Comment Exactly. (Score 2) 28
The company's own plans do not matter, cannot matter, have never mattered.
The fact that they have the data, and that they operate in a jurisdiction where they can be compelled to turn over the data (and then gagged from saying what the government is now doing with the data), is all that matters. And that applies to both the US and China.
Pre-Snowden, I could imagine some people sticking their heads in the sand and pretending that stuff doesn't happen, or if it does, it doesn't happen here, or if it does, it doesn't happen often, or if it does, it happens with meaningful judicial oversight.
But the cat's well and truly out of the bag. Gathering data is equivalent to using it for evil, and we should (some of us do) treat every app that attempts to gather data, as evil. And we've long known that even approximate location data reveals plenty about who you associate with and what you do.