Privacy in Asia

(minus PRC, obviously) With all the recent news about age verification, Chat Control, Section 230, etc, I realized I've never seen any stories about internet/tech privacy in East Asia. Is this just a failure of reporting, or has there been nothing to report? Have you read about it? Do you have personal experience?

One thing I like about living in Japan is that the government is so bureaucratic, paper-driven, and generally retarded that it's hard for me to imagine their rolling out any real privacy-infringing policies that have any teeth. ISPs seem to generally stay out of my business (though I use VPNs, etc. so not really sure). The bad side is that the people are so sheeplike that if the government DID somehow come up with a real, privacy-violating laws, there'd be little to no push-back (I guess that's most places though).

my understanding of this topic is spotty and reserved to trivia such as the fact that it is illegal in much of the world (including japan and china) to manufacture cellphones that don't make a shutter sound when photos are taken. or the matter of chinese government using deep packet inspection to monitor and censor network traffic. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_packet_inspection however some cursory research I found some interesting things. Sri Lanka was first southeast asian country to implement sophisticated privacy laws in 2022: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_Data_Protection_Act_(Sri_Lanka) . Japan has a couple of privacy laws dating back to 2003 as well, which were amended in 2016. an interesting thing about these is that the japanese law is generally in line with EU privacy laws that allow businesses to interoperate in the two regions with greater ease. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privacy_law https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?from=EN&uri=CELEX%3A32019D0419 Some other interesting stuff I just learned is how APEC - the asia pacific economic cooperation has mandates for privacy that all members have adopted. I've attached pdf of the framework, known as APEC privacy framework. there is also this overview of asian privacy laws and e-discovery ive found, also attached.

>>27010 Taiwanese lainon here. I'd say the majority of people don't really care about privacy and the government is generally inept at anything digital. Due to most tech products (smart phone, social media etc.) here are produced by foreign companies, the extent of privacy infrigement mainly depends on the will of these companies. And because most of the people don't really care about privacy issue, they will accept the terms of these companies instead of opting for privacy-friendly alternatives. So we are clearly not exempted from big tech datamining. As for the government the problem is not they are trying to violate your privacy further but they are unable and unwilling to properly protect it. For example in 2022 the household registration(戶籍), which includes data like the name, personal ID and relatives of every Taiwanese national, was leaked. To date little is known about the breach, including the perpetrator, the origin of the leak and to whom the data is shared. Because the majority don't care about privacy, there's basically no push for investigation on such data breaches, let alone anyone being held accountable for them.

>>27011 unrelated but how's the piracy scene over there? i've heard it's bleak.

>>27021 Hmm, are you asking about physical or digital distribution? To be honest, I don't use Japanese trackers--I'm only torrenting the occasional film or anime that I find on rutracker or nyaa--so I can't speak to the Japanese distribution of their own content. My ISP has never given me any issues about the traffic/data through.