Facebook, Twitter, Google Threaten To Quit Hong Kong Over Proposed Data Laws (wsj.com) 92
Facebook, Twitter, and Alphabet's Google have privately warned the Hong Kong government that they could stop offering their services in the city if authorities proceed with planned changes to data-protection laws that could make them liable for the malicious sharing of individuals' information online. From a report: A letter sent by an industry group that includes the internet firms said companies are concerned that the planned rules to address doxing could put their staff at risk of criminal investigations or prosecutions related to what the firms' users post online. Doxing refers to the practice of putting people's personal information online so they can be harassed by others. Hong Kong's Constitutional and Mainland Affairs Bureau in May proposed amendments to the city's data-protection laws that it said were needed to combat doxing, a practice that was prevalent during 2019 protests in the city. The proposals call for punishments of up to 1 million Hong Kong dollars, the equivalent of about $128,800, and up to five years' imprisonment. "The only way to avoid these sanctions for technology companies would be to refrain from investing and offering the services in Hong Kong," said the previously unreported June 25 letter [PDF] from the Singapore-based Asia Internet Coalition, which was reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.
Stop (Score:5, Insightful)
>Facebook, Twitter, and Alphabet's Google have privately warned the Hong Kong government that they could stop offering
I think China would love that very much!
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>Facebook, Twitter, and Alphabet's Google have privately warned the Hong Kong government that they could stop offering
I think China would love that very much!
Probably the original intended end result of that law.
Don't worry, WeChat will still work in Hong Kong (Score:2)
And it works in the west as well. All carefully curated and free of false news.
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interesting that isn't it. Right one law, that only sorts of targets them, most people wont care and boom down they go. A subtle law, that targets their business model and makes them legally liable for the harm and damage it does. Boom, their gone, overnight. They can protest as much as they want but everyone uses them but hates them and everyone knows, get rid of them and some other company will turn up and do a better job. Happens every time.
Politicians planetwide have just learned how to bitch slap the
Re: Stop (Score:2)
"There business model is doxxing people?
How were they allowed to get way with it for this long?"
Haven't you heard of Facebook's "real name" policy?
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>Facebook, Twitter, and Alphabet's Google have privately warned the Hong Kong government that they could stop offering
I think China would love that very much!
Exactly! They are very welcomed to leave. I have to wonder which idiot thought of this idea of punching one’s own face and say “are you afraid of me now?”
Re:Imagine that... (Score:4, Insightful)
Huh? They're not leaving because of "principles"... they're leaving because their business practices could finally earn them prison sentences.
Let's hope more countries follow suit.
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The honest, trusty kind of politician will always know which principles to uphold.
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Oblig IANAL disclaimer.
Here is a link to the report with proposed amendment [legco.gov.hk].
For TL;DR sake here is the relevant section of the law as it currently exists (both excerpts copied/pasted for convenience without formatting. I encourage you to read the original source anyway):
“(1) A person commits an offence if the person discloses any personal data
of a data subject which was obtained from a data user without the data
user’s consent, with an intent—
(a) to obtain gain in money or other property, whether for the
benefit of the person or another person; or
(b) to cause loss in money or other property to the data subject.
(2) A person commits an offence if—
(a) the person discloses any personal data of a data subject which
was obtained from a data user without the data user’s consent;
and
6 A data user is defined as a person who, either alone or jointly or in common with other persons,
controls the collection, holding, processing or use of the data.
5
(b) the disclosure causes psychological harm to the data subject.”
And the proposed amendment would change it to:
A person commits an offence if the person discloses any personal
data of a data subject without the data subject’s consent,
(a) with an intent to threaten, intimidate or harass the data subject
or any immediate family member, or being reckless as to
whether the data subject or any immediate family member
would be threatened, intimidated or harassed; or
(b) with an intent to cause psychological harm to the data subject
or any immediate family member, or being reckless as to
whether psychological harm would be caused to the data
subject or any immediate family member;
and the disclosure causes psychological harm to the data subject
or any immediate family member.
I agree that it doesn't sound that draconian, especially in intent. However, I think the dangerous area is:
"or being reckless as to
whether psychological harm would be caused to the data
subject or
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I assume you're referring to the HK companies that are supporting the changes, and not the American ones whose principles force them to exit a country entirely in order to avoid being held liable for harmful content posted on their platforms that they're still monetizing anyways.
Bravo guys! (Score:2)
Awesome threat!
"You better stop targeting us, or we'll pull up stakes and leave just like you want us to."
Stay there virtually (Score:5, Insightful)
Look, they are not planning on blocking Hong Kong/Chinese people from using their services.
What they are threatening to do is to pull all their people out of Hong Kong and continue to offer service, all while ignoring Hong Kong Law.
Oh, they will put up a web page saying "We do not offer service to Hong Kong", but they will not take any steps to prevent people in Hong Kong from using their services.
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Oh, they will put up a web page saying "We do not offer service to Hong Kong"
Why should they? They shouldn't even put that up. Just pull out of HK and call it a day.
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but they will not take any steps to prevent people in Hong Kong from using their services. and then china will force them to give up logs.
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china will force them to give up logs.
Or what?
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firewall block? jail / prison time?
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No prison if they have all pulled out. Firewall doesn't matter if they have given up on the region.
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Until China gets big enough to be able to force its client states to arrest and extradite people China considers criminals. Just consider what America will do to bring someone to their justice.
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They may even make a good faith effort to follow the law (doxing is already a violation of Twitter's TOS, not sure about others).
What I'm curious about is which countries would extradite people to Hong Kong for violation of this law. Will this end up having a larger spill-over where they have to pull out of more locations than just Hong Kong? Generally countries will only extradite for offenses that are also illegal in their own country, but I don't have encyclopedic knowledge of all the particulars, nor w
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Generally speaking, through history, Hon
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Extradition does occasionally happen without a treaty. It's rare but if a country wants to get rid of an axe murderer, it is an option. A famous case was Afghanistan's offer to extradite Bin Laden to America if America would show some proof.
As for extraditing to China, they're assembling client states so there are countries that would happily extradite just like Canada extradited Marc Emery when America pressured for it. That was about selling seeds that was worth a small fine in Canada or a long prison ter
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Look, they are not planning on blocking Hong Kong/Chinese people from using their services.
Hahahaha! Did you think FB, etc, would want the traffic from people they cannot sell ads to? Their users are the product, people they cannot sell ads to are not welcomed. Places they cannot maintain business presence == they cannot sell ads == users not welcomed.
Re: Stay there virtually (Score:1)
I hope they do.
They are absolutely a drag on society.
Ban them.
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If they got rid of facebook the government would have to pay contractors to spy and document your social network at the taxpayers expense. ... whatever it is you get out of facebook.
This way they're tricking users into self-collection in exchange for
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If they got rid of facebook the government would have to pay contractors to spy and document your social network at the taxpayers expense. This way they're tricking users into self-collection in exchange for ... whatever it is you get out of facebook.
How does it take a fucking taxpayer funded government sponsored spy agency, to "spy" on Attention Whores who freely tweet, post, record, stream, and cast everything about themselves, to the world?
Lame excuse to justify billions in budget waste. And we thought regular taxation was theft...
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Ever heard of Room 641A?
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Make these laws over here, so these companies also quit operating in this land.
This isn't what they are talking about in the least bit. They are indicating that they will leave legal liability. Their service will still be on the Internet for anyone to seek out. What they are indicating is that they will have zero employees within the country and thus be shielded from legal ramifications for non-compliance as they are pretty confident that domestic governments they move to will not recognize the charges.
Not that it would care much as taxpayers, since they pay no taxes regardless
Yes, awesome idea. Let's kick companies out so that they not only not pay taxes
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Make these laws over here, so these companies also quit operating in this land. Not that it would care much as taxpayers, since they pay no taxes regardless.
Would that also include the thousands of regular tax-paying plebs that work for these companies?
Not to mention the government welfare in the form of unemployment that would invariably kick in, funded by taxpayers?
As much as I despise social media with a passion, understand the impact is larger than you assume.
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doxing is a new enough word that social parlance is still figuring it out. The best rule of thumb is that doxing is sharing information for the express intent of inciting harassment.
And in the case of SWATting, you can add "with the intent to harm or kill" to that definition.
And I think the definition of doxxing should emphasize on the legal definition of harrassment. Otherwise, fork-tongued lawyers will dismiss that as "bullying", which barely has any weight beyond a toddler-filled playground.
Can we get the same laws here? Please? (Score:3)
Would permanently get rid of Facebook.
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You call that "thinking"? (Score:1)
You're kinda hitting the hyperbole button hard-and-fast there. It's not that big a slope from dropping Section 230, which doesn't really seem like that bad an idea after 15 months of mob-enabled censorship, riots and thought-police, much of which winds up discredited in the light of day a few months later, too late for discourse.
The challenge is that those "services" already censor based on perceived acceptability of the statements, but only answer to themselves. Hong Kong is saying, Fine, take that a ste
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And I personally don't want an internet where the only two legal options
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Apparently I'll have to put BIG BOLD "sarcasm" tags on some of the stuff I post, given how clueless some readers are.
Yay (Score:1)
Reciprocity (Score:2)
Reciprocity should be brought back in full force. If China has restrictions on US Companies, we impose the same x2 on Chinese Companies
But the Rich in the US do not care as long as they get their dividends and the market is raising. Time the US Gov starts working for the people
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Are you really unaware of existence of Great Firewall, or the fact that all of those companies have been banned in China for a long time?
Hong Kong = mainland China (Score:4, Insightful)
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Google has multiple offices in China [about.google]. I think the others do as well.
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More interesting here would the be office in HK itself. Iirc it has one. But yes, pretty much all SV majors have an office around Guangdong province (either in Shenzhen or Guangzhou) and often also offices in Shanghai and Beijing (the primary trade hub and primary political hub). If for no other reason than relevant lobbying.
The reason why HK offices are more at risk in these things is because Chinese offices were already severely sanitized, and basically no one important for companies represented in those
Facebook, Twitter, Google (Score:1)
It seems like a sad but fair compromise (Score:2)
This, sadly, seems to be the only half-way ethical way of dealing with the situation.
Credit where credit is due: this obviously resulted in Google being almost non-existent inside China, which is a huge lo
As someone who lives in Hong Kong: (Score:1)
Get out of here, be gone with your shitty platforms.
All they do is cause issues. They are all cancer, just ban them already.
nothing new under the ccp sun (Score:1)
"Hong Kong government" (Score:2)
Conversation made from the wrong side (Score:2)
In fact, the Chinese government wants these companies to l
What law? (Score:2)
According to NYT, the main feature of the law that the boys don't like is that it makes them responsible for anyone doxxing public officials on their sites, such as police.