China Wants to Start a National Internet ID System | The government said the proposal would protect online privacy. Critics said it could further concentrate government control over the internet.
They don't need to defend this, tankies' values don't include privacy from the state.
But western governments with compliant companies have the same or bigger amount of information on their citizens' activities as China is trying to get.
So here's your whataboutism if you want to discard it, as if someone ever really needed a reason to retreat from argument.
If you don't, I'll add that in my opinion future sucks.
They already have something kinda like this. All public wifis require that you sign in with phone number and SMS-verification. It might not be as air-tight as whatever the article is about (like a chad I only read headlines), but in practice it seems pretty darn tight IMO.
I read the article because I was quite sure China already had internet identifiers. This article is just about China wanting to make the government the sole proprieter of internet identities. Propaganda line or not that does make the privacy line make sense as less organizations are tracking your identifiers, and it's not as if the CPC wouldn't have the access to information the non government companies have. My sense is you're not really hiding from them simply by using private companies whenever you can. It's a tighter grip for sure, but it's not going to change much on its own.
So this is different from Korean iPIN because Chinese people can only get it from the government in the new proposal? It looks like they both already tie online presence to traceable identifiers, just Korea allows you to get it from government or private company and China wants to take that ability away from private companies.