China's Tech Giants Have a Second Job: Helping Beijing Spy on Its People

'Tencent and Alibaba are among the firms that assist authorities in
hunting down criminal suspects, silencing dissent and creating
surveillance cities. From a report:

Alibaba Group's sprawling campus has collegial workspaces, laid-back
coffee bars and, on the landscaped grounds, a police outpost.
Employees use the office to report suspected crimes to the police,
according to people familiar with the operation. Police also use it to
request data from Alibaba for their own investigations, these people
said, tapping into the trove of information the tech giant collects
through its e-commerce and financial-payment networks. In one case,
the police wanted to find out who had posted content related to
terrorism, said a former Alibaba employee. "They came to me and asked
me for the user ID and information," he recalled. He turned it over.

The Chinese government is building one of the world's most
sophisticated, high-tech systems to keep watch over its citizens,
including surveillance cameras, facial-recognition technology and vast
computers systems that comb through terabytes of data. Central to its
efforts are the country's biggest technology companies, which are
openly acting as the government's eyes and ears in cyberspace.
Companies including Alibaba Group Holding, Tencent Holdings and Baidu,
are required to help China's government hunt down criminal suspects
and silence political dissent. Their technology is also being used to
create cities wired for surveillance.'

-- source: https://yro.slashdot.org/story/19/07/19/1443207

Cheers, Peter
-- 
Peter Reutemann
Dept. of Computer Science
University of Waikato, NZ
+64 (7) 858-5174
http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/
http://www.data-mining.co.nz/
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