Summary
Many Americans are migrating to RedNote, a Chinese-owned app based in China, raising significant privacy and security concerns.
Experts warn that RedNote, based in China, is subject to Chinese laws, including the Personal Information Protection Law and Data Security Law, which grant the government rights to request data and cooperation with intelligence operations.
Enforcement of these laws is often opaque. Analysts highlight risks of data collection, algorithm manipulation, and censorship on RedNote.
Critics argue the U.S. lacks comprehensive privacy laws, driving users to platforms like RedNote that may pose even greater risks than TikTok.
Boo hoo! The US can’t spy on it’s people anymore because everyone got wise and switched to foriegn apps.
This has nothing to do with the security or privacy of the people. They’re pissed because they’re losing power over them.
On a side note, everyone that has joined REDnote is waking up to the lifetime of propaganda the american government has been feeding them. This past week has been wild.
got wise and switched to foriegn apps.
The Chinese aren’t the ones firing people for posting pro Palestinian things on social media or attacking protestors on college campuses or protecting white supremacists in Oregon or Washington. That’s our agencies, our cops.
First of all: US companies and agencies will be assholes about what you post, wherever the content is hosted. Same for Chinese companies and agencies.
Second: I’m not advocating for using US state-controlled social media. But China-controlled social media is not any better, and I certainly wouldn’t call switching to it “getting wise”.
Particularly switching to one that’s known to inject keyloggers into its webviews, especially when keyloggers seem to be a staple of Chinese state surveillance.
As we can see, the vendor finally sat up and took official notice of this severe, privacy-affecting software bug on June 25th–only five days before Wu, who has previously tweeted about a vulnerability affecting the same Sogou software, was paid a visit by Chinese authorities.
Wu explicitly drew this connection in my discussion with her:
Five days after Tencent (Shenzhen) admits to the IME vulnerability, the Chinese person (in Shenzhen) who originally publicized it suddenly gets dragged in by the cops and forced offline.
NONE of them could read English to see my account does not even make China look bad, it was all Baidu fucking translate and demands why I was talking about Signal and the keyboard
Her account concluded with an unsettling revelation about the risk she would face if she were to continue tweeting: having already received two “strikes” from the authorities, a third could mean a years-long prison sentence.
I had to sign and fingerprint a “confession”.
Ya but when it’s posted on a social media they can’t control and you aren’t American, they can’t stop it. It’s why videos of the genocide were all over Tik Tok but not US social media. The US does the same things, but with Instagram and similar (even in your first article it shows they have that capability and worse. Which checks out, I’ve had Instagram and FB make ad suggestions for things I’ve searched on completely different apps or web pages, or sometimes just something I’ve talked about.)
I would argue that Chinese controlled social media is better if you’re trying to get past US censored channels and surveillance and you live in the US. Same if I was in China, I’d be saying the about US social media probably.
Of course fediverse service would be the best case scenario.
there’s genuinely been some class consciousness getting into play
i saw some users from both countries compare prices of eggs and vegetables, and they even did the necessary math of accounting for average wage and cost of living. the chinese users are not allowed to talk about their politics (sadly; this is a bad thing) but they are allowed to talk about foreign politics and they are probably bigger fans of Luigi Mangione even than i have seen in English speaking social media. there are candid discussions of queerphobia as well in its different social (and for the US, political too) manifestations between countries.
The funny thing is at any point the US government can ban the collection of personal user data. It could just be illegal for any company to do this in the US.
But like you said, it’s just about the US wanting to spy on its own citizens but not wanting other countries to.
I just learned from red note that Chinese people don’t pay property taxes. Once they pay off their mortgage, they just own their home. I’m definitely the one living in a third world country.
I thought that was kind of the point… people started using red note because it was openly what the government fears Tictoc could be as a form of protest.
What’s next a news story that says people printing out their browser history and dropping it off at the chinese embassies, might be giving their private data to china?
If that’s true then people are more stupid than i thought
No shit
Someone: and they just hand over their SSN to you?
Zuckerberg: Stupid fucks
Yeah, obviously, but the US isn’t going to implement privacy laws because that would impact American tech corporations as well, who also do mass data collection.
Which means they’ve legislated themselves into a game of whack a mole. Without true regulations all they can do is wait for the next mole to pop up.
Incoming: all apps offered on the appstore must be whitelisted and approved by the DOGE. If a social media apps is not approved they can sell themselves within 24h to Musk in order to get apprlval.
If all my data is for sale and China can just buy all my data from Meta, Amazon, Google, etc. Then why not just skip the middleman? At least if I give my data directly to the CCP, Zuckerberg won’t have access to it.
I think we need legislation to give us privacy in the world wide web and in that aspect you are correct. Where I disagree is that information is harmless and you dont care if the CCP has it or the US has it. In the USA we have freedoms that chinese dont have, also hundreds of thousands chinese nationals are coming through the mexican border. Why are they coming to the US by the hundreds of thousands if China is good and the US is bad. Joining another chinese app is insane and if they reach huge #s they will ban those apps as well.
I agree with you on the web privacy legislation, but the point u/Filthmontane was making is that the CCP could have our data anyway, by buying it from Meta or Google, so at least giving it directly to China is better (in that at least Meta and Google don’t have it). I think that argument is only half-serious, but after the whole Cambridge Analytica debacle still more serious than it should be…
When you sell data you choose what to sale. When you are the one collecting all that information you dont have a limit on what you can collect. Selling them data is safer than letting them collect from the source. I dont think we should be selling peoples information and a hell no to us letting china collect it.
