We all know that China has an internet censorship system. Besides IP blocking and DNS poisoning, it has a very powerful keyword filtering system. All it does is scanning packets and as long as it discovers any sensitive keywords, it sends a reset packets to both end points to kill the connection. I do not think this is only a censorship problem. I think this is also a privacy problem, because your data might be analyzed by other people that you do not know. Here comes the question. Can people in China ensure their internet privacy? Or can you ensure your privacy if your data is sent to China or routed through China? I do not think so. Due to the internet censorship in China, most internet companies have to deploy a censorship system into their internal networks. I think this is the reason why internet privacy cannot be ensured.
The most popular instant messaging software in China nowadays is QQ which is developed by one of the largest Internet company in China named Tencent. Basically most people that have internet access in China has a QQ account. As we might expect, Tencent has its own censorship system, and thus Tencent has its own list of sensitive keywords. Therefore, people might not be able to send curse words to each other and of course people cannot talk about any topic that is considered sensitive by the company or by the government. (In China, government actually has control over local companies) Another most popular tweeter-like website, www.weibo.com , also has this “feature”. The company that hosts Weibo, Sina, also has its own censorship system. Therefore, people cannot post sensitive information.
People’s privacy cannot be ensured because of those censorship systems. Let me tell you a piece of news that I read a few months ago. Two people in China decided to rob a local bank and they discussed the plan using QQ. Then they went to the bank, and before they started several police showed up and arrested them. The question here is, how did those police know about the plan in the first place? Another story is more about politics. As we all know that in 2011 a revolution took place in Egypt. Some people in China heard about it and wanted to protest. Then they discussed their location and time, and when they arrived hundred of police were stand by there. How did the police know there was a protest?
The answer is that basically every province or even every city has a secret special police department that has tens to thousands of people whose job is monitoring network traffic all the time. Oh Lord, that sounds like the people in China are living in a place where thousands of cameras are watching them.
Although the internet privacy is a problem here, the bigger concern I think is whether we can all ensure our internet privacy not just in China. One of my friends who is studying finance once told me that if we lend someone money, even though that person owes us money, one important fact still holds. We are not the ones that have the money and that person more or less has a little advantage over us. I think that internet privacy is similar to that. Once your data is written into other people’s hard drive, the people who owns the hard drive still have advantage over us. Even though laws can punish them if they steal our data, laws still cannot prevent the stealing from happening.