Regarding Snapchat - the company that cares about privacy wouldn't require so many permissions (including a permission to receive SMS messages).
Also, you can opt out of Wechat just as you can opt out of FB, so I'm not sure I see your point. Sure you can't opt out of chinese censorship in general but the chilling effect in both cases is where I see the analogy. It's bad for online platforms to do that whether by coercion or direct force.
At present, in Western nations, it is somewhat easy to, say, self-host certain social media platforms (from Wordpress to Mastodon) for friends and family and whatnot that could be used for more private, less advertiser-monitored social media interaction. Assuming you get buy in among your friends, this pretty much avoids issues with advertiser and employer snooping that you have on large social media sites. You can then keep your Facebooks and Twitters for your "public face" (or ditch them entirely).
I don't know if the same applies in China.
Losing a job can be just as catastrophic as a jail term.
Especially if it brands you for future job positions too, as "that person that was fired because X".
Not everybody has it as good as in-demand developers, job wise.
And employer blacklists (e.g. of union types) have been a thing for ages, and can wreck havoc to a person's life (killing their economic prospects) in the way that a jail sentence might not.
Is it a guarantee that you will get quality food in a democratic country's prison, like prisons of US?
So while Snap takes the high road here and tells people they're not bleeding or collecting information on their users (which is true), what they don't say is that still all the info that has been bleeding from mobile users through any other of their weather and emoji apps can and will be used against them in Snapchat Advertising campaigns.
If they didn't play along, they'd be quickly out of any media planners' heads, and they're already struggling hard against Facebook in the ad ecosystem.
Source: I do this stuff for business. Throwaway obviously.
Well, the thing is that FB may have a real names policy but they really only occasionally enforce it.
Plus I think it's possible to just not be FB friends with anyone in your company or even use FB's permission system to hide controversial opinions. And I haven't heard of advertisers putting people in jail or firing them for their opinions. Here, it seems like you're confusing "creepy" and "actually has the ability to harm you".
But most people or many people, indeed connect their FB profile to their employer and wind-up censoring themselves accordingly. But that actually seems like the ordinary censoring of "peer pressure" that has always happened in among with the people who someone chooses to associate with.
If I went to the company picnic and hung-out with co-workers and boss, I would be self-censors like heck - fortunately, I'm able to avoid such situations which I find miserable experiences on all levels. God help me if I have to spend a lot of my social time like that.
It's easy to summarize this as "really what you mean is you're too lazy to set up communication which you're employer can't see" but I wouldn't want to imply the situation isn't a problem. That the medium requiring least effort broadcasts to people's employers, that is a problem, just a slightly different problem.
I understand what you're saying about your employer, but there are different levels of self-censorship. My level of self-censorship for friends who work at the same company as me would be very different compared to acquaintances at the company and my boss. I'm ok with the first one because it's what I would do for my friends anyway. I know there are ways to toggle privacy/whatever to affect what people can see but at the end of the day I'm always going to assume my employer can see any regular post I make on Facebook through one means or another.
Regulations are slow and won't necessarily protect the first people who are harmed (see subprime crisis) but they can make it much harder to do similar things in the future
Lawsuits don't always work and are heavily weighted against consumers but do provide some protection
Public goodwill is huge. If lots of people got really hurt from a Facebook or google data compromise, id bet people stop using them. Seems crazy now but there are alternatives and Facebook is not essential. All these companies (and many other non tech ones, like banks for example) are strongly incentivized to not harm the public in a large way because the execs would lose their jobs and careers
These protections are FAR from perfect and shouldn't prevent you from losing sleep, but imagine living in a country where the government is incentivized to not protect its citizens through regulation or enforce standard legal protections
More chilling is the potential social acceptance of such snooping in the name of social harmony, trust in government etc. if people no longer believe such censorship or oppression is bad, you have a real problem
Edit: The NSA is an analogous threat in the US, but to my knowledge that info isn't used to secure the reputations and positions of government leaders. Also there is a huge public backlash against them, not sure if the same exists in china
It's one thing to fire someone for having a political opinion (like Google recently) and just to have an opinion about people you work with.
You can't help having an opinion. We're not logical robots. All we can hope to do is to be aware of or decision making process d not to let irrelevant opinions influence it.
I don't want to give HR any more reasons to mistrust me: say I supported candidate X, and HR think's X and their supporters are racist/misogynist/anti-immigrant. Now if someone raises a complaint about me, legitimate or not, and HR sees that, they're more likely to assume I'm guilty. And at the end of the day, all else being equal (and it often is with HR because they aren't really able to evaluate technical work well), who gets the promotion: the person HR sees as edgy, controversial, and potentially an asshole because of their political views, or the person who doesn't share their political views?
Things shouldn't be this way, but they are.
You are correct. However, I don't think that it can is even remotely close to China's censorship.
And now it's happening with advertisement too. Tell your friend you just took a pregnancy test via FB messenger and now every advertiser on the internet knows just what to sell you. Most people don't really care about this yet, but most people don't realize that this kind of thing could be used in the future for all sorts of dystopian shit. All this data is being stored. I think Google is treating my data pretty responsibly at the moment, but I could see it being used for anything from background checks (e.g. checking search history or message logs for indicators of illegal activity) to blackmail.
On a tangential sidenote, I read an article about Snap recently about how they're trying to position themselves as a different kind of social media company. They don't (yet) perform highly sophisticated targeted advertising and don't save a lot of actual content data. You typically are only connected to your actual friends, not some random guy from your high school class, your aunt, your ex-girlfriend, and your coworker. There's also no public profile for employers to search for and snoop around. Of course these are typically the case for any tool focused on direct messaging but I hope as Snap expands they can be both successful and keep these fantastic qualities.