One thing that surprised me about SK is that they have so many local alternatives for tech products that I thought were global. And the global/US version has almost no market penetration. An example of this was Google, at least when I visited in early 2015.
It's great that American software monopolies do not have access to Korean data and that Korean companies can create jobs hiring Koreans and add to the GDP. ALL sovereign countries should practice sovereign software and safeguard PII of its citizens
It's rather inconvenient for non-Koreans but you were never the intended audience nor is there much care for foreigners these days-there is growing hostility towards foreign tourists who have flocked to Japan and Korea in recent years.
> ALL sovereign countries should practice sovereign software and safeguard PII of its citizens
Most countries are incapable of this and when they do try they do a worse job.
My government has a website that allows you to fetch a person’s voting centre by knowing their ID number. Our ID numbers are sequential. Therefore you can use that website to get approximate location for literally everyone.
My government also has a website to request passports online. I was playing with it and it turns out they have an open GraphQL endpoint that lets me query billing transactions for _everyone_.
> Therefore you can use that website to get approximate location for literally everyone.
In America, before the Internet took off, every year everyone would get a book called the "white pages" that had the name, address, and phone number, of everyone who lived in their city.
The American view of privacy is that "openness makes for a civil society".
Although one can argue that hasn't been working out well for us lately ..
Likewise, marriages are publicly recorded and accessible online, as are all property purchases, births, deaths, and even property tax payments.
Though for some reason we consider income taxes to be super secret. Everything else is public, but not those! (How much cash someone put down to buy a house? Public. How much money that person makes? Not public. How much money everyone donates to politicians? Public.)
> Therefore you can use that website to get approximate location for literally everyone.
Approximate address, surely. Addresses are ... usually not very secret in the first place, though? It'd be absolutely fascinating if your government not only tracked everyone's location but assigned their voting center by current location, but, well,
The voting centre is typically the closest public school to where you live.
So when I say location here I mean the neighborhood where you live.
Also the main concern isn’t the government. They clearly already have the data and will always have that data. They also have the actual address of people.
The main concern is literally anyone can access the data and this thread is about countries protecting PII lol.
In some Western countries voter's lists with names and addresses are publicly accessible, if I understand correctly. Helps to make sure government doesn't add dead souls to vote for them.
> It'd be absolutely fascinating if your government not only tracked everyone's location but assigned their voting center by current location, but, well,
That's exactly what happens in Turkiye. I assume GP is there.
IMHO That's where the software model could change if more countries gave a serious shake at managing national services.
As you point out it's hard and few can do it, so getting more common open source platforms would be a natural evolution. Then relying on global providers that act as a service developer instead of a service owner would still be a huge difference.
That sounds great. I imagine it would turn out the same way using local transit has. Some are awesome like the netherlands and some are hostile towards users that you can’t even properly use it if you arrive too late at night because no one is available like france.
Everyone in this thread seems to thinks government is able to get things done. That is not what my last 40 years of life has shown me.
Most countries ARE capable of that. Or rather, most people of a country don't like platforms not dominated by their own primary language, and this is passively achieved by that tendency.
Lots of Russian stuffs on the Internet come through Telegram, meanwhile China has Weibo and TikTok, Korea does its thing in KakaoTalk and Facebook/Insta, Japan uses LINE along Twitter/Insta instead, so on and so forth. Everyone could be on Facebook, but that isn't what is going on.
The Interweb isn't so global, and English isn't the lingua franca of all communications. It's just the perception one experiences through an American door, though the Web do tend to be more developed in en-US.
Why would we think that every country blocking out foreign companies would result in better software being written for consumers in that country?
I think some tiny amount of protectionism can be necessary to get a domestic industry started, when it is important for reasons beyond giving access to the best products like national security. Especially in edge cases like competing with foreign companies with the backing of their state government or an international market that has degenerated to a monopoly. But ultimately free trade makes better products and international consumers richer and is the desired end goal, not every nation rewriting the same tech stack and providing local flavors of software solving similar problems.
> not every nation rewriting the same tech stack and providing local flavors of software solving similar problems.
Why not? Isn't Diversity good? Wouldn't it be nice to have multiple colors, implementations of things rather than the monopolistic (and probably American) beige?
Diversity comes from (fair) competition. Why would I not make American monopoly beige if it works for America locally? But if the foreign company is already that color I have to differentiate somehow. I have to compete on whatever I know about the domestic market, and force the foreign companies to learn and adapt to reach parity with me.
That whole process works in reverse too, where I have to reach parity with the large multinational company on all the features the domestic audience cares about. That last step is usually the first one to be missed when a government hands a monopoly on a tech vertical to a local company with protectionist policies. (And often they don’t just do it to insulate them from foreign competition, they will end up insulating them from domestic too as an artifact of the way these relationships reinforce themselves)
So, the state should intervene to help level the playing field to reach fair competition. In practice though it rarely stops there and instead works to insulate the domestic company from any competition. Which results in inferior products.
It is not diversity to have many people reinventing and maintaining essentially the same wheel. Exceptionally, this is necessary for national security purposes, but in the common case this is actually a poor deal for local consumers who prop up a worse product.
This is rich, coming from someone in a country where everyone still uses SMS to chat with their friends and family. Other countries already have far superior messaging apps than whatever America has produced, but Americans refuse to give up their SMS just like they refuse to give up their guns.
I’m not sure what this is supposed to prove? There are lots of different messaging apps with very high market share in the US versus a WhatsApp monoculture. A lot of people using SMS are actually using iMessage, and historically one of the reasons it’s won is because US telecoms went to unlimited SMS messaging when competing with each other, whereas foreign monopoly telecoms charged prices per SMS making messaging apps on data more competitive.
iMessage is a better experience and also degrades gracefully to sms for people who aren’t on the platform, unlike almost all other messaging apps where I have to make sure they have the app installed.
Facebook messenger has like 50% market penetration with its own suite of features. Snapchat is next and offers a very different user experience.
Apps without compelling reasons to exist like Google allo lose.
> Why would we think that every country blocking out foreign companies would result in better software being written for consumers in that country?
Why do you think foreign companies are automatically better? Is American software written by non-Americans automatically best? I find this to be incredibly arrogant.
Sovereign software would break the open Internet as it exists today. A lot more work needs to be done on open protocols before interoperation would work nearly as well as the products we have today.
Not to mention the colossal waste of effort in engineering hours, the disparity in quality between rich and poor countries, etc.
Reuse is good. I would rather see open data and open protocols too, but look at Cambridge analytica, a scandal that was a direct consequence of giving people control over their data!
Right, which is exactly why it's dangerous to allow foreign (that is, US) companies to control your citizens' data, particularly if that data is not safeguarded against those foreign governments (e.g. due to "national security" laws).
yes, and they also have the power to tell multinationals where they are allowed, geographically, to store the locals' data.
the grandparent has invented a fake problem (data regionalization, as though it cannot be addressed with regulation) and has conflated a nationalist-socialist desire to replace a foreign private enterprise with a nationalized public one. it's nationalist because it assumes that the nation needs to own it, and socialist because at the national level a public solution is proposed.
the solution, in turn, doesn't actually solve the regionalization problem unless the state organization running the nationalized ride share app is required through further legislation to keep the data local -- the same legislation that would be needed to regulate private entities, except now it's the government regulating itself since the public national ride share app is operated and owned by the government, and is now open to all the problems of corruption that plague every command economy.
But by all means, be more like North Korea, South Korea. Just nationalize everything. You don't want American influence. Those American monopolies and American dollars have really made you worse off in the last seventy years. /s
I have a problem with your comment. It's extremely condescending and emotionally charged.
Data sovereignty/regionalization is not a fake problem. Many governments around the world are trying to keep foreign companies from accessing their citizens data.
A sovereign country wants to create its industry by keeping foreign companies out isn't communism. Much of the West does this already and uses regulation/fines/antitrust lawsuits to keep em down.
Amusingly, U.S. Congress has been making a ruckus about this so-called “fake problem” lately (and I can’t fault them) even though TikTok already stores American data in Oracle Cloud on American soil.
> It's great that American software monopolies [...] and that Korean companies can create jobs hiring Koreans and add to the GDP.
Largely agree with this, but this
> do not have access to Korean data
> safeguard PII of its citizens
Is incredibly ironic on a post "I found a 1-click exploit in South Korea's biggest mobile chat app". Zerodium pays $1 million for a WhatsApp (the Western equivalent of Kakaotalk) one-click exploits. As a consequence, any new exploits must be incredibly involved, else they'll already have been cashed in (and patched after being reported/exploited). Whereas this Kakaotalk exploit is trivial.
Americans share their PII with the FAANGs, us in Korea share it with the entire world because, as this article shows, security is absolutely atrocious.
> That's because the Korean and Japanese internets are far older than most of Americas giants. They also were made for locals.
Google launched in 1998. Naver didn't launch search until 2000. Copying American tech companies but targeting your own market is a common theme (see China, Latin America, Southeast Asia, etc.). Let's not pretend it's not the case here or Korea is somehow special.
If you want to think that then that's fine by me. Would be interesting to see the usage of Naver in 2001 versus Google in 2001 in terms of percentage of local population. (even if Google had 3 years head start)
Yahoo was before Google and Japan has been on Yahoo forever. Yahoo is American but they engorged on it in Japan.
Google is just a copy of a copy.
Koreans and Japanese were definitely ahead of the West in both phone and internet uptake.
