Digital Surveillance is Omnipresent in China. Here's How Citizens Are Coping
AnonTechie writes:
Do you ever think about the digital footprint you leave when you are browsing the web, shopping online, commenting on social networks or going by a facial recognition camera? State surveillance of citizens is growing all over the world, but it is a fact of everyday life in China, where it has deep historical roots.
In China, almost nothing is paid for in cash anymore. Super apps make life easy: people use Alipay or WeChat Pay to pay for subway or bus tickets, rent a bike, hail a taxi, shop online, book trains and shows, split the bill at restaurants and even pay their taxes and utility bills.
The Chinese also use these platforms to check the news, entertain themselves and exchange countless text, audio and video messages, both personal and professional. Everything is linked to the user's mobile phone number, which is itself registered under their identity. The government may access the data collected by Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent, Xiaomi and other operators.
How do Chinese citizens experience this constant surveillance? In my book Living with Digital Surveillance in China: Citizens' Narratives on Technology, Privacy and Governance , I present research I conducted in China in 2019. Specifically, the book is based on 58 semi-structured in-depth interviews with Chinese participants recruited through colleagues at three universities in Beijing, Shanghai and Chengdu.
[...] So, what about us? We, in Western liberal democracies, are also exposed to digital surveillance. And our surveillance ideas are also shaped by our own socio-political, cultural, and economic contexts, with significant variations across different Western societies. My work suggests that some of our own privacy and surveillance narratives are quite close to the Chinese ones, while others clearly differ.
What about you? How do you see your own relationship to digital surveillance?
[Source]: The Conversation
[Also Covered By]: Fast Company
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