Letter to BS: Data privacy is a big concern with Chinese tech firms

This refers to the article “Huawei to ByteDance: Big tech firms in a spot as China riles US, India” (July 27). The entrepreneurial spirit that a Chinese start-up founder talks of in the article is possible in a protected, competition-free market like China. For years, China has kept big US tech companies like Google and Facebook away through its firewall policies.

With Chinese tech firms, privacy is a big concern. It is not that the concern is less with the tech giants of other countries, but then they are not government puppets. It is no secret that the Chinese government has a lot of power over its technology companies and expects them to comply with its censorship demands. The real concern is that China may be collecting a lot of personal data -- a lot of it sensitive in nature -- of millions of Indians, besides people from other nationalities. So apps like TikTok need to be banned. In the today's world, nations are using technology to assert themselves geopolitically.

H N Ramakrishna  Bengaluru

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