A Huge List of Western Privacy Violations

Injustice Anywhere is Injustice Everywhere

16 Mar 2025

If you’d like to directly jump to the list of links, head to the section A Huge List of Links.

There are a lot of people who know China has huge privacy violations. From suppressing content, disappearing dissidents, to even collaborating with corporations, the Chinese government wants to know what you are doing at all times.

However, the same can be said about the Western countries as well, which is hopefully conveyed within this article. This is mostly US centric, but as the Western countries frequently collaborate with each other, there are probably similar measures happening elsewhere as well

The reason I’m focusing on Western nations is because I’m assuming you will likely hear about Russia’s and China’s programs and will unlikely to hear the Western ones.

Instead of banning by origin (eg. BYD, TikTok, etc.), we should be banning practices we deem egregious. Global surveilance doesn’t care who you are, they just want to always know what you are doing.

Thanks again to Edward Snowden and others like him, who gave creditability to a tin-foiled hat theory.

A Huge List of Links

Just a heads up, I had stopped collecting links in recent years. This is why it may seem like that these privacy violations mostly happened in the past, however it continues unabated to this day. You can follow news like CitizenLab, 404Media, ArsTechnica, Wired, EFF, and the FSF. If you would like to contribute to this list, you can ping me with the URLs you’d like to add on Mastodon or make a PR here.

There is no pattern with the links:

Additional Tangentially Bad Things

Why I am Posting About This Now

I was recently talking to RMTransit, a person I respect for their knowledge about trains and public transportation. Unfortunately, they seem to think that banning based on origin is a perfectly fine remedy to the systematic privacy violations enacted on ordinary people. It’s also unfortunate that he said that people should be more grateful, so I guess that’s that for this conversation (To be fair, this could be for another conversation that he may be referring to, however it was posted close to when I last posted, so I think it would be natural for me to assume that it was for me).

He is not alone in thinking this way. Lot’s of my friends and family think this way as well. It’s a bit frustrating because 1) their familiarity with their country doesn’t mean they won’t be swept up in the global mass surveilance and 2) people’s familiarity with technology also seems to make them experts on what is actually going on their devices, without truly understanding what is happening with their data. I won’t claim to know everything that goes on in a device, however I’ve roughly followed this space for a while now to generally know what is going on.

So what can we do about this? Well, there are multiple privacy guides online that you can easily search up. There really isn’t a fit-all solutions, but more of assessing your threat model and software/hardware you use and adjusting those as needed. This field also changes constantly, so you always have to be aware of new threats. There are some general things to keep in mind though:

We should also try to demand these things from our governments:

Finally, please do not go in with guns blazing like I did in the conversation with RMTransit. Yes, it might be frustrating, but you won’t convince anyone with your viewpoint with anger and frustration. It also is probably not worth getting worked up over the internet as you interact with are unlikely to have to power to change the world (This paragraph is more for me lol)