> 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...

> but if you work at a place they're interested, they care about you.

And also worth noting that "place a hostile intelligence service may be interested in" can be extremely broad. I think people have this skewed impression they're only after assets that work for goverment departments and defense contractors, but really, everything is fair game. Communications infrastructure, social media networks, cutting edge R&D, financial services - these are all useful inputs for intelligence services.

These are also softer targets: someone working for a defense contractor or for the government will have had training to identify foreign blackmail attempts and will be far more likely to notify their country's counterintelligence services (having the penalties for espionage clearly explained on the regular helps). Someone who works for a small SaaS vendor, though? Far less likely to understand the consequences.

> The other thing is, China has been known to operate overseas against targets

Here in boring New Zealand, the Chinese government has had anti-China protestors beaten in new zealand. They have stalked and broken into the office and home of an academic, expert in China. They have a dubious relationship with both the main political parties (including having an ex-Chinese spy elected as an MP).

It’s an uncomfortable situation and we are possibly the least strategically useful country in the world.

> Listen in on what people talk about, run it through a STT engine and a ML model to condense it down

this is something I was talking when LLM boom started. it's now possible to spy on everyone on every conversation. you just need enough computing power to run special AI agent (pun intended)