Comment by jabbany

> I think it's reasonable to assume that they currently aren't.

I don't see any reason they wouldn't be? If anything they probably face more scrutiny than US domestic companies exactly because they are foreign. The problem (at least in the US) is just that behavior like in this post should be illegal but it isn't (yet). They _feel_ ethically wrong but there's no punishment for doing it.

> (...) that China has built a digital database of all (or most) of its citizens based on the data they collected (...)

But so do companies like Google, or Meta, or Clearview etc... This is a real problem but Chinese companies are hardly alone here and they aren't even the first to start mass data collection. As for the domestic data collection and association, that's largely a domestic issue that their citizens need to figure out for themselves. For what it's worth, most countries do at least a little bit of domestic surveillance (as seen from the Snowden leaks), China just has a much more robust system with fewer safeguards.

> I think that we have to ask ourselves how that could threaten our democracy.

That is a good question and I think it should be asked of all tech companies.

Facebook had the whole election meddling thing which started the gears turning in legislative branches of how we might reign in companies as instruments that threaten democracy, and by now we all more or less assume countries like Russia and China will try to exert influence in other countries. However, getting the regulations right is hard even though it is also important. We'll need both experts in the technology (re: this whole thread about discreet behavior tracking that a layperson would never identify) and in the legal space to figure out how to protect individuals. This is not the cold war era. It should not be a battle of ideology. We should instead figure out how to protect people from institutions of power, be it hostile foreign powers, domestic tyranny, or just corporate greed.