A competent Western administration would have banned it all years ago. But instead of securing the future of Western civilization, they want detente and cheap plastic goods instead. Shrug.
If your business model relies on violating the privacy of others, your business deserves to die.
How is it any different from western apps listening to you and siphoning all data on your local network to 3 letter agencies?
I'm not denying that a lot of data is likely surreptitiously collected, but I'm talking microphone/camera in particular.
Most traffic is encrypted with HTTPS unless you can root every single device you own
we have microphone use indicators on mobile, and I would imagine it would be pretty clear if an app was uploading audio with even very basic monitoring tools.
Complicated smartphone OS, firmware, drivers might have bugs allow overrides of visual indicators.
Companies have also been known to secretly eavesdrop and not tell users before (Apple + Siri https://www.courthousenews.com/judge-approves-95-million-app...)
Do you know for sure whether PSP or CSME has ever done DMA, or fingerprinted stack/heap allocation patterns and timing, or inspected the contents of your disk (after FDE was done being decrypted, of course), to evaluate whether common packet capture software is installed, or even whether it's currently running?
Detecting spyware is one thing. Detecting surreptitious nation-state spyware that behaves differently when it's being observed is a different challenge entirely.
- stuff they saw online recently — ads or otherwise, which put the keywords in their mind
- or stuff they were already interested in recently
Not hard to imagine targeting algorithms picking up on either of these
You dont see those "coincidental" ads because your phone is listening to you, you see them because your freind showed interest in the product and theirs enough information to infer they talked to you about it. The good news is, your phone isn't listening to you without your consent. The bad news is, because it doesnt need to.
Do you still get ads for the exact thing you just bought for a week after buying it? :)
And yet, for reasons that remain beyond me, many Americans remain more fearful of the former than that latter.
"Get creative" might work well for fictional writing exercises, but is it such a sound strategy for assigning guilt? Surely you wouldn't like being prosecuted for crimes that someone "got creative" with in accusing you of, no?
Not sure where you got that consensus from, it sounds made up to me or at least outdated as of Feb 2026, especially on HN.
Please stop with the hyperbole. Shit is bad enough; more fake news from any direction doesn’t help.
Do chinese apps make use of all data they can access? Absolutely. Do western apps make use of all data they can access? Absolutely.
Both concepts are evil. Talking one is evil while dropping off the other is skew of discussion towards vilifying one side and omitting the subject.
Not to mention the use of the word "Western", which is the kind of bullshit I could write a smaller book about.
Oh they break it alright whenever they please. And they have been caught handsomely.
By continuing you agree to us sharing your data with our 954 partners…
It's very different from:
> ps aux # Every running process with full arguments
If you think these two cases are even remotely comparable, I don't know what to tell you.
I’m not in a position, nor do I have the skills, to fully validate exactly what I’m agreeing to. Let us assume that what I’m sharing is merely my app usage data: what I listen to, my likes, follows, comments, usage patterns, etc.
They share this data with 954 “partners” - what exactly does this mean? What other data do those organisations have? Who do they share it with?
I don’t think the average user has any chance of fully understanding what they’re agreeing to.
Also I’m living in the EU. If I want I can get all of the information which you asked for.
But on the other hand, companies purposefully make those information as obscure as possible. Also, I’m not sure that people would care even if it had been clear. People love free stuffs.
What if that was always a good idea.
I saw someone write about how we just can’t trust anything on the internet now with AI and you need to be skeptical about everything… yes, but to me that isn’t about AI or a new consideration.
Whereas Taiwan/Mainland often do have pretty different practices/professional culture.
The China that was a founding member of the United Nations was the Republic of China (ROC), and it controlled both mainland China and what we call Taiwan. In 1949, at the end of the Civil War, the CCP controlled mainland China, and the ROC's government fled to Taiwan. Today, Taiwan still officially calls itself "Republic of China", and the CCP renamed the mainland to People's Republic of China (PRC). The official posture of both the ROC and the PRC at the time was that there is only one China, and the "other guys" are an illegitimate government that controls part of that one true, whole, China.
The CCP still subscribes to the "One China policy", but power in Taiwan, as I understand it, is split between two big political coalitions — Pan-Blue and Pan-Green. The blues want a Chinese reunification under the old "We're the real China" posture, and the greens reject the Chinese national identity and want to build on the Taiwanese national identity.
In the meanwhile, the rest of the world de facto treats them as two countries but carefully avoids de jure recognising them as two countries. Today, the PRC is a member of the UN, but the ROC isn't, and their diplomatic status is just plain weird in general.
> Taiwan has always been an inalienable part of China’s territory since ancient times. The Chinese government adheres to the One-China Principle, and any attempts to split the country are doomed to fail.
/s/Mainland//
FTFY.
ps. UTM.app is a nice way to sandbox Discord, since it’s using the OS-level sandbox already in a way that prevents us from limiting it further with a .sb file. Takes some extra space, I suppose.
Meanwhile they do tell you they collect everything
https://www.mumuplayer.com/privacy-policy.html
Not to defend them, but just feel sad about the world.
(3) In order to ensure account security, identify and prevent malicious programs, and create a fair, healthy and safe environment, we will collect your device identifier information, product identification information, hardware and operating system information, installed application list, application process and product crash record information during your use of the service, including during the background operation of the application, so as to combat acts that damage the product environment or interfere with the normal operation of the product service.(Used to detect piracy, scan cheating programs or software, prevent cheating).
I would think they would be more restricted in what they can collect on a Phone OS (android in my case) but i still wonder if there is some way to fully isolate shady apps.
Specifically: can we market this [feature/change/refusal/etc...]?
iOS maybe. macOS no.
I mean besides the theorical high level threat, there is a very practical one maybe sufficient for suing the company if it was a western one (I don't work in legal, I don't know what I'm saying)
All you need is the ability to edit any byte on your hard drive. ;-)