Dangers of Chinese tech
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) keeps an ever-watchful eye over China’s population, arresting dissidents and those whose ideas stray too far from party ideals.
In Taiwan, too, Chinese technology — Xiaomi and Hikvision to name a few brands — is ubiquitous. Users download paired software and applications made in China to register their devices, with some even connecting to Internet servers based in China.
All such data passing through Chinese-made tech — every single move, spoken word and keystroke — could be transmitted to China at any time from anywhere. It could be saved in a data cloud in China and monitored, as has been proven multiple times overseas with the data harvesting by ByteDance.
With such grave national security problems, does the government have any policymaking body dealing with the issue?
How many Chinese-made surveillance cameras or monitoring equipment are being used in the neighborhoods or along the commuting routes of important government figures, high-ranking military officers, national security units and lawmakers?
We need to see this as an urgent national security issue. Even original equipment factories used by government procurers are using Chinese equipment either in secret or without knowing it.
How could we place limits or restrictions, even for the public’s use of various unchecked China-based online shopping platforms such as Taobao and Tmall? Are we just going to wait for disaster to strike before we do anything about it?
Since Taiwan’s market is small, backing for application software services is not easy.
The Ministry of Digital Affairs should act as the government’s overseer for this issue, putting out public bid tenders for a “national data security platform app” and stipulating that all people within Taiwan who use hardware made in China should transfer use records to this official application, while at the same time disabling China’s factory-set surveillance apps.
Through thoroughly cutting off login and registration for use of China’s surveillance apps, plucking out the all-seeing third eye of the CCP, we could get monitoring equipment and devices back under our own control and avoid data security risks from Chinese surveillance, guaranteeing the public’s democratic freedoms and security.
We could even export our own technology to provide this service to countries with similar needs, working together to safeguard the lines of defense of democracies everywhere.
Hsu Yu-min
Taipei
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