I'm generally with Occam and his razor, but nothing surprises me anymore. The depths and detail a country like China or Russia will go to is astounding, and you can plausibly argue they've probably hacked these sites and collected the personal data. To what ends they might be using that data is something I don't know about, and it's probably on some hard drive somewhere where they're charged with figuring out how to use it but haven't yet, but it wouldn't surprise me if they'd collected it regardless.
Then again, Russia has shown in its war with Ukraine that its military strategy is to throw waves and waves of bodies at the opposition in the hopes of just outnumbering the opposition. For all the bluster about their advanced war schools and strategy, that's essentially what they've done, and it's why they're bogged down in three years of warfare with what had been a much smaller, relatively divided country (I mean, Ukraine was having trouble keeping Russian influence out of their politics as late as 2010-4, I believe). So Ukraine being united, organized, and skilled enough to survive that sort of overwhelming onslaught is nothing short of a miracle given what Russia is, or at least what it claimed to be. North Korean troops are actively assisting Russia because they need more bodies to overwhelm the smaller population. Rather than using tactical warfare, they're advancing along the front because of sheer numbers.
To tie this in, much like we give Russia too much credit for its military and their tactical prowess, we probably also give China too much credit for its organizing and data mining/technological capabilities. That said, things like DeepSeek being developed in China is a product (it's more like an event or a window into China) that is troubling and illuminating. China is pretty darn advanced and organized even compared to our deep and information-gathering state, and whatever data practices we were using to harvest data from our own citizens (and we were logging personal data in a methodical, deep way at a deeply alarming level via the NSA), we can bet that China probably has at least a reasonable imitation of those same practices on those very citizens. They want U.S. citizen data badly, and they'll go to great lengths to get it.
. Really good guy and we have a ton in common. It's been a pretty good experience. I was almost going to just take this info to the grave, but life got tricky and i had a wake up call and didn't want to have anymore loose ends. It was a risk not knowing him from any other stranger on the street, but it worked out better than i could have expected.
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