I agree so much. How about we hear from some Chinese people about how they feel about the developments?
The few comments I've seen have expressed excitement and highlighted the extreme issues with Baidu. The outrage seems to be coming entirely from people with no real stake in this news.
I absolutely believe there's a discussion worth having about the extent capitulating to authoritarian demands is morally and practically allowable, but to dismiss it out of hand because it conflicts with Western notions of privacy while ignoring the cultural realities in China seems shortsighted.
> How about we hear from some Chinese people about how they feel about the developments?
How open do you think a typical Chinese person is going to be with you about how they think about their government's censorship? Unless they know and trust you really well, they're probably not going to criticize it to you even if they hate it. There are strong Chinese cultural taboos against criticizing your in-group in front of outsiders. These taboos operate from the level of the family up to the level of the country. See:
> The outrage seems to be coming entirely from people with no real stake in this news.
Everyone has a stake in this news. The Chinese government has shown increasing willingness to strong-arm Western companies actions in the West by holding their Chinese operations hostage. See a notable example in its recent actions over the treatment of Taiwan on airline websites (https://money.cnn.com/2018/07/25/news/companies/taiwan-china...).
Totally ignoring the morality of enabling authoritarian censorship in a foreign country, non-Chinese still have an interest keeping the domestic influence of that censorship regime to a minimum.
I know plenty of Chinese people who aren't a fan of censorship, and none of them have anything bad to say about Google.
> The Chinese government has shown increasing willingness to strong-arm Western companies actions in the West by holding their Chinese operations hostage.
If that's the real reason everyone is angry, then they should support Trump's tariffs and boycott everything manufactured in China.
> If that's the real reason everyone is angry, then they should support Trump's tariffs and boycott everything manufactured in China.
They very well may. However, it's not yet possible to "boycott everything manufactured in China" without going off to live in the woods somewhere, so that's not a realistic standard to hold anyone to.
I'm a Chinese citizen, and I used to comment on this kind of things to merely offer my perspective.
But I realized as long as my perspective didn't fit the narrative of Western media or general view by westerners, it gets downvoted (just like comments in this trend).
I understand that HN allows downvotes for disagreeing, and I think that causes self-censorship. But as an individual concerned about the amount of karma, I just choose to self-censor myself.
Sure why not provide the best tracking technologies to the worst regimes. I would also go even further and provide them services for the development of nuclear arsenal. Imagine all of these jobs that will be created in the US.
Where are you getting the idea that they're giving China the "best tracking technologies?" They're doing the same things that literally every other internet company in China is doing.
