* about foreigners, only about their own citizens. Most people are not so are not really endangered even if chinese spyers do know what they handle on their phones. So in battle between US spyers/China spyers I'd better give my data to Chinese, if I don't have a choice not to share my data at all.

China, as well, don't try to make extraterritorial laws (like financial regulations), so it's harder to even be targeted by CCP if your are a foreigner.

You should talk to this Swedish guy. He was captured in Thailand(!) by Chinese agents:

https://www.dw.com/en/china-sentences-swedish-publisher-to-1...

I do feel bad for the man, but he's not just a "Swedish guy."

Of the two, which government do I think is more evil? China's. Which government do I, a permanent resident of America, think could more immediately make my life harder by being able to invade my privacy? America's.

Well, as somebody who has travel to China for business, I would not touch any Chinese hardware or OS at all. In the US and EU you have a working legal system.

Thats moving the goalposts a bit though. The question wasnt in the context of those that go to, travel through or deal with Chinese government on the regular.

But rather in the context of those in America that largely only deal with American government officials and those outcomes.

And to my knowledge. China isnt abducting people or conduction renditions on american soil.

As I said, I am not such a person. Most of the English-speaking world consists of the same.

As I said - I agree that China's government is worse. In fact my previous employer had a policy that company devices just didn't cross that border, even when traveling for work. But it's still not a factor in which devices I purchase myself.

> Of the two, which government do I think is more evil?

But that's not what the original comment said.

I didn't say they said that. It's also not my whole comment. Not sure what you're getting at.

I think the point is that the average person who resides in the US is more concerned with Orwellian overreach from the NSA than the CCP surveillance apparatus.

The Chinese secret police don’t present a threat to me, whereas the NSA has the means, motive (at the leadership level) and opportunity to violate my natural rights.

Depends on the person. Those of us with ties to lands within Chinese sphere of influence are rightly more cautious. Others just don’t care.

If one of the US TLAs has decided to target you you’re fucked. No amount of switching phones and OS is going to help you, short of completely disconnecting from the internet and not using any sort of financial infrastructure.

Likewise, if the criminal underworld has decided to target you, you are equally fucked.

What I think is funny: There are more privacy for consumer laws for Chinese tech companies in China than for US tech companies in USA! It's wild west essentially in USA in this regard. I'm sure what Apple is doing is also against the European Union's GDPR privacy laws. US is missing out here...

GDPR specifically excludes law enforcement so it doesn’t apply here. The sad thing is Apple was legally required to allow law enforcement to search iCloud backups before they implemented this system, so nothing fundamentally changed.

However, after this backlash you can bet other manufacturers will continue to hide what their actually doing.

As you've written... why there has to change something when it works already for law enforcement.

I think Apple was actually designing this system internally as an improvement in terms of privacy. Doing Perceptual hashing on the phones is more open and thus auditable than doing the same thing on their servers. They set things up to require multiple different images to match etc.

However, the perception was very different.

This kind of technology should not be on phone. Industry standard is doing it on the cloud. It requires only little code changes (let's say in the time frame of 5 years) that law enforcement or whoever says: Please extend that to offline photos and then it's only a few code changes to make that happen. I don't want a ticking time bomb and Apple pinky finger promises that this will not be abused in future.

That’s not a bid for privacy, it’s a bid for spite.

Picking a Chinese phone based on financial circumstances, however, is understandable IMO.

That would be... literally all phones available today, wouldn't it? With the possible exception of the $2000 Librem 5 USA.

However, as one who's moved from an iPhone to a Nokia 8110 with KaiOS, which I in no way argue is as secure as iOS:

It has less on it. It has far less on it. It has my phone calls, a handful of text messages, and while it has email access right now, I'm experimenting with if I actually need that, or can remove it (leaning towards removing it). And my calendar.

The camera is horrible, so I just carry a pocket digital camera with me now if I care to take photos, which don't end up on the phone.

If I don't give it wifi privileges (which it currently has, but I've been running with wifi off and cell data off to see how that works, and the answer so far is "quite well"), there's simply not much it can really do to my accounts or network.

I might make this change. Are you using any kind of app for 2FA like Google Authenticator?

I still have a few things like Authenticator rooted on my iPhone. I mostly use hardware tokens, so Authenticator is nice to have, but not critical for daily use. Signal is another one, I'm currently using the linked devices, but I don't have a "new root" yet.

I believe there are some Google Authenticator apps for KaiOS, just not in the main app store, and I've not gone through the process of working out sideloading yet.

You can use a password manager to do TOTP codes.

Google Authenticator is sort of a crap option for doing TOTP, all things considered.

> Are you using any kind of app for 2FA like Google Authenticator?

I'd love to go feature phone, but would be missing two essentials for work purposes:

- A 2FA application (eg Google Authenticator, Authy)

- A password manager (eg BitWarden, KeePass, etc)

I can do without emails etc but not those two, yet whenever feature phones try and be more feature-some they do the same old emails, FB, WhatsApp etc instead.

Japan, Thailand, and Vietnam manufacture a lot of phones.

By "random Chinese phone", are we talking about PINE, or the various OEMs that make android phones?

The Pinephone seems good as far as being mostly open, cheap, physical switches but... I guess the modem is not open. Anyway have I personally tested that the switches actually work/no soft switch somewhere no... I'm mostly after the potential emerging market (apps) over privacy.

I have a KDE edition Pinephone that I intend to use more overtime but primarily an Android user.

Also I get super annoyed when Android bundles stuff on your phone. I realize you can get rid of it/the cheap phone has to get paid somehow... but like having notifications that you can't slide away... things like that. Want more control over I realize Linux phones are lacking in software, pretty bad... Plasma looked really nice, Phosh not so nice (home screen) but it works out of the box though particularly detecting external screens. Anyway I'm looking forward to it improving over time, a cheap Samsung Dex-like experience is my desire.

> I guess the modem is not open

The Pinephone modem is partially open already:

https://linuxsmartphones.com/hackers-develop-open-source-fir...

Ahh that's nice yeah I think the keywords were "proprietary blobs" or something like that, anyway that's cool

Edit: another thing to my parent comment, ads in your voicemail... the visual voicemail app in Android. Omg that annoys me so much, thankfully I have not been getting many voicemails anymore.

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