News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:U.S. Warns Of Spy Dangers Of Chinese-Made Drones by adventured on Wednesday May 29, 2019 @12:27PM (#20042193)
It's not a debate over whether the US hoovers up information. Most of this US vs China debate centers on one thing: which side do you want to give your information to. That is what is being argued over; that dispute is going to get worse for a while yet as China pushes outward globally in its tech ambitions.

The better alternative: I don't want anyone to have my information - unfortunately is largely not going to be an option. The choice will mostly be between the US and China (or in some cases, European tech providers, which will frequently work with the US). If it's not already that way, it certainly is going to be in the next 10 or 20 years.

Re:U.S. Warns Of Spy Dangers Of Chinese-Made Drones by taneq on Thursday May 30, 2019 @05:58AM (#20049712)
The issue is that everyone's burned out by ridiculously long overly-broad EULAs written in impenetrable legalese. The general sentiment even, here on HN where people should know better, is "sure, they SAY they can do those things but (it's just boilerplate | they wouldn't really ever do that stuff | they really just meant this much more benign thing | they need that access to provide the product | it helps them debug problems)". And then people act all shocked when, once again, a company does precisely what it told you it was going to do.

A classic example is the "we collect your data to provide X service" / "you can disable service X" that we see all over the place. Everyone reads it as "you can disable data collection" but that's not what it says, and it's not what really happens.

The better alternative is to not accept this kind of invasiveness but the ease and convenience of giving in is too seductive for most people, so we invent a comfort belief that it's somehow benign or at worst irrelevant.