Comment by Elucalidavah
9 hours ago
Querying a local dictionary on each clipboard seems okay; having a feature to request remote dictionaries is okay; making it easy to combine both is dubious but understandable (would be better off as a special flag); but having them combined by default? That's pretty much malicious.
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It's malicious intent! The developer isn't a kid, they're releasing the software for world wide use. It's a simple thing, do not send private data to remote servers without explicitly asking the user!
I'd go one step further and say it's a blatant Chinese SIGINT.
In your eyes maybe (and mine for the record), but different people have different values and expectations of what is privacy.
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That's like saying Afgans have a different idea of consent.
Not really because "Chinese" is being used here as an indicator of nationality, not ethnicity.
I disagree with using it that way because it feeds into the CPC's propaganda mission to conflate the ethnicity of "Han" with citizenship of the PRC, which aids their cultural imperialism ('Taiwan is "Chinese" and we are "China" so therefore people in Taiwan are our people!'). Also the definition is being stretched to include anyone with even the vaguest ethnic ancestry from within territory ruled by the PRC or historic empires ("China" is a word that basically means "empire")
Anyway I agree that people from the PRC are more used to throwing up their hands at invasions of privacy since the government having total insight into your life is a given there, and to many a positive thing (they may believe it keeps them safe). I also believe that growing up as one of one billion people gives one a sense of useless anonymity - who cares if someone sees your clipboard, there's just too many people for it to matter.
There definitely seems to be a cultural difference when it comes to privacy expectations from Chinese companies and western companies. Doesn't mean it's okay to do this kind of thing in a Debian package, of course, but I can understand how this could've happened.