China has state-coordinated schemes to both suppress its own internal population (which may not concern you if you aren't Chinese and never go to China) and to manipulate people globally (which everyone should be concerned about).

While it's true that all countries collect data for the purposes of propaganda, China does so at a scale and with a level of precision and control that pretty much no other country can reach.

You should be trying to limit the amount of data that ANY group gets about you, but some groups will do more nefarious things with it than others. Google for example just wants to advertise to you. Which is bad, I'm not trying to downplay that, just contextualize it. China wants to control every aspect of everything you do. China's capacity to control people outside its own borders is limited, but growing. The more data China gets, the more leverage it has to manipulate, coerce, and control.

https://mullvad.net/en/why-privacy-matters

Excellent set of articles on why.

It's not about what country has it, it's about that they CAN have it, and what they could do with it.

We continue to spiral into a dystopian area. To say it won't happen to you, remember that period tracking apps are being used to track women and arrest them. If I was a Chinese data center grabbing data, this is a nice piece of info to sell and make a profit out of it.

But what about you? Surely you don't do anything. But lets think of a hypothetical. Maybe you visit sites in Opera that are anti-Russian, a news site that had a story about Putin shitting his pants. We'll with all the data stored, they can identify who you are. You're now on a Russian list of people who hate Russia. Maybe you'll go, "But I'll never go to Russia." But who knows?

When women were using those apps, they didn't expect it to be used to get them arrested.

People who practice good privacy have a significantly less chance of getting shit on. So why not?

The pessimistic view: basically everything you do online can be tracked, sold, and bought by anyone with a few bucks. Poor online security means you have no privacy regardless of browser, while good (or at least "better") online security is possible with almost any browser.

If your friend is advocating switching browsers, but with no other behavioral changes, that's just a false sense of security, which may be worse.

To more directly address the question, unless you are a Chinese dissident, "China" having your browsing data isn't any better or worse that Google or Microsoft or Meta having that same data. Spoiler: for the average user, they already do.

So this isn't a compelling argument because it sounds outlandish and the implications (while serious) are indirect

Every major power, and some companies, have population simulations. It's not that hard to build one - we've been using them for decades, and they start yielding useful results even when they're pretty simple. Individuals are complex, but populations can be boiled down with statistics pretty easily

Let's say I want to increase stochastic violence in America. I rate the traits of as many people as I can across as many useful criteria as I can measure. I could then tweak an algorithm to show something I think would radicalize people to a test group, and measure again. I then take what I learned, and polish my approach until I'm ready to go live

You can do this to whatever end you like - and browsing habits can only tell a human so much, but this is what big data does. It finds associations humans wouldn't see through math

This probably sounds like I'm wearing a tin foil hat, but this is a real thing. This is how foreign election interference works - astroturfing blindly only does so much, and modeling a population isn't difficult (depending on what you're trying to do)

Now as for browsing habits - like location data or Facebook friends, with enough data points you can find out things about a person they don't know themselves. It may or may not make sense to a human, but big data is all about finding associations through blind math.

If you provide a set of data points, you contribute. It may or may not influence you, but either way it improves the ability to influence those around you.

I don't know how much opera collects, I don't know how much of that data is exfiltrated to China. I know I don't want anyone to have too much of that data, but I also have to live my life.

It's a matter of harm reduction - educate yourself on your choices, listen to people who dive deeper than you're willing to, and do what you can to make the most ethical choice based on where you are right now. There's no perfect choice

Good question. One reaaon is that wherever it goes you can't ensure that's where it stays.

Personally I think it’s overblown, with way too much Sinophobia, similar to “the red scare” of the Cold War. It’s easier to control and manipulate your own population if they’re all afraid of “the big bad”.

However I’ll agree with pretty much all the risks, all the ways it can be abused. It’s just that local companies will “legally” abuse that data with far more direct impact to me, as do local political groups. A foreign government collecting that data may be able to manipulate crowds to meddle and someone needs to be concerned with that, but they have no reason to meddle specifically with me.

You should definitely be concerned about data collected about you and how it can be abused, but not just by China

Opera specifically is owned by a loan shark company; avoid that shit even if you're a member of the CCP itself.

Why would you not want your data to be sold in general? Because it'd lead to your internet experience being less private. Companies can buy your data to give you targeted content while you're browsing the internet and it could influence you all sorts of ways from giving you the idea to buy a product, to showing you a specific political candidate's propaganda during elections; which does literally influence another country.

Others have explained why Chinese ownership of Opera might be bad.

I suggest you try the Vivaldi browser which is made by a company started by the co-founder & CEO of the original Opera. Basically builds upon the heritage and philosophy of the original Opera. Extremely customizable, tracker and ad blocking built in along with speed dials, gestures, UI customization of just about everything.

Has desktop for all platforms including Linux, and mobile for Android and iOS with sync (not going through Google) for all platforms.

Optional email, calendar, Mastodon and RSS clients in the desktop versions. Optional email account and Mastodon account accessible from any standard client and the Web, or via their desktop.

Not fully open source (nor is Opera) and built on the same open source Chromium base as Opera, Brave, Chrome, but seriously de-Googleized and does not use the Chromium UI. Will continue to support ad blocking even after Google/Chromium removal of the interfaces for ad blocking extensions. Yet desktop versions do allow installation of extensions from the Chrome/Chromium extension store.

Edit: fix link and some grammar

Knowing things about people and having lots of info on them gives someone power over them. And they don't just do it for fun. They have some motives. I'd also rather not give it to some authoritan regime.

Ultimately everyone has to decide... Do I tell everyone my exact salary? Do I keep it to some people and not tell others? Do I close the blinds of the bedroom while having intimacy? And what harm is there in the neighbors knowing what I like to do in private?