With respect to DJI your concerns are well-founded. DJI drones contain spyware and the US DoD has banned their purchase.

https://hotair.com/john-s-2/2020/07/24/security-analysts-rev...

https://www.theverge.com/2017/8/4/16095244/us-army-stop-usin...

You can safely consider them an arm of PLA. Their main recruitment event is https://www.robomaster.com with over 100 Chinese universities participating. Its about building and programming little aimbotting war machines :-).

If you think DJI Mavic 3 is impressive just imagine what they are supplying army with.

I have an old phone that I install their app on. Their app isn't even available on the app store anymore, you have to download it directly from them.

I know that doesn't answer your question regarding ethics, but I absolutely don't trust them from a security perspective. Very good product, though.

It's on the Apple App Store, but not on the Google Play Store (since November 2020). The officially stated reason is something about a change in file formats, but that seems like a flimsy excuse for being unavailable in the most popular app store in the world for an entire year.

I also installed it on an unused spare phone, and consider that device tainted forever.

You could watch the tone of this comment to get a much better reaction.

How’s that?

It has “red scare” vibes to me, not that you intended as such. It was a decent point, but I think the contagion word especially so soon after Covid is perhaps a poor word choice. I don’t think caution is unwarranted when dealing with products made in China, like nearly every cell phone ever made, or this camera drone.

That’s a totally fair point and I’ve edited my post to more properly reflect how I think about it, without the virus word association.

I’m also skeptical of other products made in other countries, but there are vastly more consumer electronics products sold in America made in China than any other country, along with open hostility to some Western companies who want to sell in China without undue government influence.

I’m skeptical of all my purchases independent of where they were manufactured, but threat assessment isn’t context blind. I’d be more suspicious of a Saudi-made iPhone than a Chinese one, but less suspicious of an Indian iPhone than either. I’m sure my own unconscious biases are feeding into these suspicions, but I honestly don’t have reasonable alternatives to most of my electronics made in any particular country. The news tells us to fear Huawei, which makes me wonder what other warnings we may not be hearing. Do other countries warn against using American products and services?

I’d be curious about reliability and quality control variance between countries of manufacture, but I suspect that timely data on this would be hard to gather.

I quite like the vast majority of my products, wherever they are made. I just want trustworthy products made safely by willing employees paid fair wages for reasonable working hours. In that regard, it’s hard to find anything I know to meet these criteria, even when it’s made in USA.

Buying better isn’t always buying less, but they can be complementary goals.

> Do other countries warn against using American products and services?

The EU warns against US based cloud infrastructure.

But does the US warn against EU based cloud infrastructure?

Kinda?

https://www.computerworld.com/article/2509944/eu-upset-by-mi...

> everyone out of China is communist contagion

That’s just inflammatory. There are indeed reasons to be skeptical and careful about Chinese imports because of the actions and politics of the state among other reasons… but there you’re just name calling. Do you have actual reasons for your doubts or are they just “bad guys” to you?

I typed a reasonable reply to this but it got flagged. It shouldn’t have been flagged, it was reasonable and didn’t label anyone as “bad guys.” I don’t like that we can’t talk about DJI being bad, because they are a Chinese company, despite it being obviously true.

DJI also sends data to US GOVT agencies as required by law. To label any company "bad" simply because of their compliance to law is a rather self-limiting view.

Most tech stuff is made in China. Why does is matter so much if the capitalists harvesting the fruits of the Chinese workers are American rather than fellow Chinese?

> I think it’s totally reasonable to assume that a Chinese company is anti-human by default

Completely, totally deranged. I recommend diversifying your news sources.