This might come as a weird take but I'm less concerned about the Chinese logging my private information than an American company. What's China going to do? It's a far away country I don't live in and don't care about. If they got an American court order they would probably use it as toilet paper.

On the other hand, OpenAI would trivially hand out my information to the FBI, NSA, US Gov, and might even do things on behalf of the government without a court order to stay in their good graces. This could have a far more material impact on your life.

That's rather naive, considering China has a international police unit, that is stationed in several countries https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_police_overseas_servic...

> What's China going to do? It's a far away country I don't live in and don't care about.

Extortion is one thing. That's how spy agencies have operated for millennia to gather HUMINT. The Russians, the ultimate masters, even have a word for it: kompromat. You may not care about China, Russia, Israel, the UK or the US (the top nations when it comes to espionage) - but if you work at a place they're interested, they care about you.

The other thing is, China has been known to operate overseas against targets (usually their own citizens and public dissidents), and so have the CIA and Mossad. Just search for "Chinese secret police station" [1], these have cropped up worldwide.

And, even if you personally are of no interest to any foreign or national security service, sentiment analysis is a thing. Listen in on what people talk about, run it through a STT engine and a ML model to condense it down, and you get a pretty broad picture of what's going on in a nation (aka, what are potential wedge points in a society that can be used to fuel discontent). Or proximity gathering stuff... basically the same thing the ad industry [2] or Strava does [3], that can then be used in warfare.

And no, I'm not paranoid. This, sadly, is the world we live in - there is no privacy any more, nowhere, and there are lots of financial and "national security" interest in keeping it that way.

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-65305415

[2] https://techxplore.com/news/2023-05-advertisers-tracking-tho...

[3] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jan/28/fitness-tracki...

These threads always seem to be what can China do to me in a limited way of thinking that China cannot jail you or something. However, do you think all of the Chinese data scrapers are not doing something similar to Facebook where every source of data gathering ultimately gets tied back to you? Once China has a dosier on every single person on the planet regardless of country they live, they can then start using their algos to influence you in ways well beyond advertising. If they can have their algos show you content that causes you to change your mind on who you are voting for or some other method of having you do something to make changes in your local/state/federal elections, then that's much worse to me than some feigned threat of Chinese advertising making you buy something

Carry this package and deliver it to person X with you next time you fly. Go to the outskirts of this military base and take a picture and send it to us.

You wouldn't want your mom finding out your weird sexual fetish, would you?

China has a policy of chilling free speech in the west with political pressure.