this post was submitted on 18 Jul 2026
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There’s a difference between government mandated surveillance (i.e. CCP / NSA) versus tech corp surveillance (i.e. Palantir), as one is “official” meaning it’s regulated at a federal level by a nation’s government enforced by police and the judiciary who have legal power to detain and charge while the other ("unofficial") is in the hands of a private company specialized in data collection but have no legal authority to detain people as Palantir isn’t the police.

The “official” level is enacted by federal governments or those in charge such as the president or prime minister (i.e. using “-16 social media ban” as a facade) by enforcing age verification (via facial scans and digital ID) on websites towards the average person (they use a VPN anyway for circumvention) or speaking about the NSA doing that covertly (Snowden put a light on it) and digital ID’s are regulated by a nation’s government.

The “unofficial” level is by a private tech giant who at their own discretion can harvest data of an individual, but they do not have legislative powers to detain that person since they are not law enforcement as mentioned. They can only spy on the subject but can’t intervene from a legal standpoint even if they sense or spot something criminal or they are covertly harvesting data from that person which is prone to being stolen by hackers.

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[–] tal@lemmy.today 0 points 3 days ago

I think the real question is more along the lines of "is western culture prodominantly evil"

Over surveillance?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_surveillance_in_China

Mass surveillance in the People's Republic of China (PRC) is the network of monitoring systems used by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and government to monitor its citizens. China maintains the largest and most sophisticated mass surveillance system in the world.[2][3] Surveillance is primarily conducted through government entities, although corporate surveillance in connection with the CCP and Chinese government is also prevalent. China monitors its citizens through Internet surveillance, camera surveillance, and through other digital technologies.[4][5] As of 2023, the country had over 700 million surveillance cameras. The surveillance has become increasingly widespread and grown in sophistication under Xi Jinping's administration.[6][7][8][9] In the 2020s, China started integrating artificial intelligence into its surveillance systems.