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Thread: China's TERRIFYING Social Credit System (it's already here)

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    Default Re: China's TERRIFYING Social Credit System (it's already here)

    It's a crappy article, that's the point. This shows that the media is a propaganda machine.

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    Default Re: China's TERRIFYING Social Credit System (it's already here)

    Quote Posted by DeDukshyn (here)
    Quote Posted by peterpam (here)
    Quote Posted by DeDukshyn (here)
    There's a lot wrong with that OP article.

    There's a massive conflation of all sorts of assumptions and speculations being presented as fact.

    What I am seeing is China cracking down on tax evaders and not letting them leave the country -- USA does the exact same thing.
    Banning your travel from not walking you dog with a leash isn't something that actually happened to anyone.

    That aside, lumping all criminal activities together into a "credit" system though is obviously going to be rife with issues. That's the only real story here.
    I don't think anyone believes you are not getting to travel for a dog walking citation...
    That's why I think its a crappy article -- attempting to conflate things to make x look like Y to garner the expected emotional reaction. What looks like Ramus' own addition (the first line) doesn't seem to be helping that either.

    -----

    Back to the topic ...
    The "American" version of this social credit system would be more casual, and look more like the episode of Black Mirror called "Nosedive" -- we are already halfway there ... its a pretty good episode.

    https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5497778/?ref_=ttep_ep1
    "A woman desperate to boost her social media score hits the jackpot when she's invited to a swanky wedding, but the trip doesn't go as planned. "
    that was a very good episode. I have worked for a woman who has a management style that i would call the "dysney management: be nice at all cost, as long as you smile and everybody likes you" you were fine. No complaints towards you, no frowning from anybody towards you, you had to be the perfect social butterfly, not important if you had substance or not.

    It was literally choking.

    whatever China or the USA is doing in a slow motion or an obvious one towards this direction, it will be choking for the people, for creativity, for analysis of situations, name it.
    How to let the desire of your mind become the desire of your heart - Gurdjieff

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    Default Re: China's TERRIFYING Social Credit System (it's already here)

    Nosedive episode of Black Mirror was the best viewing ever. And yes, what is happening in China is just a foreshadowing of what is to come here.

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    Default Re: China's TERRIFYING Social Credit System (it's already here)

    Quote Posted by ramus (here)
    @Carmody , I have a thread on just this topic :

    China is putting surveillance cameras in plenty of schools

    https://www.abacusnews.com/digital-l...rticle/3000524

    --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
    Once again pay attention to the way this is worded ...

    Where US schools turn to facial recognition for safety, Chinese schools are doing it to manage students .. U.S. IS GOOD CHINA IS BAD ..
    ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
    Being watched by facial recognition cameras when walking around schools? That's not sci-fi anymore.

    ------------

    https://projectavalon.net/forum4/show...ras-on-planes-
    very good point!

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    Default Re: China's TERRIFYING Social Credit System (it's already here)

    Quote Posted by DeDukshyn (here)
    Quote Posted by peterpam (here)
    Quote Posted by DeDukshyn (here)
    There's a lot wrong with that OP article.

    There's a massive conflation of all sorts of assumptions and speculations being presented as fact.

    What I am seeing is China cracking down on tax evaders and not letting them leave the country -- USA does the exact same thing.
    Banning your travel from not walking you dog with a leash isn't something that actually happened to anyone.

    That aside, lumping all criminal activities together into a "credit" system though is obviously going to be rife with issues. That's the only real story here.
    I don't think anyone believes you are not getting to travel for a dog walking citation...
    That's why I think its a crappy article -- attempting to conflate things to make x look like Y to garner the expected emotional reaction. What looks like Ramus' own addition (the first line) doesn't seem to be helping that either.

    -----

    Back to the topic ...
    The "American" version of this social credit system would be more casual, and look more like the episode of Black Mirror called "Nosedive" -- we are already halfway there ... its a pretty good episode.

    https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5497778/?ref_=ttep_ep1
    "A woman desperate to boost her social media score hits the jackpot when she's invited to a swanky wedding, but the trip doesn't go as planned. "
    You are right about the American version. I have watched the episode "Nose Dive". Culturally we are so primed to do that. Most people have their phones in their hands and we have been conditioned to rate all kinds of things. Now all we need is a bit of trans humanism or some amped up contact lenses and we'll be ready to go.Look at the way some people are focused on how many "likes" or how many followers or subscribers they have, equating that with acceptance, friendship and popularity. Maybe even using it as cheap substitute for friends, family and real acceptance. That is just a stones throw from what our social credit system will look like. The concept of absorbing the masses in rating each interaction and being consumed with a score which will effect your life at every level would be the most compelling way to keep the masses distracted, a modern day bread and circus approach.
    Last edited by Pam; 25th February 2019 at 13:15.

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    Default Re: China's TERRIFYING Social Credit System (it's already here)

    From https://infowars.com/trump-administr...-can-buy-a-gun
    4 Sept, 2019

    Trump Administration Considering Social Credit Score System to Determine Who Can Buy a Gun

    The Trump administration is considering launching a social credit score-style system in coordination with Big Tech that would use spy data collected from Amazon, Google and Apple devices to determine whether or not an individual can own a gun.

    “The proposal is part of an initiative to create a Health Advanced Research Projects Agency (HARPA), which would be located inside the Health and Human Services Department,” reports the Daily Caller. “The new agency would have a separate budget and the president would be responsible for appointing its director.”

    HARPA would employ “breakthrough technologies with high specificity and sensitivity for early diagnosis of neuropsychiatric violence,” including Apple Watches, Amazon Echo and Google Home.
    In other words, data collected from devices that spy on private conversations and closely monitor user behavior would be used to strip Americans of their fundamental rights.

    “Though the proposal is starting as a voluntary data collection scheme allegedly aimed at finding warning signs of mental illness, we all know so-called “voluntary” government programs often become mandatory at the drop of a hat,” comments Chris Menahan.

    According to the Washington Post, Trump has reacted “very positively” to the idea.

    The full scope of the program is chilling and would provide Big Tech with an easy excuse to formally impose the total neuro-surveillance of citizens via their smart phone and home assistant devices, something that has already been occurring surreptitiously for years.

    One wonders if Trump has any idea of the slippery slope this would entail, or whether he was sold on the idea because Ivanka cried.

    The proposal bears some similarities to Communist China’s social credit score system, where citizens’ behavior is tightly surveilled and then met with rewards or punishments.

    As we reported last month, the Chinese government bragged about preventing 2.5 million “discredited entities” from purchasing plane tickets and 90,000 people from buying high speed train tickets in the month of July alone.

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    Default Re: China's TERRIFYING Social Credit System (it's already here)

    Jon Rappoport $0.02:

    Psychiatry in charge of gun control: utter disaster

    by Jon Rappoport
    Sep5 , 2019

    During the reign of Barack Obama, mass shootings prompted a White House declaration that community mental health centers would be created across America, in order to spot and treat persons before they committed violent acts. Now, under Trump, we are seeing a similar reaction, with a twist.

    The Daily Caller, Aug 22, 2019: “Trump Admin Is Considering Using Amazon Echo And Apple Watch To Determine If Citizens Should Own A Gun”
    “The Trump administration is considering a proposal that would use Google, Amazon and Apple to collect data on users who exhibit characteristics of mental illness that could lead to violent behavior, The Washington Post reported Thursday.”

    “The proposal is part of an initiative to create a Health Advanced Research Projects Agency (HARPA), which would be located inside the Health and Human Services Department, the report notes, citing sources inside the administration. The new agency would have a separate budget and the president would be responsible for appointing its director.”

    “HARPA would develop ‘breakthrough technologies with high specificity and sensitivity for early diagnosis of neuropsychiatric violence,’ according to a copy of the proposal. ‘A multi-modality solution, along with real-time data analytics, is needed to achieve such an accurate diagnosis’.”

    “The document lists several technologies that could be employed to help collect information, including Apple Watches, Amazon Echo and Google Home. Geoffrey Ling, the lead scientific adviser on HARPA, told reporters Thursday the plan would require enormous amounts of data and ‘scientific rigor.’”
    Translation:
    Use all available resources to spy on Americans; and by deploying psychiatric definitions of mental disorders, somehow intercede before potentially violent individuals can legally obtain a weapon. Whether or not you favor gun control, creating this new federal agency would be on the order of injecting poisons in people to prevent poisoning.
    Why? Because some of the most popular psychiatric drugs, given for “mental disorders,” cause people to go over the edge and commit violent acts, including murder. Once diagnosed, an uninformed person is at the mercy of psychiatrists who refuse to admit what their drugs are creating.

    NOTE: Withdrawing from the drugs without expert supervision can result in effects which are even worse than those resulting from taking the drugs.

    Here is an excerpt from my 1999 white paper, “Why Do They Do It? School shootings Across America.”:

    [...]

    Full article: https://blog.nomorefakenews.com/2019...tter-disaster/


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    Default Re: China's TERRIFYING Social Credit System (it's already here)

    Where Eyes Wide Shut Meets Social Credit Scores

    This isn't about their behavior, it's about the fact that they are building tools to scrutinize, judge, and literally rank and score the behavior of others in a system that will increasingly have real world consequences... and who are they to judge??

    Actually, it is about their behavior, their "Eyes Wide Shut" behavior as well as their ability to determine and judge the behavior of others by completely different rules.

    Last edited by Franny; 6th September 2019 at 07:28.
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    Default Re: China's TERRIFYING Social Credit System (it's already here)

    Inside China's High-Tech Dystopia
    Bloomberg
    Premiered Jan 24, 2019

    In part three of Hello World Shenzhen, Bloomberg Businessweek’s Ashlee Vance heads out into a city where you can't use cash or credit cards, only your smartphone, where AI facial-recognition software instantly spots and tickets jaywalkers, and where at least one factory barely needs people. This is the society that China's government and leading tech companies are racing to make a reality, with little time to question which advancements are net positives for the rest of us.

    Part One - Inside China's Future Factory https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eLmaI...

    Part Two - China's High Stakes Robot Wars https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qrhvZ... https://www.bloomberg.com/hello-world
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    Default Re: China's TERRIFYING Social Credit System (it's already here)

    If we don't think that people can be caught up in fearful toleration and even promotion of human rights abuse against neighbors, IMO we are hugely naive. IMO we can easily see the end result but can often miss the slow steps that would allow the cooperation necessary for a government to act against its citizens.

    When a group of people are scapegoated (seen as the enemy, the subverting influence, the source of the social ills experienced), then IMO all bets are off as to how far persecution can expand.....









    Quote Human rights activists are calling for the immediate closure of what they label as re-education camps in the Chinese province of Xinjiang. About a million Uighurs, Kazakhs, and Kyrgyz people are believed to be held there and tortured, including a Kazakh national arrested while on a visit to his Uighur mother in China. Since being released, he has been sharing his story.


    Quote China's Uighur minority shackled by digital technology as thousands are detained for 'vocational training'
    People are being imprisoned without trial and placed in secretive detention camps for alleged political crimes

    Gerry Shih
    Sunday 17 December 2017
    Nobody knows what happened to the Uighur student after he returned to China from Egypt and was taken away by police.

    Not his village neighbours in China's far west, who haven't seen him in months. Not his former classmates, who fear Chinese authorities beat him to death.

    Not his mother, who lives in a two-story house at the far end of a country road, alone behind walls bleached by the desert sun. She opened the door one afternoon for an unexpected visit by AP reporters, who showed her a picture of a handsome young man posing in a park, one arm in the wind.

    "Yes, that's him," she said as tears began streaming down her face. "This is the first time I've heard anything of him in seven months. What happened?"

    "Is he dead or alive?"

    The student's friends think he joined the thousands — possibly tens of thousands — of people, rights groups and academics estimate, who have been spirited without trial into secretive detention camps for alleged political crimes that range from having extremist thoughts to merely travelling or studying abroad. The mass disappearances, beginning the past year, are part of a sweeping effort by Chinese authorities to use detentions and data-driven surveillance to impose a digital police state in the region of Xinjiang and over its Uighurs, a 10-million strong, Turkic-speaking Muslim minority that China says has been influenced by Islamic extremism.

    Along with the detention camps, unprecedented levels of police blanket Xinjiang's streets. Cutting-edge digital surveillance systems track where Uighurs go, what they read, who they talk to and what they say. And under an opaque system that treats practically all Uighurs as potential terror suspects, Uighurs who contact family abroad risk questioning or detention.

    The campaign has been led by Chen Quanguo, a Chinese Communist Party official, who was promoted in 2016 to head Xinjiang after subduing another restive region — Tibet. Chen vowed to hunt down Uighur separatists blamed for attacks that have left hundreds dead, saying authorities would "bury terrorists in the ocean of the people's war and make them tremble."

    Through rare interviews with Uighurs who recently left China, a review of government procurement contracts and unreported documents, and a trip through southern Xinjiang, the AP pieced together a picture of Chen's war that's ostensibly rooting out terror — but instead instilling fear.

    Most of the more than a dozen Uighurs interviewed for this story spoke on condition of anonymity for fear that Chinese authorities would punish them or their family members. The AP is withholding the student's name and other personal information to protect people who fear government retribution.

    Chen and the Xinjiang regional government did not respond to repeated requests for comment. But China's government describes its Xinjiang security policy as a ‘strike hard’ campaign that's necessary following a series of attacks in 2013 and 2014, including a mass knifing in a train station that killed 33. A Hotan city propaganda official, Bao Changhui, told the AP: "If we don't do this, it will be like several years ago — hundreds will die."

    China also says the crackdown is only half the picture. It points to decades of heavy economic investment and cultural assimilation programmes and measures like preferential college admissions for Uighurs.

    Officials say the security is needed now more than ever because Uighur militants have been fighting alongside Islamic extremists in Syria. But Uighur activists and international human rights groups argue that repressive measures are playing into the hands of the likes of al-Qaida, which has put out Uighur-language recruiting videos condemning Chinese oppression.

    "So much hate and desire for revenge are building up," said Rukiye Turdush, a Uighur activist in Canada. "How does terrorism spread? When people have nowhere to run."

    The government has referred to its detention program as ‘vocational training,’ but its main purpose appears to be indoctrination. A memo published online by the Xinjiang human resources office described cities, including Korla, beginning ‘free, completely closed-off, militarised’ training sessions in March that last anywhere from 3 months to 2 years.

    Uighurs study Mandarin, law, ethnic unity, de-radicalisation, patriotism and abide by the ‘five togethers’ — live, do drills, study, eat and sleep together.

    In a rare state media report about the centres, a provincial newspaper quoted a farmer who said after weeks of studying inside he could spot the telltale signs of religious extremism by how a person dressed or behaved and also profess the Communist Party's good deeds. An instructor touted their "gentle, attentive" teaching methods and likened the centres to a boarding school dorm.

    But in Korla, the institutions appeared more daunting, at least from the outside. The city had three or four well-known centres with several thousand students combined, said a 48-year-old local resident from the Han ethnic majority. One centre the AP visited was, in fact, labelled a jail. Another was downtown on a street sealed off by rifle-toting police. A third centre, the local Han resident said, was situated on a nearby military base.

    While forced indoctrination has been reported throughout Xinjiang, its reach has been felt far beyond China's borders.

    In April, calls began trickling into a Uighur teacher's academy in Egypt, vague but insistent. Uighur parents from a few towns were pleading with their sons and daughters to return to China, but they wouldn't say why.

    "The parents kept calling, crying on the phone," the teacher said.

    Chinese authorities had extended the scope of the program to Uighur students abroad. And Egypt, once a sanctuary for Uighurs to study Islam, began deporting scores of Uighurs to China.

    Sitting in a restaurant outside Istanbul where many students had fled, four recounted days of panic as they hid from Egyptian and Chinese authorities. One jumped out a window running from police. Another slept in a car for a week. Many hid with Egyptian friends.

    "We were mice, and the police were cats," said a student from Urumqi, Xinjiang's regional capital.

    All who returned were intensely grilled about what they did in Egypt and viewed as potential terror suspects, the students said. Many were believed held in the new indoctrination camps, while some were sentenced to longer prison sentences.

    The young man from Korla rarely went out in the two years he spent studying Islam in Egypt. He played some soccer — a beloved sport among Uighurs — but wasn't particularly athletic or popular.

    Instead, he kept to himself in an apartment that he kept fastidiously clean, steeped in his studies at the revered Al Azhar University, the 1,000-year-old seat of learning in Sunni Islam. He freely discussed Quranic verses with his Uighur friends but mostly avoided politics, one friend said. He spoke of one day pursuing a PhD in comparative religion.

    "He had big dreams," said the friend who is now hiding in Turkey to avoid being sent to China. "He wanted to be a religious scholar, which he knew was impossible in China, but he also wanted to stay close to his mother in Korla."

    He was fluent in Arabic and but also in Chinese. When they huddled around a smartphone to watch a Taiwanese tear-jerker about a boy separated from his mother, he would be the one weeping first.

    When homesickness got to him, he would tell his friends about how his mother doted on him, and about Korla and the big house he grew up in. And when he gets married, God willing, he would say, he'd start a family in that house, too.

    "If my wife doesn't agree, then we don't marry," he declared.

    He returned to China when he was called back in 2016 and taken away in February, according to three students and a teacher from Cairo. They say they heard from reliable sources in China — but cannot prove — that he died in detention.

    Southern Xinjiang, the vast desert basin from where many of the students came, is one of the most heavily policed places on earth.

    Deep in the desert's southern rim, the oasis town of Hotan is a microcosm of how Chen, the Xinjiang party boss, has combined fearsome optics with invisible policing.

    He has ordered police depots with flashing lights and foot patrols be built every 500 meters (yards) – a total of 1,130, according to the Hotan government. The AP saw cavalcades of more than 40 armoured vehicles including full personnel carriers rumble down city boulevards. Police checkpoints on every other block stop cars to check identification and smartphones for religious content.

    Shopkeepers in the thronging bazaar don mandatory armoured vests and helmets to sell hand-pulled noodles, tailored suits and baby clothes.

    Xinjiang's published budget data from January to August shows public security spending this year is on track to increase 50 per cent from 2016 to roughly 45 billion yuan ($6.8 billion) after rising 40 per cent a year ago. It's quadrupled since 2009, a watershed year when a Uighur riot broke out in Xinjiang, leaving nearly 200 members of China's Han ethnic majority dead, and security began to ratchet up.

    Adrian Zenz, a researcher at the European School of Culture and Theology who tracks Chinese public security staffing levels based on its recruiting ads, says Xinjiang is now hiring 40 times more police per capita than populous Guangdong Province.

    "Xinjiang has very likely exceeded the level of police density seen in East Germany just before its collapse," Zenz said. "What we've seen in the last 12 to 14 months is unprecedented."

    But much of the policing goes unseen.

    To enter the Hotan bazaar, shoppers first pass through metal detectors and then place their national identification cards on a reader while having their face scanned.

    The facial scanner is made by China Electronics Technology Group (CETC), a state-owned defence contractor that has spearheaded China's fast-growing field of predictive policing with Xinjiang as its test bed. The AP found 27 CETC bids for Xinjiang government contracts, including one soliciting a facial recognition system for facilities and centres in Hotan Prefecture.

    Hours after visiting the Hotan bazaar, AP reporters were stopped outside a hotel by a police officer who said the public security bureau had been remotely tracking the reporters' movements.

    "There are tens of thousands of cameras here," said the officer, who gave his name as Tushan. "The moment you took your first step in this city, we knew."

    The government's tracking efforts have extended to vehicles, genes, and even voices. In February, authorities in Xinjiang's Bayingol prefecture, which includes Korla, required every car to install GPS trackers for real-time monitoring. And since late last year, Xinjiang authorities have required health checks to collect the population's DNA samples. In May, a regional police official told the AP that Xinjiang had purchased $8.7 million in DNA scanners — enough to analyse several million samples a year.

    In one year, Kashgar Prefecture, which has a population of 4 million, has carried out mandatory checks for practically its entire population, said Yang Yanfeng, deputy director of Kashgar's propaganda department. She characterised the check-ups as a public health success story, not a security measure.

    "We take comprehensive blood tests for the good of the people, not just record somebody's height and weight," Yang said. "We find out health issues in citizens even they didn't know about."

    A biometric data collection program appears to have been formalised last year under "Document No. 44," a regional public security directive to "comprehensively collect three-dimensional portraits, voiceprints, DNA and fingerprints." The document's full text remains secret, but the AP found at least three contracts referring to the 2016 directive in recent purchase orders for equipment such as microphones and voice analysers.

    Meiya Pico, a security and surveillance company, has won 11 bids in the last six months alone from local Xinjiang jurisdictions. It won a joint bid with a DNA analysis company for 4 million yuan ($600,000) in Kargilik and has sold software that automatically scans smartphones for "terror-related pictures and videos" to Yarkent.

    Meiya and CETC declined comment.

    To monitor Xinjiang's population, China has also turned to a familiar low-tech tactic: recruiting the masses.

    When a Uighur businessman from Kashgar completed a six-month journey to flee China and landed in the United States with his family in January, he was initially ecstatic. He tried calling home, something he hadn't done in months to spare his family unwanted police questioning.

    His mother told him his four brothers and his father were in prison because he fled China. She was spared only because she was frail.

    Since 2016, local authorities had assigned ten families including theirs to spy on one another in a new system of collective monitoring, and those families had also been punished because he escaped. Members from each were sent to re-education centres for three months, he told the AP.

    "It's worse than prison," he said. "At least in prison you know what's happening to you. But there you never know when you get accused. It could be anytime."

    A document obtained by U.S.-based activists and reviewed by the AP show Uighur residents in the Hebei Road West neighbourhood in Urumqi, the regional capital, being graded on a 100-point scale. Those of Uighur ethnicity are automatically docked 10 points. Being aged between 15 and 55, praying daily, or having a religious education, all result in 10 point deductions.

    In the final columns, each Uighur resident's score is tabulated and checked ‘trusted,’ ‘ordinary,’ or ‘not trusted.’ Activists say they anecdotally hear about Uighurs with low scores being sent to indoctrination.

    At the neighbourhood police office, a woman who gave her surname as Tao confirmed that every community committee in Urumqi, not just Hebei Road West, needed to conduct similar assessments. She said there were no statistics on how many residents had been deemed ‘not trusted,’ nor were there official procedures to deal with them.

    "What is happening is every single Uighur is being considered a suspect of not just terrorism but also political disloyalty," said Maya Wang, a researcher at Human Rights Watch who is studying how Chinese police are using technology to track political dissidents as well as Uighurs.

    This month, Xinjiang announced it would require every government employee in the region to move into a Uighur home for a week to teach families about ideology and avoiding extremism.

    What pains most, Uighurs abroad say, is the self-imposed barrier of silence that separates them from loved ones, making efforts to say happy birthday or find out whether a relative is detained risky.

    When Salih Hudayar, an American Uighur graduate student, last called his 70-something grandfather this summer, he spoke in cryptic but reassuring tones.

    "Our phones will not work anymore," his grandfather said. "So, don't try calling and don't worry about us. We'll be fine as long as you're all fine."

    He later heard from a cousin in Kyrgyzstan that his grandfather had been sent to re-education.

    A Uighur student who moved to Washington following the crackdown this summer said that after his move, his wife, a government worker still in Urumqi, messaged to say the police would show up at her home in 20 minutes. She had to say goodbye: after that she would delete him permanently from her contacts list.

    A month later he received calls on WhatsApp from a man who introduced himself as Ekber, a Uighur official from the international cooperation office of the Xinjiang regional public security bureau, who wanted him to work for them in the U.S. — and warned him against saying no.

    "If you're not working for us then you're working for someone else. That's not a road you want to take," he snapped.

    A week after that, he couldn't help himself placing one last call home. His daughter picked up.

    "Mom is sick but she doesn't want me to speak to you. Goodbye," she said.

    For the past year, Chen's war has meant mass detentions, splintered families, lives consumed by uncertainty. It has meant that a mother sometimes can't get an answer a simple question about her son: is he dead or alive?

    A short drive from Korla, beyond peach plantations that stretch for miles, the al-Azhar student's mother still lives in the big house that he loved. When the AP arrived unannounced, she said she had not received any court notices or reasons about why her son and his father were suddenly taken months earlier. She declined an interview.

    "I want to talk, I want to know," she said through a translator. "But I'm too afraid."

    AP reporters were later detained by police, interrogated for 11 hours, and accused of "illegal reporting" in the area without seeking prior permission from the Korla government.

    "The subjects you're writing about do not promote positive energy," a local propaganda official explained.

    Five villagers said they knew authorities had taken away the young student; one said he was definitely alive, the others weren't sure.

    When asked, local police denied he existed at all.


    Video showing hundreds of shackled, blindfolded prisoners in China is 'genuine'
    Human rights groups say China is holding one million people, mostly ethnic Uighurs, at detention camps - a charge Beijing denies.
    By Deborah Haynes, foreign affairs editor

    Saturday 21 September 2019 07:28, UK

    Online footage purporting to show hundreds of blindfolded and shackled prisoners in a mostly Muslim region of China is believed to be authentic, a European security source has told Sky News.

    The detainees are thought to be from China's minority Uighur Muslims, the source said on Friday.

    Human rights organisations accuse China of holding one million people, mostly ethnic Uighurs, at sprawling detention camps in Xinjiang province - a charge Beijing strongly denies.

    The footage, posted anonymously on Tuesday on Twitter and YouTube, shows lines of men, heads shaved, hands bound behind their back, sitting in lines on the floor or being moved by guards at a station in the city of Korla in Xinjiang, northwest China.

    The European security source said: "We've examined the footage and believe it to be genuine.

    "It shows up to 600 prisoners being moved; they're shackled together, have shaved heads, are blindfolded and have their hands locked behind their backs. This is typical of the way the Chinese move this type of prisoner."

    The images were thought to have been taken earlier this year, the source added.
    Last edited by Delight; 21st September 2019 at 16:42.

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    Default Re: China's TERRIFYING Social Credit System (it's already here)

    "La réalité est un ręve que l'on fait atterrir" San Antonio AKA F. Dard

    Troll-hood motto: Never, ever, however, whatsoever, to anyone, a point concede.

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    Exclamation Re: China's TERRIFYING Social Credit System (it's already here)

    Chinese Citizens must pass Mass Facial-Recognition Test to use the internet for A.I. 'Social Credit System': December 1st 2019
    No need to follow anyone, only consider broadening (y)our horizon of possibilities ...

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    Default Re: China's TERRIFYING Social Credit System (it's already here)

    Gaining more acceptance in a city near you under the guise of “multiculturalism” and “diversity”.

    Philadelphia Raises Communist China’s Flag at City Hall to Celebrate Diversity

    By Pluralist | October 8, 2019

    Philadelphia raised the flag of China at city hall last week to honor the 70th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China.






    Mayor Jim Kenney announced last Tuesday the observation of “The People’s Republic of China Flag-raising Day,” according to Xinhua, China’s official state-run press agency.

    The City of Philadelphia released photos of the event, showing a small crowd of attendees watching as the flag of China is raised.

    The Epoch Times reported that local community groups had strongly opposed the raising of the Chinese flag, viewing it as an endorsement of the communist nation’s oppressive regime.

    “Raising this flag, a symbol of the birth of the Chinese Communist Party on October 1, 1949 is only celebrating tyranny, repression, and death,” said one local resident in an email to Kenney, who like a large majority of the Philadelphia City Council is a Democrat.

    The mayor’s office told The Epoch Times in an emailed statement that “the flag raisings are not a sign of support for any specific government, political party, or movement.”

    “Rather, they are an opportunity … for people with shared heritage to celebrate their backgrounds and experiences,” the office said.

    In an opinion article published in The Philadelphia Inquirer, columnist Christine M. Flowers criticized the city’s justification for raising China’s flag “as part of a program devoted to multiculturalism and diversity.”

    “Raising the flag of a brutal totalitarian regime does not honor the immigrants whose parents and grandparents were brutalized by the government it represents,” Flowers wrote. “Raising that flag does not honor the humanity of those Chinese refugees, prisoners of conscience, and victims of persecution who I have met in my capacity as an asylum advocate. Raising that flag is an abomination.”

    Flowers said she’d written the mayor’s office to protest the event.

    The office responded with the same statement provided to The Epoch Times. And Flowers didn’t buy it.

    “Sorry, but it’s hard to understand how raising the Communist flag of China is not meant to support the Communist regime of China,” she wrote.

    “Why not just announce a parade down the Parkway to commemorate the birth of Stalin in December? Or maybe raise the swastika at City Hall to commemorate Jan. 30, 1933, the day Hitler was made Chancellor of Germany?”
    "Rage, rage against the dying of the light." -D. Thomas

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    Default Re: China's TERRIFYING Social Credit System (it's already here)

    Quote Posted by ExomatrixTV (here)

    This is very very interesting, and well worth the hour for those who genuinely want to understand all this better.

    The panel are self-admittedly a panel of debunkers of some of the 'hysteria and hype' (this is my paraphrase of what I think they think).

    But before we all delete the video in disgust, they all know a LOT about China, and certainly far, far more than I do or probably most people reading this post now. So maybe they deserve a hearing. They speak having gathered a lot of information.

    I emerged
    1. More knowledgeable.
    2. More confused.
    Their summary (in my own words) is that
    • It's a projection of western fears on to a foreign scapegoat/target
    • The social credit system isn't regarded as very important by most Chinese, and many don't even know a lot about it
    • The way the system works is that it results from punishment (legal transgression), and doesn't really cause punishment
    • The Chinese context in which this needs to be understood is that most Chinese trust their government with data, but don't trust corporations with data.
    These aren't just their own casual opinions — they've been to China to do the research.

    My provisional position:
    This is still the [maybe very] thin end of a potentially huge wedge: like 1984 lite.
    Again: anyone seriously interested in this issue might learn some things from hearing the discussion.
    Last edited by Bill Ryan; 11th October 2019 at 22:13.

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    Default Re: China's TERRIFYING Social Credit System (it's already here)

    George Orwell's 1984 comes to mind as China's Social Credit System is now being extended to companies operating in China. It ensures company monitor their own activity for compliance and also monitor their suppliers. Beyond this it can be used as leverage against foreign governments for example in censoring bad press on Chinese activity.

    China Uses ‘Social Credit System’ to Control Domestic, Foreign Companies
    A Bloomberg News report on Sunday described how Communist China uses its “social credit system” to control not just citizens but corporations – and not just domestic companies, but foreign companies seeking to do business in China as well.

    Nervous foreign businessmen are forking over thousands of dollars an hour for training in how to avoid being flagged as miscreants by the most pervasive surveillance system in history.

    The social credit system is a vast database that monitors Chinese citizens for “good behavior” and aggressively punishes those who fall short. Anything from poor spending habits to ideological impurity can produce a low social credit score, with consequences that might include the unfortunate citizen suddenly discovering he is no longer allowed to board airplanes or trains.

    The social credit system has a business component as well, monitoring corporate behavior in much the same way it keeps tabs on individual citizens. Companies with poor social credit scores can face heavier regulatory scrutiny, higher taxes, reduced access to business loans, or an outright ban on doing business in China.

    Bloomberg News provided the example of China Railway Construction Corporation, a company that covered up some fatalities on a railroad project in Mongolia, got caught, and was banned from doing business for a year as well as being “subject to more inspections, limits on bidding for public projects and restrictions on issuing bonds and shares.” And those were only the immediate consequences – there is no telling how long the demerits fed into the social credit system will haunt the company and its managers across every province of China.

    “The system will be widely used in China to oversee domestic and foreign companies, and firms have to assign resources to keep a real eye on making sure their records are clean,” noted Andrew Polk of the Trivium China consulting firm.

    Trivium is currently charging corporate clients $2,500 an hour to consult on the social credit system and $50,000 for a complete audit. Bloomberg News suggested other U.S. and European firms are offering similar services.

    Other expert observers pointed out that the rules governing the social credit system are notoriously vague and clearly subject to political tweaking from Beijing, making it quite easy for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to punish or blackball foreign corporations unless the foreigners bend over backwards to maintain good relations with CCP officials.

    The Chinese government is not shy about warning that American companies could be blacklisted as part of the trade war, or in retaliation for U.S. criticism of Chinese policies such as the internment of Uyghur Muslims in concentration camps. Publishing the CCP’s thus-far secretive blacklist, as Chinese state media has threatened to do, could cause big problems for American firms in other countries, and would almost certainly produce immediate black marks in the social credit system for every listed entity.

    A report published in November by Dezan Shira & Associates warned that one of the “most potentially problematic” aspects of the social credit system is that it makes companies responsible for their business partners and suppliers. If one company is blacklisted, bad marks can swiftly propagate to other corporations it has business relations with. Conversely, the preferences given to “red-listed” companies with high social credit scores provide a tremendous competitive advantage.

    Although the social credit system is still being rolled out, Dezan Shira & Associates observed that “at least 33 million businesses have already been assigned a score and many have been put on various punitive blacklists,” in addition to local and regional programs that have been in place for years.

    The report concluded by advising companies doing business in China to “undertake a supply chain audit and conduct due diligence on business partners given the inclusion of partners in social credit assessments.”

    “Businesses should also not forget to assess their IT and data security strength since they will need to transmit data to the government more frequently and in greater numbers,” the authors added.

    Link: https://www.breitbart.com/national-s...ign-companies/
    In hoc signo vinces / In this sign thou shalt conquer

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    Default Re: China's TERRIFYING Social Credit System (it's already here)

    What's YOUR Social Credit Score?




    Last edited by Franny; 28th December 2019 at 18:03.
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    Default Re: China's TERRIFYING Social Credit System (it's already here)

    Quote Posted by Franny (here)

    What's YOUR Social Credit Score?



    This is a very worrying, must-see video. It may be one of the very best yet made on this disturbing topic.

    But it's not just about China. From 24:45, it reports on how personal surveillance and credit-scoring is already being adopted in the rest of the world, in varying forms that affect us all in one way or another.

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    Default Re: China's TERRIFYING Social Credit System (it's already here)

    This is a premonition of HELL. I would not want to live in that world...
    Last edited by East Sun; 6th January 2020 at 19:18.
    Question Everything, always speak truth... Make the best of today, for there may not be a tomorrow!!! But, that's OK because tomorrow never comes, so we have nothing to worry about!!!

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    Default Re: China's TERRIFYING Social Credit System (it's already here)

    I termed this kind of neo social fascism 'Digital Zersetzung'

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    Default Re: China's TERRIFYING Social Credit System (it's already here)

    Will Google’s Social Credit System Determine Your Future?
    by Dr. Mercola
    2/12/20
    https://articles.mercola.com/sites/a..._rid=809159675

    https://youtube.com/watch?v=wP321Miy7zQ (This video is embedded in post #37 above, in this thread, and highly recommended by Bill.)

    "STORY AT-A-GLANCE
    > China started rolling out a social credit system in 2018, which awards and subtracts points for certain types of behavior

    > Google is the largest monopoly the world has ever seen, and its data-siphoning tentacles reach deep into our everyday lives, collecting data on every move you make and conversation you have, whether online or in the real world.

    > By the end of 2021, approximately 1 billion cameras will be watching public movements across the globe. Cities are also inviting residents and businesses to plug their private surveillance cameras into their police network, which expands the surveillance system even further.

    > To make sense of all this footage, video analytic software and artificial intelligence are used. Video analytic capabilities include fight and fall detection, loitering and motion recognition, dog walking, jaywalking, toll fare evasion and lie detection

    > There are now proposals suggesting all of this data, in combination with AI-enabled analytics systems, could be used for “predictive policing” as illustrated in the 2002 movie “Minority Report,” where suspected perpetrators are arrested before actually committing the crime

    Expert Review by: Maryam Henein

    You may have heard about China's social credit system — a dystopian monitoring scheme focused on the moral dimension of human life and behavior — which was conceived in 2014 and rolled out in in earnest in 2018. As reported by Business Insider in October that year:1
    "Like private credit scores, a person's social score can move up and down depending on their behavior. The exact methodology is a secret — but examples of infractions include bad driving, smoking in non-smoking zones, buying too many video games and posting fake news online.

    China has already started punishing people by restricting their travel. Nine million people with low scores have been blocked from buying tickets for domestic flights …

    They can also clamp down on luxury options — three million people are barred from getting business-class train tickets. The eventual system will punish bad passengers specifically. Potential misdeeds include trying to ride with no ticket, loitering in front of boarding gates, or smoking in no-smoking areas."
    Aside from impeding your ability to travel, an individual's punishment for "bad behavior" per the social credit system can also result in slower internet speed, being banned from attending certain schools or getting a higher education, being barred from certain types of employment, confiscation of pets and, of course, public shaming.2

    Google Makes Orwellian Surveillance Easy
    In the bitchute video above, Truthstream Media details how this kind of public "trustworthiness" scoring can alter the way people behave — indeed their view of reality itself, and the vast data mining required for the system to work. As noted in the video:
    "Social credit scores award or remove points based on behavior. It's Big Data meets Big Brother. This will be a world with no more personal experiences, only transactions for the social credit system.

    This [the system] knows every person, every bike, every car, every bus. That's because it essentially turns every public interaction into a transaction where points can be earned or lost."
    Google, of course, is a perfect fit for this kind of Orwellian surveillance scheme. It is, by far, the largest monopoly the world has ever seen, and its data-siphoning tentacles reach deep into our everyday lives, collecting data on every move you make and conversation you have, whether online or in the real world.

    Google actually tracks your movements online, even when you don't think you are using their products. Most websites you visit use the 'free' Google Analytics program to track everything you do on a website. Google purchased Urchin Software back in 2005, and by giving it away were able to integrate this important surveillance tool into most of the internet.

    Google Analytics integrates with Google's ad network monopoly, as well as the largest email service Gmail. These systems are not free, they are a tightly integrated package of surveillance tools - selling your data, selling ads served to you, and manipulating content to direct your behavior.

    These tools collect data along with other Google products like the Android 'smart' phones, the Nest home security system, and even Google's Home Assistant. You can expect these surveillance products to become free over time as the absolute goal is to exploit every bit of data they can collect from you.

    A 2015 Wired article3 revealed some of the details of how Google's online empire is built, noting "One of the company's cluster switches provides about 40 terabits per second of bandwidth — the equivalent of 40 million home internet connections," and "Google now sends more information between its data centers than it trades with the internet as a whole."

    As highlighted in a January 27, 2020, article4 by The Intercept, smart camera networks equipped with facial recognition and video analytic software will advance global surveillance even further, and should be banned to prevent an inevitable slide into invisible yet all-encompassing authoritarianism.

    "The rise of all-seeing smart camera networks is an alarming development that threatens civil rights and liberties throughout the world.

    Law enforcement agencies have a long history of using surveillance against marginalized communities, and studies show surveillance chills freedom of expression — ill effects that could spread as camera networks grow larger and more sophisticated," The Intercept notes.5 Silicon Valley Is Building America's Social Credit System
    According to Fast Company,6 China's social credit system is not entirely unique. "A parallel system is developing in the United States, in part as the result of Silicon Valley and technology-industry user policies, and in part by surveillance of social media activity by private companies," Fast Company writes.7

    For example, life insurance companies can now use content shared in social media posts to determine your premium. "That Instagram pic showing you teasing a grizzly bear at Yellowstone with a martini in one hand, a bucket of cheese fries in the other, and a cigarette in your mouth, could cost you," Fast Company notes.8

    PatronScan is another example. These devices are used by restaurants to identify fake IDs and undesirable customers — people previously removed from an establishment for causing a fight, committing sexual assault, stealing or doing drugs.

    The list is shared among PatronScan customers, so getting banned in one bar or restaurant effectively bans you from all bars and restaurants in the U.S., Canada and U.K. for up to one year. For additional examples, see the original Fast Company article.9

    The Expansion of Public Video Surveillance
    Many TV's now have a camera and can be used to record your emotions while watching presidential debates or the evening news. The Intercept article10 cited earlier goes on to detail the rise and expansion of video surveillance, starting with Axis Communications' internet-enabled surveillance camera, launched in the late '90s, to more modern video management systems that organize all this visual data into databases.

    By the end of 2021, the marketing firm IHS Markit predicts 1 billion cameras will be watching public movements across the globe. As if that's not enough, cities are also inviting residents and businesses to plug their private surveillance cameras into their police network, which expands the system even further.

    According to The Intercept, Detroit, Chicago, New Orleans, New York City and Atlanta have all deployed these types of "plug-in surveillance networks," and many others are considering it as well. To actually make sense of all this footage, video analytic software and artificial intelligence (AI) are used.

    Video analytic capabilities include "fight detection, motion recognition, fall detection, loitering, dog walking, jaywalking, toll fare evasion and even lie detection," The Intercept reports.11

    Object recognition and "anomalous or unusual behavior detection" are also used to flag particular incidents that are then reviewed by human eyes. The Intercept recounts how this information can be used by law enforcement to identify potential crime situations:

    "In Connecticut, police have used video analytics to identify or monitor known or suspected drug dealers.

    Sergeant Johnmichael O'Hare, former Director of the Hartford Real-Time Crime Center, recently demonstrated how BriefCam helped Hartford police reveal 'where people go the most' in the space of 24 hours by viewing footage condensed and summarized in just nine minutes.

    Using a feature called 'pathways,' he discovered hundreds of people visiting just two houses on the street and secured a search warrant to verify that they were drug houses."

    Is a 'Pre-Crime' Department Next?
    Companies are also working on searchable databases that can access and make sense of visual data from a range of different platforms, which will "supercharge the ability to search and surveil public spaces," The Intercept says.12

    What's more, there are now proposals suggesting all of this data, in combination with AI-enabled analytics systems, could be used for "predictive policing" as illustrated in the 2002 movie "Minority Report," where suspected perpetrators are arrested before actually committing the crime.

    Sound too crazy to be true? The Intercept cites a 2018 document 13 by the data storage firm Western Digital and the consulting company Accenture, "Value of Data: Seeing What Matters — A New Paradigm for Public Safety Powered by Responsible AI," which predicts smart surveillance networks may be deployed "across three tiers of maturity."

    The first tier is where we're at now, where law enforcement use CCTV networks to investigate crimes after they've already occurred.

    At the second tier level, predicted to be in place by 2025, municipalities will be transformed into fully connected "smart cities," where the cameras of businesses and public institutions are all plugged into a government-run AI-enabled analytics system. The third tier, predicted by 2035, will have predictive capabilities. As reported by The Intercept:14
    "A 'public safety ecosystem' will centralize data 'pulled from disparate databases such as social media, driver's licenses, police databases, and dark data.' An AI-enabled analytics unit will let police assess 'anomalies in real time and interrupt a crime before it is committed.' That is to say, to catch pre-crime."
    Google's Ad Network Monopoly
    Google's monopoly goes well beyond web search. It also has a potentially dangerous monopoly on online advertising. In 2007, Google bought DoubleClick, which already dominated the digital advertising market. As reported by InfoWorld:15
    "Here's the danger: Google already knows a tremendous amount about the traffic it sends to individual Web sites — where it comes from, what people are looking for, even some basic demographics.

    With DoubleClick in the fold, they will also know what ads are being served on any given page. That gives Google unprecedented insight into publishers' business. And remember, those publishers may be partners, but they are also competitors, often trying to woo the same advertisers as Google.

    Web sites live and die based upon ad revenue and on charging advertisers a certain rate based upon the number of pages served and the quality of their readership/user base. I could imagine a not-entirely-paranoid fantasy in which Google can run the numbers, turn around, and offer better rates to advertisers for a similar audience."
    To learn more of Google's surveillance of you and those you love, please view my comprehensive interview with Robert Epstein below. Epstein, former editor-in-chief at Psychology Today, is now a senior research psychologist for the American Institute of Behavioral Research and Technology, where for the last decade he has helped expose Google's manipulative and deceptive practices.


    Source: https://www.bitchute.com/video/HoyEBkOu7pkd


    https://mercola.fileburst.com/PDF/Ex...ein-Google.pdf

    Google Goes After Your Health Data
    More recently, it's also become apparent Google is going after everyone's health data. Fitbit, which was recently purchased by Google, will provide them with all your physiological information and activity levels, in addition to everything else that Google already has on you.

    As discussed in "How Google Is Stealing Your Personal Health Data," Google, Amazon and Microsoft also collect data entered into health and diagnostic sites, which is then shared with hundreds of third parties — and this data is not anonymized, meaning it's tied specifically to you, without your knowledge or consent.

    In other words, DoubleClick, Google's ad service, will know which prescriptions you've searched for on Drugs.com, for example, thus providing you with personalized drug ads. "There is a whole system that will seek to take advantage of you because you're in a compromised state," Tim Libert, a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University told Financial Times.16

    Google and various tech startups have even been investigating the possibility of assessing mental health problems using a combination of electronic medical records and tracking your internet and social media use.

    Undisclosed data mining is also occurring in hospitals. A whistleblower recently revealed Google amassed health data from millions of Americans in 21 states through its Project Nightingale, and patients have not been informed of this data mining.17,18 As reported by The Guardian:19
    "The secret scheme … involves the transfer to Google of healthcare data held by Ascension, the second-largest healthcare provider in the U.S. The data is being transferred with full personal details including name and medical history and can be accessed by Google staff. Unlike other similar efforts it has not been made anonymous though a process of removing personal information known as de-identification …"
    According to Google and Ascension, the data being shared will be used to build a search tool with machine-learning algorithms that will spit out diagnostic recommendations and suggestions for medications that health professionals can then use to guide them in their treatment.

    Google claims only a limited number of individuals will have access to the data, but just how trustworthy is Google these days? Since the data includes full personal details, sooner or later, they're likely to find a way to use it.

    Google and Mastercard Track Your Purchasing Habits
    Your credit card data, which at first glance would appear completely separate from Google, is also being used by the internet giant to customize ads. As reported by Bloomberg20 August 31, 2018, four unnamed insiders, three of whom claim to have been directly involved in the negotiations, claim Google and Mastercard brokered a business alliance that gives Google access to Mastercard users' retail spending.

    The two companies never made the agreement public, though. Christine Bannan, counsel with the advocacy group Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) told Bloomberg:21
    "People don't expect what they buy physically in a store to be linked to what they are buying online. There's just far too much burden that companies place on consumers and not enough responsibility being taken by companies to inform users what they're doing and what rights they have."
    According to Google, Mastercard users can opt out of ad tracking using Google's online Web & App Activity console.22 The question is, how would users know to do that when they were never told such tracking was occurring in the first place?

    Google's Store Sales Measurement service also suggests it's not just Mastercard users that are being tracked. As noted by Bloomberg, when Google announced the new sales measurement service in 2017, it claimed it had access to about 70% of U.S. credit and debit card sales.

    Goodbye Google
    To have any chance of protecting your privacy, you simply must avoid Google products, as they account for the greatest personal data leaks in your life. To that end, Mercola.com is now Google-free. We do not use Google Analytics, Google ads or Google search for internal searches. To boycott Google, be sure to ditch or replace:

    Gmail, as every email you write is permanently stored. It becomes part of your profile and is used to build digital models of you, which allows them to make predictions about your line of thinking and every want and desire.

    Many other older email systems such as AOL and Yahoo are also being used as surveillance platforms in the same way as Gmail. ProtonMail.com, which uses end-to-end encryption, is a great alternative and the basic account is free.

    Google's Chrome browser, as everything you do on there is surveilled, including keystrokes and every webpage you've ever visited. Brave is a great alternative that takes privacy seriously.

    Brave is also faster than Chrome, and suppresses ads. It's based on Chromium, the same software code that Chrome is based on, so you can easily transfer your extensions, favorites and bookmarks.

    Google search engine, or any extension of Google, such as Bing or Yahoo, both of which draw search results from Google. The same goes for the iPhone's personal assistant Siri, which draws all of its answers from Google.

    Alternative search engines include SwissCows and Qwant. Avoid StartPage, as it was recently bought by an aggressive online marketing company, which, like Google, depends on surveillance.

    Android cellphones, which run on a Google-owned operating system, can track you even when you're not connected to the internet, whether you have geo tracking enabled or not. Blackberry is more secure than Android phones or the iPhone. Blackberry's upcoming model, the Key3, may be one of the most secure cellphones in the world.

    Google Home devices, as they record everything that occurs in your home or office, both speech and sounds such as brushing your teeth and boiling water, even when they appear to be inactive, and send that information back to Google. Android phones are also always listening and recording, as are Google's home thermostat Nest, and Amazon's Alexa.
    See: https://mercola.fileburst.com/PDF/fo...tip-google.pdf

    Additional Privacy Tips
    In my recent interview (above) with Epstein, he also offered the following guidance for those seeking to protect their online privacy:

    Use a virtual private network (VPN) such as Nord, which is only about $3 per month and can be used on up to six devices. In my view, this is a must if you seek to preserve your privacy. Epstein explains:

    "When you use your mobile phone, laptop or desktop in the usual way, your identity is very easy for Google and other companies to see. They can see it via your IP address, but more and more, there are much more sophisticated ways now that they know it's you. One is called browser fingerprinting.

    This is something that is so disturbing. Basically, the kind of browser you have and the way you use your browser is like a fingerprint. You use your browser in a unique way, and just by the way you type, these companies now can instantly identify you.

    Brave has some protection against a browser fingerprinting, but you really need to be using a VPN. What a VPN does is it routes whatever you're doing through some other computer somewhere else. It can be anywhere in the world, and there are hundreds of companies offering VPN services. The one I like the best right now is called Nord VPN.

    You download the software, install it, just like you install any software. It's incredibly easy to use. You do not have to be a techie to use Nord, and it shows you a map of the world and you basically just click on a country.

    The VPN basically makes it appear as though your computer is not your computer. It basically creates a kind of fake identity for you, and that's a good thing. Now, very often I will go through Nord's computers in the United States. Sometimes you have to do that, or you can't get certain things done. PayPal doesn't like you to be in a foreign country for example."


    Nord, when used on your cellphone, will also mask your identity when using apps like Google Maps.

    Clear your cache and cookies — As Epstein explains in his article:23
    "Companies and hackers of all sorts are constantly installing invasive computer code on your computers and mobile devices, mainly to keep an eye on you but sometimes for more nefarious purposes.

    On a mobile device, you can clear out most of this garbage by going to the settings menu of your browser, selecting the 'privacy and security' option and then clicking on the icon that clears your cache and cookies.

    With most laptop and desktop browsers, holding down three keys simultaneously — CTRL, SHIFT and DEL — takes you directly to the relevant menu; I use this technique multiple times a day without even thinking about it. You can also configure the Brave and Firefox browsers to erase your cache and cookies automatically every time you close your browser."
    Don't use Fitbit, as it was recently purchased by Google and will provide them with all your physiological information and activity levels, in addition to everything else that Google already has on you.

    - Sources and References
    1, 2 Business Insider October 29, 2018
    3 Wired June 17, 2015
    4, 5, 10, 11, 12, 14 The Intercept January 27, 2020
    6, 7, 8, 9 Fast Company August 26, 2019
    13 Western Digital, Accenture, Value of Data: Seeing What Matters — A New Paradigm for Public Safety Powered by Responsible AI (PDF)
    15 InfoWorld April 13, 2007
    16 Financial Times November 12, 2019
    17 Financial Times November 14, 2019
    18 Wall Street Journal November 11, 2019
    19 The Guardian November 12, 2019
    20, 21, 22 Bloomberg Updated August 31, 2018 (Archived)
    23 Medium March 17, 2017
    Last edited by Tintin; 13th February 2020 at 13:15. Reason: added links and tidied layout
    Each breath a gift...
    _____________

  40. The Following 4 Users Say Thank You to onawah For This Post:

    Airelle77 (4th January 2021), Bill Ryan (13th February 2020), Franny (12th February 2020), Tintin (13th February 2020)

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