Imagine if China did this

Do you think China doesn't do this?

China has massively increased laws specifically to prevent it. Premises require explicit and direct permission from an individual in order to use facial recognition, facing steam criminal fines for non compliance. This came into effect on June 1st of this year.

scmp.com/…/china-lays-down-law-facial-recognition…

The UK (i live here) is a mass surveillance hellscape.

the article is behind a paywall for me.

From the few sentences I was able to read it seems like they're talking about private providers.

I have a personal (positive) anecdote about facial recognition in China. My friend was drunk and decided to press SOS button near the river "just for fun", and and hour later he recieved a call asking if everything was ok.

Facial recognition was everywhere in China when I left about a year ago. I haven't been in the UK for a while, but as far as I know from others there's more surveillance in China than the UK.

Bypassing paywalls needs to be a basic skill you know how to do in the year of our internet 2025.

archive.is/ZnIU6

I don’t know why you think the laws magically don’t also apply to the government itself. If your take is going to always be “yeah but the evil communists aren’t going to be applying that to their own government” then there is literally never going to be any convincing you of anything being better in China, ever, because your baseline is always going to be disbelief.

but as far as I know from others there’s more surveillance in China than the UK.

The fuck are you on about mate? The UK is the surveillance capital of the world. China is absolutely fucking better than us in this regard. They have consistently tightened privacy laws of late, beginning with PIPL in 2021 which is as strong if not stronger than the EU’s GDPR law because it does not provide a “legitimate interest” processing scope and they have been increasing privacy with the new tighter laws this year.

They are absolutely better than the US and UK in this regard, and because the EU is bureaucratically slow China is now pulling ahead in privacy laws. Some of the new EU laws currently under consideration are looking towards China’s implementation because they are becoming first to implement and thus leading other countries on implementation.

Saying that China doesn't have mass surveillance is as ridiculous as saying that it'll collapse in a year.

Is the mass surveillance in the room with us right now?

According to you it is in the room with you, but it's not allowed to be anywhere else outside of the UK.

Mate you are not being coherent.

The point here is whether western digital privacy is superior to Chinese digital privacy. What you have not caught up on is the fact that Chinese digital privacy has significantly surpassed the west and you are too much of a racist west-supremacist to take on new information that contradicts your supremacist ideology. You spent so much time on reddit internalising the concept that dem sneaky chinese are lies and cheats that your brain just completely shuts down at the very idea that they might be doing it better than the superior white west that deserves supremacy. This is the ideology guiding your thought process.

The only thought you have in your head is “china = mass surveillance” and “west = superior”. You have nothing going for you beyond that, it’s entirely vibes based which is what makes it so obvious it’s a thought created by propaganda. On the otherhand I could talk quite precisely about the information we have on five eyes, nsa and gchq mass surveillance. The UK’s use of face recognition. Palantir. Snowden. And so on. China? No evidence. All you’ve got is “they censor the internet” which, funnily enough, the UK that I’m cursed to be stuck in is doing significantly fucking more.

This provides evidence for a hypothesis I had a few months(years?) back. That as conditions in the west worsen, people in the west will just insist that the “bad guy countries” are worse, regardless of evidence or material reality. It really does look like as the survalliance state increases and worker’s and minority rights collapse in the west, westerners will still be insisting it is “fine” because evil China is even worse. “We may be forced by our capitalist overlords to work 24 hours a day, but those damn evil chinese commies force their people to work 25 hours a day!”

You're basing your assumptions on words of a person who probably has never been to China, instead of the one who lived there for over a decade...
I was trying to point out that there is no perfect country, and "the grass is always greener...", but your outtake was that "the evil west is pushing it's idea through lusterko0 ?