Depends where you live. Americans have much more to fear from other Americans than they have from the Chinese government. Hell, I'm British and I have more to fear from the US than China. At least my government wont extradite me to China on a whim.
That sounds like a problem with your government rather than the US. If they are agreeing to extradite people who haven't committed a serious crime, you should be voting to change that.
I wasn't blaming the US. The fact remains, the US can do me more damage than China can. If I had to choose between surveilled services in China or surveilled services in the US, I'd go China every time. Same with hardware. I'd rather have bugged Chinese hardware than bugged American hardware.
Obviously, I'd rather not have bugged hardware or be using surveilled services in the first place. Also, you can replace "American" with "British" above, and the argument would still apply.
"U.S government can easily send drones to my country to shoot me, or at least force my country to get me extradicted, or their secret service could just take me to Guantanamo without anyone noticing" vs "Yes, Chinese government is much more oppressive than U.S, but they are not likely to share data with my government, or to get me in any way unless I decide to go to China".
Heck, even if I were US citizen, I would trust Baidu more. Especially if I were US citizen. If you have to share your data, it's better to share it with someone that can't get you easily, or won't share it further with someone that can.
In what example is the US Government killing, kidnapping, torturing, or droning citizens of other countries on any meaningful scale basis outside of a few obvious countries like Afghanistan?
What does someone in Brazil, or Peru, or Belgium, or Russia, or China, or Spain, or Japan, or Australia etc etc - have to fear from the US Government? Absolutely nothing, even with all the understood spying abuses that have taken place. Most likely 99.999% of the world will never have anything to fear from the US Government.
The primary threat is actually economic espionage, from all the major powers. On that field of battle, China is arguably the world's largest threat, they have the most to gain from stealing technology from other countries (Japan, the US, Britain, Germany, Russia, France).
That is probably true, but if you read the newspapers you'd think otherwise. The US has a pretty good humanitarian track record, but every little thing gets blown up outside of proportion.
And of course, the US has an economic system that the world politically hates. It's not socialist, so it's constantly held up as an example of how bad things can be in Europe. America's economy is huge, very free and not a dictatorship, so every middle eastern country, China, and so on are very afraid of it, making sure that every media available in the country regularly excoriates it. Problem is that the US press picks up on an article from these places on a regular basis and reprints a rewrite of it.
Impressions matter more than actual substance. Otherwise China, or for that matter Palestine, would be looked at very differently.
Do you have examples of where people have been extradited from other countries due to NSA collected data? I'm also curious about the drone part. I know they have been used in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Iraq to kill. Have there been cases where they've picked off people in London, etc?
The American government kidnapping people to torture at Gitmo or bombing people's homes into rubble over Google searches isn't something that actually happens. So, it's not something choosing another search engine can reliably protect against.
There are enough examples of US government / secret services doing exactly this. Have they used NSA and Google data? No evidence, but do you really expect they will have a press release? Until Snowden only loonies "knew" that USA/NSA is spying on regular people at al.
I'm a US citizen living in china, the Chinese government could seriously mess me up if they wanted to. The US government is a lot more reliable in comparison, though a bit more sinister (in the sense that the Chinese government is obvious in their disregard for rights, the US government is not).
Who's to say that the political geography won't change in the next 50 years? Just because China doesn't have the ability to extradite _today_ doesn't mean they won't in the future.
Well first it uses .edu domain name, indicating that it's something else than it is.
Then it lures you in with a "download thesis" tease, with a big DOWNLOAD HERE link. Then it forces you to fill in pages and pages and pages and pages of things that you have no interest in filling. Then it automatically "follows" tons people that you have no interest in following. Then it starts sending annoying e-mails.
Just because you wanted to download that one file, you are suddenly in a "network" you had no interest of entering in the first place.
As one Czech saying goes, "you give then a finger and they bite away your whole hand".
It's not a conspiracy, it's a self-organizing system. Each person acts in their own interests with the information and resources they have available, and this is the end result.
Or perhaps like dogs peeing on lampposts - just leaving their mark. Most of these people are incapable of comprehending the internals of SSL or contributing to it, so they comment on trivialities (which they do not understand either). Dragging things down to their own level is another way of putting it.
On the other hand, the EU has finally brought telco to their knees. We had the situation where as e.g. a T-Mobile Germany customer, you'd pay exorbitant roaming fees to use mobile internet or to call on the T-Mobile Netherlands network. It's still expensive, but getting better by the year, thanks to the EU intervening in such cases.
But telephony was invented over 100 years ago - and given the USA completey screwed up telecoms deregulation its a case in the kingdom of the blind the one eyed man is king.
You had to do far more than just change your privacy policy and this was for more than some trivial site with 200 pages or so.
Try implementing it across a global 500 publisher with maybe 60+ major internet property's many of which are built from 3 or 4 CMS's over a decade and it quickly adds up.
Just finding all the pages on a large site to apply the changes to is a non trivial problem.
We haven't actually been getting the data to make an informed decision on these, either. It took nearly a year to get any sort of numbers out of the government regarding how many people were being targeted[1] and they still haven't given any numbers on incidental collection. Meanwhile, most of the the media has been claiming that the communications of millions or even billions of people are being swept up, and now the Washington Post is actually looking at the data they've had for the last year and saying the number is more likely to be somewhere around 900k worldwide. I'm not saying that's necessarily a great number, but that's orders of magnitude less than what we've been led to believe. Nor does the article go into much detail on what "incidental" really means versus "targeted" - are these people in contact with the actual targets, or completely unrelated? Is there a better way to protect the privacy of these people without compromising actual intelligence operations? If not, which side should we err on, and how far?
These are tough questions to answer - especially without hard facts. It's hard to have an honest debate when we the people are left trying to discern the actual facts somewhere between the secrecy and sensationalism.
The conspiracy theory is a bit more complex. The NSA has two programs for upstream collection prior to 9/11 2001. THINTHREAD and STELLARWIND.
THINTHREAD was designed by long time NSA personnel to protect privacy while providing comparable digital surveillance capability to ECHELEON's capability in the analogue world.
STELLARWIND was the full take and archive program.
The White House chose the lower privacy technology, forced the people involved in THINTHREAD into retirement and then prosecuted the whistleblowers.
These sites are hiding in the deep web on purpose. Google doesn't index sites that don't want to be indexed. It respects a site's robots.txt, for example.
Instead, I will trust BaiDu, that's even more in bed with far more oppresive goverment."
I don't know about that.