Don't put India in the same basket as China

We have fundamental enforceable human rights, democratic government, independent judiciary, (way too much)state-independent media, functional Intellectual Property Rights(IPR) regime while China lacks all of these.

Also, India has not even begun to setup the kind of real-time mass surveillance, through millions of cameras, already in place (to be fair, US is comparable here) or the upcoming dystopian big data-driven, social network-like integrated citizen evaluation program, Social Credit System(SCS) in China.

So, its wildly inappropriate to mention India and China in the same vein here

"We have fundamental enforceable human rights, democratic government, independent judiciary, (way too much)state-independent media, functional Intellectual Property Rights(IPR) regime while China lacks all of these."

I don't agree with you here. Maybe you live in a different India. Democratic government -Yes Independent Judiciary - Nope. Look up about the recent Rafael Fiasco. Also, a judge was killed and replaced by a Yes man to protect a mafia politician. Search Justice Loya for more details

state-independent media - To some extent. But there are many ruling party pet new channels

Functional Intellectual Property Right ??? Really ?

> We have fundamental enforceable human rights,

Oh yes, you mean the one where a journalist is put under draconian NSA for criticizing the government.[0]

> democratic government

Oh right. The one where hate-mongering communal bigot is made the Chief Minister.[1]

Congratulations India!

> independent judiciary

Absolutely. I guess that' why the 4 senior-most judges of the Supreme Court of India came out and said that the democracy was at stake.[2] Isn't it?

> the upcoming dystopian big data-driven, social network-like integrated citizen evaluation program

By any chance, do you mean like the one used by 40 departments of Indian government to spy on it's citizen?[3]

> So, its wildly inappropriate to mention India and China in the same vein here

Oh it's absolutely appropriate to mention India and China in the same vein here.

[0] https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/manipur-journalist-ki...

[1] https://www.thequint.com/news/india/new-up-cm-yogi-adityanat...

[2] https://www.thehindubusinessline.com/news/supreme-court-cris...

[3] https://www.huffingtonpost.in/2018/09/07/the-indian-governme...

Nah. There has been pretty strong backlash against FB. GDPR is (as imperfect as it is) a thing. I don't see the West going down that road, disregarding catastrophic failure modes.

What do you call NSA surveillance? Pretty much all your life is online and NSA can get its hands on it in transit.

Government services are mostly exempted from GDPR restrictions. Google: GDPR Article 23.

Uh, Australia is the West.

educated ...reminiscent of contemporary video clip interviews with individuals saying I don't mind if the government reads my correspondence. I have nothing to hide.

But for an historic contrarian view:

Berlin 1931 (Weimar Republic): I don't mind if the government reads my letters. I've got nothing to hide.

Berlin 1936 (national socialism): You writings make you an enemy of the state!

"Nothing to hide", with the centers of power doing what they're doing, pretty much means "I'm obedient, I'm complicit, I swear allegiance.... you go on right ahead and rob that granny blind, take all the organs you want from that child... I'll be over here pretending to find the marble pattern on the wall terribly interesting".

Ironically, they are hiding that from themselves.

Exactly. And isn't it curious how many down votes the initial bland observation elicited? Strange.