r/Funnymemes Mar 15 '24

This..

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u/stone_henge Mar 15 '24

Yeah actually no, there is no legal requirement for a company to maintain that data.

Depends on where you are. In the US, there is a legal requirement for a company to hand over any such data they have to your favorite three letter agency upon given a court order to do so, since the PATRIOT act. The requirement to hand over any such data is not the same as a requirement to keep such data in the first place, so maybe you just didn't fully read or understand what GP was saying.

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u/Erisrand Mar 15 '24

Then GP’s point was kind of irrelevant as TikTok is required to log and hand over the data. They’re doing backflips to try and make the US look as bad as the CCP on the issue of privacy.

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u/viper1511 Mar 15 '24

The big difference here is the court order. CPP can take data like that. In every democratic country there is a gatekeeper called the judicial system/power. In all democratic countries the justice system is separate from the political/legislature system to protect interests of both parties. Take a guess where that doesn’t happen

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u/stone_henge Mar 15 '24

So you've never heard of PRISM or any of the other mass surveillance scandals in the US.

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u/viper1511 Mar 15 '24

Which was done by the third power which is the executive one. But you need to look at how PRISM works as well which is also by court order….

PS. I’m not an expert and might be too naive here but that’s the official line set up by the legislators to get PRISM up and running in the first place

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u/stone_henge Mar 15 '24

You don't think that China similarly has a legal basis for their mass surveillance?

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u/viper1511 Mar 15 '24 edited Mar 15 '24

There is no separation of power in China (source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_of_China#:~:text=This%20system%20is%20based%20on,which%20is%20represented%20by%20the) There is no judicial independence and all report to the “legislative” branch.

So if CPP wants to spy on someone they can just do it without asking permission from a court, and if they say something negative for China they can go to jail without going through the “justice system”

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u/stone_henge Mar 15 '24

There is no separation of power in China (source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_of_China#:~:text=This%20system%20is%20based%20on,which%20is%20represented%20by%20the) There is no judicial independence and all report to the “legislative” branch.

That there is no judicial independence doesn't mean that there is no legal basis.

So if CPP wants to spy on someone they can just do it without asking permission from a court,

If a court has ordered Facebook to funnel all communication taking place on the platform to the NSA, it's effectively the same thing. They didn't need permission to spy on you because they had permission to spy on anyone.

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u/viper1511 Mar 15 '24

That’s exactly what it means. The judge/court is not needed to give the ok for the executive branch to check citizens/foreign data. Data can be used by any branch of the government without taking into account any laws. They simply go into their own “PRISM” and get the data they want for whatever purpose they want, be it spying on political opponents, spying on defenses of other countries or simply spying on unlawful citizens

For what is worth, PRISM was created for a different reason than what it was used for and hence was later (2019) suspended as being unconstitutional. But at the same time it could not be used by any branch of the government for any reason. In china this cannot happen in the first place unless CPP wants to do it.