Given that the NSA and that surveillance capitalism is everywhere, and given that I really dislike that, would it make sense to seek what I like about the internet (the potential for openess, anonimity, and privacy) in China without worrying about technical or political pushback of any kind?
In practice you and your devices can be searched at any time. Don’t do anything wrong and this is less likely to happen to you.
Tor can be used to browse services outside of China, but the majority of Chinese based services are integrated with Wechat where you can’t use Tor and they have access to your name and other information. Wechat itself will have access to much more.
Chatting with E2EE is fine but most people won’t have E2EE communication apps. My friend from China noted if you want a private conversation, the general place to do it is in person.
Interesting. Thanks for your response (and a primary source, at that!). So it seems like TOR and E2EE chat will work normally, but it could increase the odds of being searched(?). Given that that’s the case, in-person conversations are the way to go for privacy(?).
Well, tbh the E2EE part is pretty much the same all over the globe, sure, Whatsapp has “E2EE” but it’s a joke, so most people don’t use a secure IM.
Indeed. Totally agree. That’s why the “and other measures to achieve privacy and anonimity” in my question is tricky. In practice, it’s hard to know what it means. In theory, it could mean that open source software is a necessity, which makes Whatsapp unsuitable, just as you point out :)
It’s much more than that. Signal is open source (https://signal.org/en/) but it’s not secure, despite the marketing blurb on that landing page (“Privacy isn’t an optional mode — it’s just the way that Signal works. Every message, every call, every time.”). See it turns out that security is hard work and the sheer variety of attack vectors that can be used to breach it is inconceivably large to even visualize, let alone protect from. (One of the myriad of ways that Signal is insecure is that it still uses the IME of the device, and I guarantee you that third-party IMEs for entering Chinese characters like Baidu’s, Sogou’s, etc.—all the popular ones you are likely to be using, and if not you then the person you’re talking to—are phoning home with what you typed or searching for keywords or the like.)
well, I’m always keep my eyes on this kind of topics, if you need more information, you can Email me, i would check my box at least once a day, you can ask me anything about security or anonimy, especially things about China.
IFmIw8CSSG5rMU9nf7I1@protonmail.com
This is my ProtonMail, an anonimy and encrypted email, BTW
