ANN CROTTY: China’s Big Brother reboot
The concept of privacy is set to vanish in the country
China could never be accused of being in step with Western trends on big economic and political issues. The country has only recently come to embrace capitalism, albeit with very large Chinese characteristics. And Western-style democracy looks unlikely to ever get much traction in the Middle Kingdom. Mind you, even in the West, "Western-style democracy" is looking as though its best years are behind it. So it’s no surprise that while citizens across chunks of the world are contemplating the implications of yet another General Data Protection Regulation e-mail notification, China’s social credit plan is taking the country full steam in the other direction. The EU’s data-regulation plans received an almighty boost from Facebook’s dalliance with Cambridge Analytica, which made clear just how free and easy the social network was with personal information. The EU has now stepped in to protect its citizens from their own willingness to hand over every bit of personal information in exchan...
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