Browser made by China's top search engine leaks almost everything Sit down, so you don't injure yourself falling down in surprise: the browser provided by China's Baidu is a privacy nightmare. That's the conclusion of Canada's Citizen Lab, which watched the wire while the browser was running and needed a lie-down itself from what it found. Baidu is China's top search engine and, like Google …
A Chinese company, based in China, is pre-empting government requirements. And we all know that the Chinese government cares not one whit about individual privacy, just like the US government but with less hypocrisy.
The real question is : will anyone outside of China use this browser ? Will the Chinese use this browser ? There are many alternatives, after all, but will a smidgen of nationalism get them to prefer a home-grown one ? Wouldn't be surprising.
"And we all know that the Chinese government cares not one whit about individual privacy, just like the US government but with less hypocrisy."
That's not entirely true. In both cases they want themselves to have access to everything, not to let everyone else have access to it. A Chinese browser that sends all the data it can to the government would not come as a surprise, but one that just sprays data all over for anyone to see sounds much more like incompetence than government interference. As with all the cheap Chinese knock-offs you can find on Amazon, it seems they just didn't care about standards and safety as long as they could make something that looks superficially like the thing they're copying.
There are close to 500 apps in playstore that are using Baidu analytics plus thousands of others that are vulnerable. The story is much bigger than just Baidu browsers, and includes ALL there apps.
Baidu,Citizen lab,full report, & third party apps vulnerable too!
https://citizenlab.org/2016/02/privacy-security-issues-baidu-browser/
Information is power, and the more intelligent a/the system wants to be, the more information it requires. Such is only natural ‽ .
Do you imagine the Wild Wacky West does not mimic and/or lead as a front for the Erotic Exotic East?
And this is only the beginning of the demise of secrecy as a tool for exclusive executive order administrations* ......
The latest trend in intelligence requires a broad range of cooperation among government, industry and academia. …… Weaving a Web of Synthetic Persistence
* Some would tell you every democracy is just a phorm of exclusive executive order administrations.
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