[Source]

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Comment: I am concerned with obvious intrusivity of Chinese corporations and sellers into our personal, private, and confidential information. It happens often, when I place an online order for items shipped from China. Here is an even more outrageous example:

I bought a China-made DJI drone. I bought it here, in Canada, from a Canadian retailer. Then, the Chinese DJI coroporation requested that I open an account with them and register with them my address, email address, phone numbers, etc., or else the drone would not be “activated”. This condition (I call it a blackmail) was presented to me after I had purchased the drone. But that’s not all.

A few months and OS updates later, the drone began to demand that I log in to my DJI account before the drone unlocks its flying mode and allows me to take off. Several times, after travelling to a remote location to fly and film, I had to come back home empty-handed because there was no internet connection there. One solution would be to use my smart phone’s hotspot feature to connect and login to DJI in order to unlock my drone but this is not acceptable and not always possible. And this involves my smart phone info, as well.

Here is the problem: Why do I have to log in to China-based corporation every time I want to fly my drone in Canada? If I break Canadian law, I will be responsible to Canadian authorities, not to China. I am not a Chinese citizen, I am a Canadian citizen. And I am not in China. I don’t have to login to my Apple account in order to use my cellphone during my travels, or to log in to a GMC account in order to drive my car. So why this? What kind of personal data is China collecting using this kind of methods and for what purpose? Why do they want to know where I am, where I go and spend my time, what I am doing here, in Canada? Maybe also what I am filming and photographing? Maybe my fingerprints lifted from the touch screen of the remote controller? It is not their business. Why is the Canadian Privacy Commissioner not investigating this and not recommending solutions to end this intelligence-gathering operation?