China Inc Watches Over Users

A new report [https://citizenlab.org/2016/02/privacy-security-issues-baidu-browser/] by one of my favorite research groups, Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto, gives us some insight into how deep the Chinese have gone in monitoring their own population, but give an indication they may be monitoring a good deal more than their own.  Why does a browser want to transmit the following items back to a host server:  user search terms, hard drive serial number, GPS coordinates of the user, nearby wireless networks [including their MAC address] and URLs visited?  This is quote from the report:

• The Windows version of Baidu Browser also transmits a number of personally identifiable data points, including a user’s search terms, hard drive serial number model and network MAC address, URL and title of all webpages visited, and CPU model number, without encryption or with easily decryptable encryption.

These are things they are collecting on users of Baidu, the Chinese equivalent of Google, but there is more to it than that.  They are also collected by third party apps made with the development kits provided through Baidu.  Millions of Android apps are pushed over third party systems to tens of millions of users.  Why does Baidu, or anyone in China for that matter, need to know my hard drive serial number and the wireless networks around me?  There are only a few uses for any of that information and none of them are good.  

At some point we have to wonder how we can continue to trust anything coming out of China.  Citizen lab did the analysis of Green Dam, monitoring software that China put on every computer made in China.  They said they stopped doing that when the World Trade Organization said that wasn't very nice.  All they did was adopt a different strategy for the collection.  Now they put it into software that users will download.  There has to be a consequence for this or they will continue to monitor everyone they can get to.  Google stopped accepting certs from the China NIC last year, so maybe we need to follow suit with software.