A security researcher wrote an article while back and it was shocking to see how much data TikTok was collecting:
- biometrics
- what words are mentioned in the video, popularity
- surrounding wifi, location data
- your contacts (presumably to cross link to social media platforms)
I just can't believe that a powerful country like America is letting a not-so-friendly military/civilian complex infiltrate it for somewhat unknown purpose.
Is this collection different from, say, Meta? I believe they collect all the same information via Instagram.
And before someone says Meta is an American company, not controlled by an adversary, let me recall that it’s controlled by Zuckerberg who spent $419 million to influence US election administration in a seemingly partisan way (“democracy hacking” as another commenter said). Meta may not be YOUR adversary, but that fact is not necessarily true of all (or even most) Americans
> He offered nearly half a billion dollars in grants to any election official who wanted one, as long as those officials spent it on what a lot of people would consider mundane essentials: ballot sorters, drop boxes, poll workers and — because it was 2020 — hand sanitizer.
> And when those election officials applied for more money than he originally offered, he kicked in another $119 million to satisfy the rest of the requests.
> At a time when Republicans are rapidly restricting access to the ballot box in states across the country, spending nearly half a billion dollars to do the exact opposite of that is tantamount to a partisan choice. Or, at least, it was bound to be viewed that way.
"Zuckerberg and Chan tapped prominent Republican election lawyer Michael
Toner to review the grants CTCL awarded last year to counties and other
jurisdictions across the country.” Toner, a former chairman of the Federal
Election Commission, “discovered that more Republican jurisdictions, defined as municipalities that voted for Trump in 2020, applied for and received grants from
CTCL"
This would result in exactly the disparity in "dollars per vote(r)" that was pointed out above. Because if more people apply for and get the same amount of grants as a smaller group of people, then the former group will have less dollars per individual.
So if someone like elon musk or peter theil did something like this, they gave $419 million to a bunch of red states all while aggressively promoting trump, would you still claim it's "not damning"?
This is an example of an extremely wealthy person influencing an election, plain and simple. It's odd to me that we're all just supposed to be ok with it.
The parent to your comment is asking what caused CTCL to give more to Democratically aligned counties. Everyone agrees it happened - I am just unconvinced it has a strictly partisan explanation. They are asking for proof it’s malicious. Just stating there is a difference in funding isn’t proof the CTCL acted with partisanship.
There are many latent variables besides GOP/Dem, Urban/Rural that could cause the difference. For example when examining barriers to voting, time spent in line or number of polling places/capita are easy KPIs. Urban areas tend to score poorly on these metrics. If the funding was allocated by these metrics urban areas will win more funding.
There are many reasons a totally non partisan group would prioritize grants to urban areas. Chief among them might be that partisans have deliberately underfunded urban locations and sometimes been caught saying the reason was for their partisan gain.
Or the simplest explanation: a party that discourages voter turnout is in charge or rural areas. Officials in those counties are less likely to ask for funding that makes voting easier.
> And the total amount of the grants was not determined based on population. Rather, amounts tracked with blue votes. The average grant amount per registered voter for a Biden-carried jurisdiction was more than 50 percent larger than the average for those that Trump carried. [1]
>Emails from the Office of the Pennsylvania Governor and the Pennsylvania Department of State show that former Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar and an official in Gov. Tom Wolf’s office knew about private 2020 election grants and invited Democratic-leaning counties to apply, appearing to aid the selective process at a time when other counties were unaware. No email shows any official in either office providing similar information or assistance to any of the commonwealth’s Republican-leaning counties. [2]
It appears that the grant process were overly influenced by politics both from an application, and an outcome perspective.
Ok so… who asked for the funding and didn’t get it? Did Republicans apply for large grants in equal numbers and not get any? What happened to result in Democratic areas getting most of the money?
You’d think that for all this is, there’d be a sob story somewhere of the Republican counties that wanted better access to voting and didn’t get it. So… what happened?
So if we decided to channel all voter access expansion and protection funds to the Koch Brothers that would be totally fine because it should be considered non-partisan? In the most abstract sense, it isn't partisan. In the actual implementation, it is partisan.
I wouldn’t want all voter access funds channeled by the Koch brothers, but if they decide to fund non-partisan GOTV efforts, I would applaud it.
Even if they ended up donating more to areas likely to vote their way. More voting is good period. If GOTV funding is spread unevenly then more GOTV funding to neglected areas is the solution.
The Daily Mail's sidebar is trash, selected articles sometimes have a high level.
They seem to use their network of paparazzi/journalists to actually research facts on the ground. It is paid for by the fact that 95% of the content is indeed trash that sells.
But the 5% that isn't trash contains classic what/when/where/how style facts in great detail. For select topics like the trucker protests in Canada the Daily Mail is one of the best publications.
No, the Mail is all trash. But they're also notorious plagiarists (in the modern way, where you quickly rewrite somebody else's story.) So if you have a scoop that panders to a reactionary audience, the Mail will steal it, not link back to you, and become the outlet who becomes the main social media share for it. They will do no checking or verification on the story beforehand, but if it eventually turns out to be a made-up story, they'll just delete it. They've already got the juice, so now that it turns out you're wrong they're happy to refer people to you for the credit.
I even remember noticing they stole one of their uplifting weight-loss stories from another tabloid.
edit: they have lots of photos, though, which is the best thing about tabloids.
"Zuckerberg and Chan tapped prominent Republican election lawyer Michael
Toner to review the grants CTCL awarded last year to counties and other jurisdictions across the country.” Toner, a former chairman of the Federal
Election Commission, “discovered that more Republican jurisdictions, defined as municipalities that voted for Trump in 2020, applied for and received grants from CTCL"
Looking past the raw number of grants to the total amount of money granted, however, from zucks form 990 IRS filing. CTCL awarded all larger grants – on both an absolute and per capita basis to deeply Democratic urban areas.
>The group that got the bulk of Mr. Zuckerberg’s money — the Center for Tech and Civic Life — sent some 2,500 grants to government elections offices in 48 states. Defenders of Mr. Zuckerberg contend that more grants went to Trump areas while conveniently ignoring the fact that the vast amount of money was targeted to critically important areas for Mr. Biden. In fact, approximately 160 of the 2,500 grants were for $400,000 or more and totaled a whopping $272 million — and 92% of the money flowed to jurisdictions that Mr. Biden carried. [1]
>Much of Mr. Zuckerberg’s money is documented by CTCL’s tax filings. The January 2022 report shows grants of $860,000 to Kenosha, $1.2 million to both Green Bay and Madison, $1.7 million to Racine, and $3.4 million to Milwaukee. These five critical cities alone received about $8.5 million of the $10.1 million that flowed into Wisconsin from CTCL, and $5.1 million dollars of Mr. Zuckerberg’s money was spent in Arizona. Four difference-making counties — Maricopa, Pima, Apache and Coconino — were carried by President Biden and received nearly 76% of CTCL’s grants. This funding helped Biden grow his turnout by nearly 700,000 votes in funded counties over Hillary Clinton’s 2016 total. CTCL sent $45 million to Georgia — more than any other state in the country — and 94% of the funds went to jurisdictions carried by Mr. Biden. [1]
It is pretty clear that pushing extremely well-funded get out the vote operations in highly democrat areas in the most key swing states is enough to swing an election.
It’s a little bit different, because Meta operates in a much different legal environment. You give up a lot of control of your company to the CCP to operate in China, and if you don’t, you’re forced out of the market.
The situation in the US is not without valid criticism , but it is not even close to comparable with the legal environment in China. The US has a judicial branch that frequently operates at odds against its own executive branch, by design.
>The US has a judicial branch that frequently operates at odds against its own executive branch, by design.
Maybe if you are from US, if you are not from US you have no rights, US gov can spy on you, or even kill you without any legal consequences because it will be legal from US POV
I'm mostly referring to the rights of private companies operating under US law to dispute executive action. Apple, for example, refuses to unlock phones regardless of the citizenship status of user.
Apple unlock drama was over "all writs act" where FBI compelled Apple to write new software to access user hardware versus using alleged (non)existing capabilities. FBI ended up using third party solutions, but after US gov decided to simply cirvumvent user layer via CLOUD act to simply legistate that manufactures have to make such remote access capabilities available, aka adopting PRC requirements. Seems to me, functionally US is not substantively different than PRC in having legal framework to gather any user cloud data. And with respect to Apple, for reference Apple maintain they didn't have capability to give user data to any government including PRC. They also handed icloud keys to PRC control a few months after Cloud Act, so technically Apple was "compromised" in US before PRC. At end of the day, US domestic lawfares achieves it's nationals security goals.
Do we know any case where Apple or Google defended the privacy of a non US person ignoring the laws that force them to give access? I want to see this case and understand what happened. The reality is that if you are not an US citizens you don't have rights, and corporation would defend you only if there is profit in it otherwise they will defend you rights only on PR articles( like company X supports LGBT then same day CEO shakes hand with politicians that just stoned some person to death because there is money to be made)
I'm not defending the CLOUD act, but it is definitely a substantively different type of a situation than having your company completely nationalized as it was with GCBD.
GCBD didn't nationalize Apple in PRC, it's data soverignty requirement same way TikTok was coerced/pressured to moved US data to Oracle US servers. Legal minutiae matterse less and less when outcomes consistently comparable. In terms of differing market environment, TikTok/Bytedance was one Trump EO away from being force sold to US companies (actual nationalization), which is more aggregious than PRC joint venture scheme that's at least upfront about requirements foreign companies operating in PRC. Apple didn't have to take GCBD deal, they wanted cloud business in PRC to keep selling iproducts. Meanwhile TikTok is bending backwards to follow US laws and still subject to various shenanigans according to changing admin whims. Functionally, it's not substantively different, US have alleged "better" laws, but also better lawfare to circumvent said laws.
IMO this is just reality of mediating "strategic" foreign companies operating domestically, especially from "adversarial" countries. Set legal compliance onerously high and hope they leave. Western platforms left PRC because they couldn't stomach the filtering requriements that every PRC company has to shoulder. And when they finally adopted improve moderation due to requirements/pressure in their host country, they tried to get back into the PRC market. Meanwhile TikTok is sticking around US because Douyin survived burdens of PRC regulatory environment so what's another difficult market. Both markets are difficult, TikTok just better at playing ball in such enviroments. FB/Google can't even control their own employees from sabotaging their return to PRC.
GCBD is nationalized iCloud. It was founded by the Guizhou government and is wholly state owned and operated.
Apple "chose" to agree to this deal with a gun to their head, the only other "option" being that they would be banned from the Chinese market. This isn't just because they have a data sovereignty requirement, but also because they have requirements regarding the sovereignty of a company's corporate governance structure.
>TikTok/Bytedance was one Trump EO away from being force sold to US companies (actual nationalization)
I'm not defending that idea, but a forced sale is categorically not nationalization. The whole impetus for the idea was that Trump's "eye for an eye" approach regarding what he saw as unfair practices against other US companies that tried to operate there. And in the end, Bytedance challenged it, and it never came to fruition.
Is Trump EO not also a gun to bytedance head? Apple could choose to discontinue cloud services and setup backdoor to physical iDevices access which would have made their products not competitive, but they chose to play ball same way Bytedance did. It's both lawfare coercion. It's functionally the same - subborn domestic data within framework accessible by domestic legislation. As for defending either idea, I think it's fine, everyone watches out for their interest including putting guns to heads.
No, because EOs do not hold ultimate power in the US. Bytedance also had the (quite realistic) option to challenge the executive through the US's independent judiciary. Ultimately, they took this option and they were successful, and they maintain ownership of TikTok assets in the US to this day.
There aren't any functional counterparts to these checks on power in China that would have been relevant to Apple/GBCD. There's no independent judiciary or alternative ruling party.
Is Trump EO not also a gun to bytedance head? Apple could choose to discontinue cloud services and setup backdoor to physical iDevices access which would have made their products not competitive, but they chose to play ball same way Bytedance did. It's both lawfare coercion. It's functionally the same - subborn domestic data within framework accessible by domestic legislation. As for defending either idea, I think it's fine, everyone watches out for their interest including putting guns to heads.
that sounds much bigger than it is, a little like inteligent design.
> not even close to comparable with the legal environment in China.
So, you are literally saying that you are not in a position to compare them. Or at least you are saying it's so out of this world, it may be on another planet, a parallel universe even.
Really, I have discovered a legitimate branch of legal research is in constitutional comparation (or whatever it's called). Sounds more promissing than it likely will be, surely a small field, but damn I'm intrigued.
I do concede that this thread should focus on less whataboutism.
So no, the answer is no. And there are laws in place that prevent such a change from occurring.
> nobody can collect the data.
It's unrealistic to think no one will be scraping data. You just need laws around who can do it, can for what reasons. And enforcement. (all of these things only possible in non-autocratic countries)
> laws in place that prevent such a change from occurring.
Haven't you learned anything from Snowden?
> You just need laws around who can do it, can for what reasons.
You just make illegal to use personal data for any other thing that is not the service being directly provided to the customer.
Personalized ads? Tracking cookies? Ad bids? Make all these illegal and the collection of data will stop being profitable. Stop making it profitable, and companies will no longer be interested in doing.
We are talking about private industry working together with governments. The US has no intention nor legal ability to force private industry to work with them, outside of when they choose to.
Unless a new patriot act comes along, which is highly unlikely to pass in 2022.
No. We are talking about companies with way too much power in their hands and that might use it for nefarious purposes {for,against,with,without,despite} the government.
Sheldon Adelson is the only other billionaire that comes to mind in recent times who is spending on this scale. In the 2020 cycle for Trump, he spent about 40% less than what Zuckerberg did this past cycle.
> Is this collection different from, say, Meta? I believe they collect all the same information via Instagram.
Who's doing the collecting often matters much more than what is actually collected.
The important context here is we seem to be transitioning away from the era of kumbaya free market globalism into an era of tenser geopolitical rivalries and more conflict.
> Who's doing the collecting often matters much more than what is actually collected
Correct, therefore far more attention ought be put to domestic corporate and government spying on the public because they have got a far stronger leverage over the public's mind than foreign companies whom do not
Also, wouldn't it just be funny if Meta had some internal deals to acquire Tiktoks data? Lastly, if memory serves Tiktok makes use of Oracle (approved US gov contractor) to handle US data, so this is already under scrutiny [1]
>> Who's doing the collecting often matters much more than what is actually collected
>> The important context here is we seem to be transitioning away from the era of kumbaya free market globalism into an era of tenser geopolitical rivalries and more conflict.
> Correct, therefore far more attention ought be put to domestic corporate and government spying on the public because they have got a far stronger leverage over the public's mind than foreign companies whom do not
You're missing the point, so I quoted the context again for emphasis.
To make it more explicit: the fact that US has leverage over Facebook means it's far less likely that Facebook's data collection will be used to attack US interests. That's why TikTok's collection is different, from the perspective of the US and allied countries.
You can make a pretty close personal analogy: I don't care as much if a close family member collects real time location data of my movements, because I trust they don't have incentives to use it in particular ways that are very harmful to me. I care a lot more if a personal or business rival collects the same data, because their incentive is to use it in the context of their rivalry to harm me or prevent me from achieving some of my goals.
And to make myself even more explicit, I am saying that desires of the US Public are indeed different from "US (Gov) Interests" as noted from the Snowden leaks, the Pentagon Papers, the Church Committee, Afghanistan Papers, Manning Leaks et al we can see that there's a (rather) serious divergence between the desires of both and should not be conflated
> And to make myself even more explicit, I am saying that desires of the US Public are indeed different from "US (Gov) Interests"
Sure, but it's also worth noting the interests of the "US Public" are more in alignment with "US (Gov) Interests" than they are "Chinese (Gov) Interests," at least when it comes to geopolitics and stuff like this. That's far more relevant to a discussion of TikTok, which this is.
Why didn't the Italian government just ban data collection in this form? They want to promote EU / local companies to collect this data rather than international companies.
For the biometrics part, yes: Instagram never used biometrics, or at least they didn’t until this week when they started using it for an age verification process, but even then there’s no collection of biometrics in regular usage. Facebook used faceprints until 2021, when they shut down those features under regulatory pressure, but even while the feature was active it was off by default rather than a condition of using the service.
Stop generalizing the "country of origin" as if it does not matter like the Chinese Comunist Party isn't a threat to the world.
- There will always be a ruler, and which ruler is killing, slaving, censoring and selling it's own people as meat tools for foreign companies?
- China will kill, torture it's own people and their families if they think they are a thread (even if remote) to their government party (CCP).
- China put on a HEAVY surveilance tool and actually forced people to behave like they want using social credit
- China is actively removing ANY historical filosophies, tales, traditions, religions that could be a thread to the CCP's beliefs.
- Have you ever seen a CCP convention? Their plan is to remove the worlds countries boundaries in order to rule over everything from culture to politics and economics. Australia is suffering a lot on their hands, they even sent spies to patronize elections.
The social credit system has been acknowledged by multiple western media outlets to have been greatly exaggerated and misreported. [0]
To be sure, there are numerous areas in which the behavior of the Chinese government is concerning and unacceptable, but there is also an undeniable level of hysteria when it comes to China that is not applied to US Allies. (See: Saudi Arabia and the rest of the gulf states)
The social credit score is an interesting data point to gauge that how uninformed the west is about China. The credit score is not remotely about the everyday behaviors of its people, but about how credit-worthy a person which is the representative of a company, or even a local government entity. However, in the west, people are routinely joking about someone will lose credit score for whatever reason, even scholars like Piketty holds the same misinformed view. In the mean time, if you just have lived in China for one month, you know what is said in the west media is not true (you also know a lot of "evidence" of CCP documents from NYT are fake if know only remotely about how the party speaks and writes), and yet people in the west still believe in it, most of the time also with the belief that anyone likes China is either a bot/shill, or brainwashed person. My personal experience is that the level of uninformedness for both Chinese on US, and Amerian on China are not that different. What is different is the misplaced confidence in Americans about how informed they are about every topic in China. Chinese don't have that amount of confidence about knowledge of US.
> Stop generalizing the "country of origin" as if it does not matter like the Chinese Comunist Party isn't a threat to the world.
It's important to generalize in order to show that some people are having arguments about principles, and others hate China. Sometimes you mistake the latter for the former, and waste your time making principled arguments with someone who just wants to kill.
Or rather, which system is more actionable for the local public, the answer to that is ofc the US, if you can't even get your own country to not spy on its citizens either through corporate espionage or through direct gov espionage, what hope do you hold of tangling with foreign countries to coerce them to also not spy? If anything it seems hypocrite to do that!
Or maybe we should just support and adopt open source alternatives, so that the rest of the world doesn't get stuck into pointless geopolitical disputes?
>>> Twitter should bring back Vine so we have a US ran equivalent.
>> Or maybe we should just support and adopt open source alternatives...
> People who say it cannot be done should not interrupt those who are doing it.
You misunderstood. I'm objecting to the either/or framing that implicitly says that something like Vine should not be brought back. If you want to create an open source alternative, go ahead and I hope you're successful. However, the chances of that succeeding are much smaller, therefore it's not a good choice to focus on to solve the particular problem at hand.
You know what mastodon/pixelfed/peertube needs to be "successful"? Users.
Users who are not willing to accept their data being mined. Who are not willing to be sold as eyeballs. Who are willing to pay a few bucks a year just to keep other smaller providers running.
The software exists. Unlike Vine, millions of people use it already.
They can't, but the reason has nothing to do with software license. You can write proprietary software and Google/Facebook/Twitter/Apple/TikTok still can't get your data. And Google/Facebook/Twitter/Apple/TikTok use plenty of FOSS software to run their platforms.
The privacy of your data is more impacted by where it is and who controls it, not the copyright license of the software that moves it around
You seem to be very good at pontificating while completely missing the overall point.
Of course the software license is not related directly with privacy and access control. But there is no way that a private company will be able to offer a global social network while keeping user privacy a priority. The moment that any single company becomes big enough, they will either exploit the data for their own benefit (like Google/Apple/Meta/Microsoft/Amazon) or they will be pushed into it by some government.
Our best alternative is to have not to trust any particular company, but to use federated/distributed services, and the easiest way to have that is by ensuring that we are supporting and adopting open standards and open source systems that can be hosted by many different players.
Yes - there's a difference between a company operating in a liberal democracy (the west broadly defined) with the restrictions that entails, and a company operating under control of the CCP without such restrictions or even rule of law. There are no companies independent of the state in China.
The real threat from TikTok is not so much the collection of information (though that's a problem) - it's the way the CCP can leverage it to tune influence without users noticing (silencing Hong Kong or Uyghur related information for example).
> Yet something odd happened when Borden and Prater were booked into jail: A computer program spat out a score predicting the likelihood of each committing a future crime. Borden — who is black — was rated a high risk. Prater — who is white — was rated a low risk.
> Two years later, we know the computer algorithm got it exactly backward. Borden has not been charged with any new crimes. Prater is serving an eight-year prison term for subsequently breaking into a warehouse and stealing thousands of dollars’ worth of electronics.
> Scores like this — known as risk assessments — are increasingly common in courtrooms across the nation. They are used to inform decisions about who can be set free at every stage of the criminal justice system, from assigning bond amounts — as is the case in Fort Lauderdale — to even more fundamental decisions about defendants’ freedom. In Arizona, Colorado, Delaware, Kentucky, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Virginia, Washington and Wisconsin, the results of such assessments are given to judges during criminal sentencing.
> ...
You mean, algorithms such as these above right? If so, then yeah, I feel for them, just like I feel for the black demographics living under such distopia right now in supposed democratic countries
Except for you know, the fact that these are not individual cases.... And that as you might know, courts indeed form part of "the government", if anything courts, be it tribal or others are the original form of government
Meta is different because of the US fails as a state, they lose. China doesn't.
Meta might still be a shitty company, but their incentives are not to gather intelligence against US citizens that could be used to conduct cyber attacks or plan for military operations.
TikTok is a spectacular example of both human- and democracy-hacking. It's like an authoritarian regime saw facebook in 2012 and said, "hold my beverage of choice."
> authoritarian regime saw facebook in 2012 and said
What a weird statement. Facebook has been taking all of that data for a long time. Some of the protections in Android and iOS were specifically added to inhibit Facebook from recording the surroundings in the background. TikTok just does more of the same partly because they just have more audio and video data to work with. Remember how Uber showed how cool they can track hookup dates? All of that is potentially blackmail-able information.
Are you somehow insinuating that Facebook is somehow okay because they are in a "democratic" country?
I think the comment is insinuating that any country that wants deep personal data on a huge subset of the population should make sure it has a popular social network, so its citizens (and in some cases, citizens from around the world) willingly sit there inputting any and every detail about their lives and relationships into the database.
I did not say the US government was friendly, nor does the context of TikTok operating in the US have anything remotely to do with Iraq or Afghanistan.
I didn't say the US government was friendly, and I certainly don't think that either. But if we're talking about social networks surveilling people in the US, the US government doing it is bad and an adversarial foreign government doing it is worse.
I think the „2012“ comes from the notion that Facebook was somehow more widely used in the past. I also think it’s the case from time to time since my family &friends don‘t use FB, but they have quadrupled their DAUs since 2012
I tried it during the election to see what it was about, and was almost immediately bombarded with political content and pizzagate-adjacent garbage. And you're just supposed to let it feed you the next engaging thing? Yikes.
I'm going to guess that the purpose is to use the data to eventually build life-like, AI-generated social media influencers. The data will show what kind of faces, voices, inflections, word choice, etc. is most influential. I don't think the technology is quite there yet, but very soon it will be possible, with a little hand tweaking, to fake "cool" people — video bots. It will be used as a psy-op.
> I'm going to guess that the purpose is to use the data to eventually build life-like, AI-generated social media influencers.
You think?
> very soon it will be possible, with a little hand tweaking, to fake "cool" people
If your worst thread is being out-done by a bot in the ... what domain is "cool" in. And whom are you quoting from?
PS: What can I say, you got my goat. Vain people are very vulnerable in it (think that's the definition of "vain", but I still want to know what "it" is)
It was a politically untenable situation to ban data collecting software applications as the courts overruled the federal decision.
>After Trump proposed to ban TikTok in the U.S on July 31, 2020, security researchers expressed their concern about limitations of freedom. In one article, PCMag quoted Jennifer Granick of the American Civil Liberties Union Surveillance and Cybersecurity Counsel who said that "banning an app that millions of Americans use to communicate with each other is a danger to free expression and is technologically impractical."
> On 23 September 2020, TikTok filed a request for a preliminary injunction to prevent the app from being banned by the Trump administration.[62] This request was filed with the District Court for the District of Columbia. Just a week prior, a different preliminary injunction from WeChat users filed with the United States District Court for the Northern District of California was approved by Magistrate Judge Laurel Beeler.[63]
> The preliminary injunction was approved by Judge Carl J. Nichols on September 27
> The following June, new president Joe Biden signed an executive order revoking the Trump administration ban on TikTok
Unfortunately regulating tech companies is politically untenable since he was nominated by the previous administration. They will replace him with someone who will toe the line.
> Commissioner Carr was nominated to the FCC by President Trump and confirmed unanimously by the United States Senate.
Multiple things were done unanimously. In 2020, several nominations along with H.R. 748. Some senators did abstain from voting, but every senator who voted did vote yes.
> I just can't believe that a powerful country like America is letting a not-so-friendly military/civilian complex infiltrate it for somewhat unknown purpose
This is 100% why their US data is now stored in Oracle cloud storage. So the US can mine it too now for free. [1]
And something it does that nearly nothing else does (twitter has started, but in a less shitty way). The share links are unique per user, not unique per content.
This gives them full graph of relationships building technology.
I recently saw that TikTok is moving all US traffic to Oracle servers [0] as to mitigate any potential claims of the app being a threat. Would appreciate anyone expanding on the implications.
My view of TikTok isn't so much that it's purpose is to be used as an threat; but rather a way to create an (insanely) lucrative e-commerce market in the same what it's being used in China. [1]
>I just can't believe that a powerful country like America is letting a not-so-friendly military/civilian complex infiltrate it for somewhat unknown purpose.
Because it provides a very convenient back door for our three letter agencies? Speculation, but the data that True the Vote was able to simply purchase on the open market legally was pretty shocking in its detail. What's to prevent our government from doing that? They haven't respected the 4th amendment for decades.
From an IR realist perspective this doesn't matter so much; wars aren't fought between the people of nations-- they're fought between the armies of different nations. Historically the financial class doesn't really care so much about things like, "people's expectation of privacy" and the like (...) I'm one of the few people that studies this that would kind of say, "who cares?" I state this rhetorically.
Apart from biometrics all of these are things you would more or less expect them to collect. Words mentioned in the video and the videos popularity are important for the recommendation algorithm, and the censorship of "age inappropriate content". Location data similarly goes into the recommendation algo. Any social app asks for contacts nowadays (as much as I despise it).
The insidious thing is how the data is used. For example knowing the exact content of each video allows them to filter certain topics and promote others. Knowing your location allows them to use this geopolitically (showing content about the Ukraine war in some places, but not in others).
Whether intentional or unintentional, their recommendation engine infers demographic information. I'm pretty sure TikTok thought for a while that I was gay; videos with reasonably accurate predictions like "if this is recommended to you, you are a male between 25 and 30 who is introverted. You like to start projects but never finish them" were a trend for a while.
All of this gives TikTok and by extension China a great tool to influence opinions and moods in a finely targeted way. Take all the scandals about what Facebook experimented with, and how targeted ads influenced elections and votes, and give that power to one party with no oversight. That's TikTok.
The legal environment is wildly different. Google doesn’t have an internal board of government officials controlling it. All large software companies in China do. Google doesn’t operate in China for this reason. Apple divested their cloud operations to the Guizhou government for this reason.
In the US is it normal and routine for corporations to dispute government demands. In China, If you don’t play ball with the party, your company ceases to exist and you are put behind the great firewall.
The difference is that there is a non-zero amount of friction in the US.
We also know that many companies in the US say “no” and have the legal ability to do it. For example, when the FBI asked Apple to unlock a phone for them, they said no, and they never did.
In China, your company doesn’t say “no” because the CCP members forcibly installed on your company’s board always vote “yes”.
And in fact, the CCP holds the iCloud keys for all Chinese iCloud users. (As well as the entire data center)
Companies don't deploy warrant canaries[0] just for fun. Lavabit[1] was also US based and shut down without the ability to defend itself thanks to a gag order. It might not be just as bad as China, but secret data extraction is definitely not exclusive to them.
And, since you mentioned
> And in fact, the CCP holds the iCloud keys for all Chinese iCloud users.
Quoting from [1]:
> The court records show that the FBI sought Lavabit's Transport Layer Security (TLS/SSL) private key. Levison objected, saying that the key would allow the government to access communications by all 400,000 customers of Lavabit. He also offered to add code to his servers that would provide the information required just for the target of the order. The court rejected this offer
(I'm well aware that Levinson wasn't a halo figure, either. But that's beside the point)
Lavabit would have never voluntarily shut down if it were operated in China, because the CCP members on the board would have voted to hand over the keys.
Of course, governments in every country collect data in at least some circumstances, and the details of those circumstances are a topic of great public debate in western democracies. This friction is how democracies continually improve. It isn't an indication of disaster, it's an indication of progress being made. Disaster is when you don't hear about it at all, because it happens unilaterally and without contest.
> The difference is that there is a non-zero amount of friction in the US.
This kind of statement should always end with "for now". Data lives forever, laws change. Just take a look at Roe v. Wade and how formerly benign data now has potential legal implications for users.
The few legislative protections apply mainly to U.S citizens. I guess the europeans and the rest of the world is doomed. Of course CCP is not same as the U.S government but we know that when money/interests of U.S corporations or U.S government is at stake bad things happen(i.e data is/could be weaponized).
>> What I’m mostly referring to are the laws that enable autonomy of business
In practice big corporations bow to gov demands (i.e apple, microsoft etc via PRISM) as they value their relationship with the government. The small companies don't have the resources to fight the gov (i.e NSA). You may see some smokescreen(i.e that Apple iphone vs FBI) but it's not the first time we see that ki d of stuff/PR. The only thi g you may trust is e2e encryption and open source
Depends on what you do. As long as you don't plan on visiting China, them knowing your sexual orientation, whether you do drugs is or where you were is pretty irrelevant, while it might be quite interesting for you government (and therefore Google, if you're in the US).
Many would, yes. But Google can use the “but we are an American company, so you are threatening to harm American industry” argument and can afford to pay for a large army of lobbyists to push that agenda if America tries to reign them in.
biometrics: Anything involving face scanning for any filter based stuff needs access to biometric data
words mentioned in the video: creating captions
location data: helping to recommend people near you, also ability to enforce laws based on regions
your contacts: this is something you give them permission to access. This is so you can connect with your friends who also setup TikToks. You do not have opt into this.
These are just the things I thought off the top of my head.
Does this mean China can't influence the populace? No. But the previous administration didn't think that external influence into elections was an issue. And the majority of Americans didn't seem to care, either. So you have at least one party that generally doesn't care. And don't pretend that FB doesn't matter. FB might be American, but it doesn't limit itself to only working with American companies.
Having an ostensibly valid use does not preclude also having nefarious uses.
A majority with apathy should not circumvent the efforts of those who do care.
> I just can't believe that a powerful country like America is letting a not-so-friendly military/civilian complex infiltrate it for somewhat unknown purpose.
You mean the same country that also just overturned Roe v Wade AND Miranda rights ?
iOS' App Store has a good breakdown of what's collected too. It's sort of like a nutritional label of what's collected. It's why I won't install this app. It's a data grab by TikTok to turn personal info into gold ingots.
One thing I do though, since missing out on TikTok bothers me, is to watch YouTube clips of TikTok videos which have been downloaded and shared on YT. Not that YT is better in terms on privacy, but it's better than having a Chinese malware app on your phone.
I think that people like are actually glad that TikTok and others collect your data because it makes you feel much more important and needed than you really are!
It could become hard to argument since the rest of the US digital industry is collecting the same data. So why prevent it with one while allowing it with others?
Twitter is doing exactly the same things.. So is Instagram, Google, Microsoft, etc...
It's no different for many other social apps. Even user accounts are often linked to individuals that harvest and scape data from most of these platforms routinely.
I'm not saying that TikTok isn't nefariously aligned with political agendas, but we've really got to ask ourselves at this point just what exactly ALL of these social app platforms are doing.
They make so much money and share so little with the creators on them which of course creates a windfall of funding for them to integrate complex tracking and manipulation into the platforms year over year.
Right now, the only reason why these sites are beginning to come under scrutiny is because people who are considered "High value assets" (i.e. congress people and government leadership) are realizing that these apps, and the phones that run them exist within their homes now, listening to vital conversations that these people have.... How? Because their children use the apps, even if their parents don't.
There is a mesh network everywhere now, based on the devices we've purchased that provides intel to anyone who knows how it works and it's gone widely ignored for years... Phones with lidar that can scan rooms for occupants, multiple pictures and selfies saved under real names of individuals, voice recordings galore, etc...
All content provided by children and adults alike in the quest for social media popularity.
If we're worried about just TikTok weaponizing this data, we're worried about water on a duck's back. The types of information that can be collected by apps now has completely crossed the line in terms of privacy. The biggest offense is that personal devices (the only ones we CAN purchase any more, and the devices we're supposed to be owners of) all allow this data to be gathered and shared with apps, not that apps are harvesting the data.
Two factor authentication alone often forces users of services (considered vital to their work) to share their phone numbers with private companies, and from there it's sold to others, and used to track users across the web. Now private companies collect more data on individuals than the US government, and it can be easily accessed to determine anything from credit and insurance-worthiness for individuals to being used in deepfake content (potentially by BOTH companies and by individual users on platforms) all without our knowledge, and with our unwitting consent -- buried deep into EULA agreements everywhere.
Congress has dropped the ball, too busy being enthralled into public theatre, and many congresspeople actually being invested into many of these tech companies profit-wise themselves.
It's a tragic game of "shoot yourself in the foot" because most of the profiteers from the data mining game never realize the damage they do until they find out their own children become victims of it.
It's not really about TikTok in my opinion, it's about get rich schemes and all of the corrupt Ponzi schemes we keep fostering and permitting to run freely in this country. It's been going on forever, and that's the thing undermining America most, our domestic impulse to both salute and coddle those that make profit without accountability or morality.
It's TikTok. Funny jokes and dance videos. And they're collecting no more than American IT companies are doing.
"I just can't believe that a powerful country like America is letting a not-so-friendly military/civilian complex infiltrate it for somewhat unknown purpose."
Are you for real? The one country that fits the description of not-so-friendly military-complex is the U.S. itself.
A more pressing problem and question is that despite everything we learned from the CIA and NSA leaks, American companies and their software is inside every country, government, business and IT infrastructure, and is collecting vast amounts of sensitive data still to this day.
All while people like you are drawing attention to TikTok.
This comment makes it pretty clear you don't use tiktok or have a very clear understanding of its content. A huge portion of content is political, and especially divisive. People are constantly targeted with content that either reinforces or insults their more extreme political beliefs. This is exactly how personal data is being used against individuals - to target divisive political content and maximize political angst. It's clearly working.
Yah nuh, it's not as if youtube don't do the same. More to the point, ycombinator is infamous for being a neoliberal silicon valley poster child. Nobody forced me to come here, or to tik tok
I don't answer to concerns about TikTok because I don't think there are any, and so I instead point to the ever-present elephant in the IT security discussion room.
And as for the US Government and concentration camp, maybe they don't use private sector data for that, but they sure do it based on ethnicity and origins, such as Japanese Americans in concentration camps during WW2, and South American children and their immigrant parents literally put in cages just a couple of years ago.
You responded to a question with a demonstration of your politics (ie. who you trust, and who you don't trust). Trusting the Chinese Government when they are in the midst of using technology to enable horrific crimes against humanity is a weird political position to take.
And pointing out anything that has nothing to do with Tiktok in a thread about Tiktok is not providing context, it's an attempt at distraction and deflection away from the thing you trust (the CCP, somehow) towards the thing you don't (the US Gov).
The original post above framed the issue from a national-security angle.
Whether "this side" is-doing/has-done it as well is an orthogonal concern, i.e. not pertinent here. We have a small but non-zero ability to affect change on our side.
It’s incredible that the US allowed TikTok (which is by all measures a chinese spy tool) to become such a dominant social network.
India got it right from the beggining by banning TikTok. They saw the immense threat and didn’t hesitate.
China, by principle, has always banned all foreign information technology companies. What seemed hostile for us, it’s a reasonable play if you understand the unmeasurable power of massive information products such as Google or Facebook.
Meanwhile the US is just focused on attacking its own homegrown tech companies and diminishing their ability to compete in global contexts.
We are on a declining trajectory and we willingly paved that road. It’s sad.
The fact that India would consider TikTok a threat but not Meta leads me to believe that it wasn't done on a purely espionage basis. The threat of TikTok, today, it still theoretical, while Facebook has done measurable harm to India's neighbors.
Tiktok is a far worse threat to India than Meta though.
Unlike China, US is not an adversary of India and US didn't kill Indian soldiers just two years back. So it makes sense they would go after Tiktok.
The harm is just not espionage, it is also manipulation of sentiment by propoganda.
Also, I am not really sure with all the equivalence to Meta in this thread. Sure, Meta has things to be criticized about but if one thinks West has threat from Meta on the same level as Tiktok, that seems delusional.
Is India the West now? This alone tells me that you aren’t coming this from a data pov and simply playing team sports.
My problem with this “analysis” is it stems from xenophobia rather than the actual problem with these social networks.
The idea that we must “act now” with TikTok when Meta has been a worse actor is just anti-Chinese; we are pretending that Meta wont just bend over to the CCP as well if given the chance - we already have several of our companies self-censoring on issues that might anger the CCP.
Banning TikTok won’t fix the underlying problem and if your concern is China collecting data on US citizens you should understand there are very little controls in place, today, to prevent that from happening with any foreign actor. I don’t think China would have to pull teeth to exfiltrate data from any of the other social networks.
>Also, I am not really sure with all the equivalence to Meta in this thread.
Which company is implicated in a genocide in India neighboring states? Again is your concern actually about people or is it just “China scary”.
Anti- the ruthless mafioso that rule China with an iron fist, all too ready to harvest organs from its citizens for the benefit of the Party members and their friends.
Most any individual Chinese is probably just another joe trying to feed and love his family.
The Chinese government is a threat to Western Democracy, freedom, and human rights.
Do you not realize India is in an active territory dispute with China over which they've had repeated limited military conflicts (which thankfully never escalated). You know, the China currently expanding their military presence on the border to India, including airbases with their newest generation fighters?
China is a very real threat to India right now. Why wouldn't they ban TikTok?
That's an absurd claim. The rumors about thieves and child abductors could have just as easily been spread over Telegram or AOL Instant Messenger or SnapChat. The chosen platform is completely immaterial.
Meta's entrentched. While I agree with sibling poster about the different levels of information gathered, there's also a difference between what can be gotten away with politically. Banning a network very few of your citizens are on is much easier than banning one of the primary networks that nearly everyone uses and relies on.
By theoretical, do you mean TikTok doesn't collect data that is made available to the Chinese government? In my mind, that's the practical use of an espionage tool. If not that, then what else do you mean?
Even if you ignore how suspicious that is, once the data is in China you have to assume it's made available to the government, since that's the official policy as far as I am aware.
> Although video-sharing app TikTok was developed by Chinese company Bytedance, it is not available in China. Instead users can download a twin app, Douyin, which was also developed by Bytedance. Douyin features restrictions such as blocks on international content and limits on children’s usage. The Chinese state owns a stake in the Bytedance subsidiary that controls its domestic Chinese social media and information platforms. [1]
So China deploys and app to the US market that China itself doesn't use. The app aggressively collects location and biometric information about the users while promoting copious amounts of destabilizing and divisive political content among other things. I don't want to sound like a conspiracy theorist, but it's hard not to see this as a trojan horse and it's shocking that the powers that be in the US are not assessing this situation more seriously. The OP is right in that this seems like one of many troubling signs that the US is in a decline of sorts.
Douyin collects a fuck load data too, maybe less than TikTok one day once new PRC privacy rules come into effect. But that's somethign US doemstic politics have to sort out for their territory.
>promoting copious amounts of destabilizing and divisive political
Ant that's more fault of US political culture than TikTok being Chinese/PRC. IMO TikTok would like nothing better to ban politics from platform, but that's how you get the muh-free-speech types reeeing about PRC censorship. Large reason WHY TikTok/Douyin is successful is from lessons learned maturing in PRC/Chinese censorship enviroment - platforms are very good at censoring/filtering destablizing political content to focus on light hearted content that produce casual engagement and political serenity. Chinese social platforms are calibrated for stability, but when in rome... see all the western media campaigns trying to smear tiktok for censorship when it first gained popularity, of course now that TikTok as calibrated to political reality of US market, the "destablizing" narrative gets pushed.
As far as the populace is concerned, we'd rather be spied on by Chairman Xi than by our own government. Which one can more directly affect our lives? That said, it's surprising the governing class allowed TikTok in.
Trump tried to ban it in 2020 out of "national security concerns" similar to Huawei. The ACLU and media painted it as anti free speech and xenophobia and never gave the claims any serious scrutiny.
> On July 7, 2020, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced that the government was considering banning TikTok.[26] In response, experts[weasel words] suggested that Trump's proposed TikTok ban may threaten free speech and "set a very problematic precedent" for banning apps in the United States.[27] Patrick Jackson, chief technology officer of privacy company Disconnect, said the app sends an abnormal amount of data—mostly information about the phone—to its server, but there is limited evidence that TikTok is sharing these data with the Chinese government. He also noted that the amount of collected data was similar to that collected by American-originated social media platforms and was less than that collected by Facebook.[28]
> After Trump proposed to ban TikTok in the U.S on July 31, 2020, security researchers expressed their concern about limitations of freedom. In one article, PCMag quoted Jennifer Granick of the American Civil Liberties Union Surveillance and Cybersecurity Counsel who said that "banning an app that millions of Americans use to communicate with each other is a danger to free expression and is technologically impractical."[35]
Sort of a fruit of a poisoned well - if prior trade action hadn’t been transparently lying about a national security pretext warning about TikTok would have been received better.
Oh please. The people who complained didn't care about that. They didn't like Trump, and would complain about anything he did regardless of the merit. They are nakedly partisan.
The ACLU dislikes any restriction based on national security. I imagine they’d make the same arguments regardless of which party removed TikTok.
But the broader public, reporters, and experts
absolutely base their decisions on how trustworthy they find rationales. National security arguments often boil down to “we are correct but can’t tell you why, trust us.”
Mixing trade wars into that certainly helps skepticism.
I didn't like Trump but that wasn't why I was opposed to the TikTok ban. I was opposed because it was pointless and stupid. If we want to ban Chinese businesses because of human rights abuses, fine, let's start banning imports -- hit 'em where it counts! Let's not waste people's limited time and money banning a silly mobile app.
Trump had a sale lined up, Biden won the election, and then Biden promptly canceled the sale[0]. It's a shame that Trump doesn't get more appreciation for his politically unpopular yet noble moves. Nobody was talking about China before Trump but you can be sure they were content to make fun of Trump for doing so[1].
If we're deciding the government has the ability to shut down social media apps for "national security", I want some seriously beefy protections in there to prevent abuse. That slope is genuinely for-real dangerously slippery, and scares me 100x more than the scary stuff TikTok is doing now.
The ban was right to be challenged--if Trump could legally justify it, let him do that in court. And if he couldn't, there's probably a damned good reason for that.
Then there should be no problem getting this through the courts, right?
All I'm asking for here is some guarantee that this won't be used to shut down social networks that some government entity dislikes for personal reasons. Because I know for a fact that some people who have been in power wanted to do exactly that.
We should all be demanding this.
Ban TikTok, but do it narrowly with a lot of protections.
Stop generalizing the "country of origin" as if it does not matter like the Chinese Comunist Party isn't a threat to the world.
- There will always be a ruler, and which ruler is killing, slaving, censoring and selling it's own people as meat tools for foreign companies?
- China will kill, torture it's own people and their families if they think they are a thread (even if remote) to their government party (CCP).
- China put on a HEAVY surveilance tool and actually forced people to behave like they want using social credit
- China is actively removing ANY historical filosophies, tales, traditions, religions that could be a thread to the CCP's beliefs.
- Have you ever seen a CCP convention? Their plan is to remove the worlds countries boundaries in order to rule over everything from culture to politics and economics. Australia is suffering a lot on their hands, they even sent spies to patronize elections.
Western Democracies are sleep-walking into their own destruction by way of hostile foreign influence of the population.
Our governments have foolishly, stupidly allowed social media to be used by adversaries to provoke dissension, coordinate destructive mob action, to influence elections, etc, etc.
We are going to be destroyed because we give our hostile adversaries the same benefit of the doubt, the same freedoms, the same access to our population, as we do our own people.
US kills and tortures its own citizens if they are labeled 'criminals' or 'terrorists', or just lets cops murder activists without being charged.
US has heavy surveillance infrastructure, and a kafkaesque 'private' credit system that I have no doubt the TLAs can manipulate with their banking partners.
US politicians are currently working to ban the histories of racism and genocide from public schools when they make the country look bad. US media frequently participates in disinformation campaigns coordinated with state intelligence.
US has done more successful election manipulation/coups than any other country on the planet.
As a US citizen, I am vastly more afraid of of the US government than I am the CCP.
On a personal level, sure, you’re right. On the longer, broader timespan, you are wrong. Democracy, human rights, personal freedom: That’s what’s on the line, and it is foolish to be cavalier about the situation.
I think you're overly discounting the chance of the US devolving into overt authoritarian fascism. We paint a thin veneer of democracy over political actions today, but our rights and protections in the US are disappearing rapidly already.
I fully agree. And that doesn’t discount at all my assertion that anti-Democratic foreign intelligence agencies pose an existential threat to our Democracies. A lot of what threatens your personal safety has been exacerbated by foreign influence.
Are names of political systems to be capitalized or not? It feels to me that a word like Authoritarian should be capitalized, but then it would demand that, while democracy cowers in lowercase.
"Facebook Inc. has been paying hundreds of outside contractors to transcribe clips of audio from users of its services"
"Social network says it paused human review of conversations"
So again my question is wtf is so big fuss about tiktok. We already knew about PRISM and that all the data goes to the government. It also goes to 3rd party contractors, advertisers and who knows who else...
I have the same take as you, and reading all these comments makes me feel like I’m on crazy pills.
Google and Meta apparently get a pass because they’re “American companies.” Even though we know that they collect personal data and manipulate people en masse as part of their core product offerings. And of course, through PRISM and other programs, the US govt has access to much of it.
I think people are just scared because now China is doing the same op, but more overtly.
This is a distortion of reality in support of an agenda. Google and Meta most certainly do not get a pass - a review of either mass media or tech media/news aggregators like Reddit/Hacker News/Lobsters will show a consistent pattern of strongly condemning data collection from those two companies in particular.
The alarm is over the fact that, on top of the issues of letting any company collect so much personal information about you, TikTok has the unique additional problem of being effectively controlled by the government of the most dangerous (power * malice) country on Earth. Singling them out is understandable, reasonable, and somewhat predictable.
The U.S would not put trade barriers to China for that incident in India (why India doesn't join U.S's sanctions on Russia now?) or for putting muslims in camps.
Although not being the same thing I've seen children put in cages against their will on U.S soil so I'm pretty sure it could stomach some reeducation camps in China given the terrorism issues.
U.S bombed Iraq unprovoked.
Here we have the old money and power game. U.S finally realised that it fed a communist state that has imperialist ideas and may challenge its power in Asia.
I would like this rivality to produce a more fair system for the world: secure devices, secure communication, open protocols with privacy built in etc instead of these appstores bans, obfuscation and demonization of the "enemy".
I think we should prohibit the state owned social media app which is mass collecting biometric markers for a state which is actively rounding up Muslims and putting them in camps.
I think if you want to petition for good things in other areas, that's great, but please don't stop the people currently doing good now with whataboutism.
It's no whataboutism. You make a big fuss about tiktok but meta owned apps are just as bad. The Muslim camps is just a laughable pretext. If the U.S would care so much about poor muslims, especially muslim women around the world they would not have left Afghanistan in such a hurry...
As far as I'm concered I would ban all these spyware apps, chinese and american alike. They are pure spyware and bad for our health and for democracy.
People should own their data, and their devices.
I'm glad that TikTok is chinese. It raises some important questions about appstores, privacy and data ownership.
How many people have been killed in US wars vs. the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution?
Remind me where the US has implemented a concentration camp of about a million individuals based on ethnicity alone and then continually denied its existence against overwhelming evidence from the international community.
Which foreign companies did the US use spies to steal foreign IP from during peacetime and also categorically deny?
Oh, and what's the name of the US system that censors wrongthink in real-time from all US-based social media, or the name of the system that controls US resident access to the internet?
What were the names of a few US citizens whose families were threatened if those citizens didn't stop badmouthing the US and returned to their homeland?
How many companies and people abroad did the US threaten with economic repercussions if they didn't stop claiming that an island nation wasn't just that?
And where's the paid army of anonymous internet commentators that the US uses to astroturf foreign websites?
--------------------------
The US, while having done a great many bad things, at least has a democratic process - there is the potential for the citizens to positively affect their government's actions, weak as it might be. China doesn't even have that - it's a tyrannical dictatorship, full stop.
Easily in the millions. And that’s innocent civilians, not combatants. Not to diminish the suffering that happened there under Mao - but the lives ruined by US wars continue to add up. People are still born to this day with birth defects and cancer due to the chemical weapons we used in Vietnam, for example. And if we’re counting the 20th century, how about the fact that Hitler was inspired by America’s treatment of Native and Black people when he started the Holocaust? Eugenics got its start in the US. Genocidal forced sterilization of minorities was still happening here well into the 20th century. The list of atrocities goes on.
> Remind me where the US has implemented a concentration camp of about a million individuals based on ethnicity alone
Native Americans for the entire history of our country, until we finally put them on land that white settlers didn’t want. Japanese during WW2. Prison/torture camps all over the world during the “war on terror” which scooped up Muslims indiscriminately under the guise of fighting terror. These were all either officially denied, or admitted and openly justified at the time.
And forget corporate espionage - how about the well-known fact that US intelligence agencies have outright overthrown and assassinated democratically elected leaders all over the world? We even did it to Australia, an ostensible ally.
I’ll give you that China has a horrible record of harassing and imprisoning people who criticize their government, as well as censoring media. That’s one thing the US has going for it.
But as far as democracy goes, the things we’re talking about here - data collection, spying, extralegal evil acts committed by governments in secret - aren’t things that we get to vote on in America. Not one of us idiots arguing online has any say in what data the NSA collects and how they use it. Neither does any elected representative even bother talking about that anymore. Most of them don’t know what the NSA does, either. Them and the CIA are entirely unaccountable to democracy and that’s by design. It’s marginally better because we can at least talk about it, but that’s only because we’re powerless to stop it, so our opinion really doesn’t matter.
Instead of addressing the substance of the argument, you debate semantics. Is the current United States govt harnessing the organs and forcing sterilization of ethnic minorities? It is patently absurd to compare the two, my goodness. In the words of Jules Winnfield, the two “ain't the same ballpark, it ain't the same league, it ain't even the same fuckin' sport.”
Organisation A being bad does not invalidate criticism of Organisation B. It's my understanding that Tiktok is particularly appealing to younger people, specifically girls, which is of great concern to me despite not being a parent.
Do they mean they're collecting faceprints and voiceprints of people viewing the videos? Or they're just doing it on videos that people are willingly uploading?
Except TikTok is operating on behalf of an authoritarian regime with no protection for human rights, freedom of speech or thought, rule of law, separation and balance of power, or any of those quaint things.
>> Google and Apple aren't rounding up Muslims into camps.
Neither tiktok but the chinese gov does that and the U.S tortures muslims and not only muslims. I think we've got enough about this human rights pretext.
In general, accusing someone of being a shill is a poor move - even if you are right.
Instead I would encourage you to follow up with their comments and guide the argument back to it's basic facts - like that China is rounding up Muslims in camps and may be engaging in forced sterilization, and that allowing TikTok may not align with freedom.
Obviously don't spam or just blindly become a shill yourself, but just make the shilling activity do the opposite of what a shill might want.
Hmm I wouldn't use a negatively loaded word like "shill"? It's not the paid trolls who are the problem (some of them might as well have been my friends, had I live at another place. Maybe they need money to feed their kids, who's to blame them for that) -- it's the CCP and Xi who are the problem.
> follow up with their comments and guide the argument back to it's basic facts
If there was time for that. Do you have time for that?
I think there's mostly not time for that. Maybe I'd mostly just delete paid content (CCP propaganda) if it was my forum
I just can't stand cheap propaganda. Yeah reeducation of muslims in a chinese provice is bad for human rights but saying this is the reason why the U.S is acting against chinese interests makes me puke.
Are we all that brainwashed? Has the U.S been unaware of the human rights atrocities commited by Saudi Arabia for the past 100 years? Why is the U.S selling weapons, accepts investments(i.e SA owns Apple stock) and hugs SA?
I understand that "simple" people want A "simple" message but I expect a more critical debate here. What's wrong just spelling the truth? i.e: China, a communist state, grown by the U.S(and not only) has become too powerful and now is threating U.S lead world domination(economically and millitary). We must strangle its power and communist influence to preserve our way of life(and our power in the world).
I think we are all grown ups here. There is no need to sell a syrupy story.
The U.S just left in a hurry the one place where it could have done something for the muslim women so spare me of the U.S concern of musslims reeducation camps in China.
Agreed about the US and Saudi Arabia and Yemen. And Trump and Biden handed Afghanistan over to the Talibans, they should go to prison for thousands of lifetimes for having done that
> Has the U.S been unaware of the human rights atrocities commited by Saudi Arabia
At very least Twitter and Apple have a decent track record of declining to provide data without justification. It seems pretty safe to assume the Chinese government wouldn't have to ask at all to get any of this information.
That's not "the standard", it's just worth mentioning that at least some companies have a proper legal team that seems to work on behalf of its users. Twitter's actually been behind a number of legal precedents on the right to be anonymous online.
I also don't speak for HN, clearly, since this post is full up on people who see no difference between "almost definitely has given full access to the government 24/7/365" and "Complies with reasonable court orders".
The fact that a company from the unfriendly country collects biometrical data may finally provoke enough outrage that such data collection gets forbidden for everyone.
But, I would imagine any such hypothetical regulation would have specific carve-outs for the US-based companies collecting the same/similar data. Because $.
Unless the lesson lies later down the road, when the biometrical of X billion people gets used for <insert nefarious purpose>.
They say that we don't learn by knowing but by doing, and a significant part of the incentive to do is pain.
The tragic irony lies in the fact that apparently, it only takes about 80 years to forget the last horrors —approximately one maximized average lifespan, makes sense I guess… Though what a piss-poor historical-attention span. Or about as much to collectively resign sensitivity to horror, as in the case of CCP-led China (1949-now).
You know the problem with things that concerns everyone: everybody thinks somebody else is taking care of it; in the end nobody does.
It won't, because the abortion data collection industry is is about to explode, along with whatever other data collection opportunities arise in the aftermath of the repeal of Roe v. Wade and the privacy arguments it depended upon. It seems far more likely to me that more US apps and services will be following TikTok's lead in the future, not fewer, and they will be more difficult to regulate.
I wish this was the case, but sadly people seem to have a massive blind spot when it comes to their own government having the same powers as the totalitarian CCP. One would think the implications are obvious and striking, impossible to miss, and yet I continually have to explain to people why these systems of surveillance are terrifying and inherently damaging to free societies.
Not really. Tiktok is bad because all of the sudden China became bad. It wasn't bad few years ago; some western countries such the UK loved to say how good China is. The U.S apps are "good" because they are PRISM-enabled and your have nothing to hide from the U.S gov, right?
A quick google search may bring you some results. Until very recently(i.e the Huawei thing) the main idea was that China is the best thing since the sliced bread. I believe leaving Europe and focusing on China was seen as the next step in trade and foreign policy. That didn't age well though...
>> In 2015 George Osborne, the then chancellor, promised a ‘golden decade’ for Chinese-British relations as he drummed up support for new trade opportunities and inward investment.
There was a lull when globalist enthusiasts, such as Osborne, were more than happy to sell us out. China is a distinct evil that should never have been allowed to hack our economic system with their hyper scale authoritarian meat-robot control systems. People are not people to the party any more than cells are alive to anyone making a game of life clone
Is there someone here that work at TikTok who could explain how collecting such that brings any value to TikTok.
That's an honest question. I understand that we're being tracked with cookies, email address, FB/Google accounts. But the biometric stuff, what is it for ? It seems very disproportionate to me if it's just for advertising.
Want to look like a lion? They scan your face, use their algorithm to stretch the lion face on you, and because you're moving, it's a compute intense thing so done more in the cloud than on-device.
But as it's off device biometrics, it falls into the Illinois BIPA category (only focused biometrics law in the USA) so they collect consent up front.
I guess it could be used to create social graphs and perhaps also run machine learning (i.e people using a specific accent may like watching some specific content). More data is almost always better.
The most obvious (capitalist) application would be to use the data to build AI "creators". Some of these real people make good money as influencers. And if TikTok could use computers to generate influencers, they could seriously cash in.
The military applications of this tech would be to stir up decent or manufacture outrage in a country for political gains.
Or maybe both. Selling military tech to other countries is a good way to make money too.
>The military applications of this tech would be to stir up decent or manufacture outrage in a country for political gains.
I didn't need that thought in my life, thank you. Seriously, though, this genuinely makes it possible to gently tweak an algorithm (which is absolutely invisible to anyone outside the company or the Chinese government) to nudge public opinion. Like, you could probably nudge elections by a percentage point or two, manufacture specific outrage about policies unfriendly to China, generate a bit of chaos with conspiracy theories when convenient, etc, etc. Black Mirror stuff. I
'm telling myself it's unlikely to actually happen but when I ask myself why I can't come up with a reassuring answer. The technology is there. The control is there. The willingness is certainly there. I guess it would be a bigger endeavor and there might be leaks of it happening. But, ultimately, a few dozen people could do a lot of damage.
My theory is that this is already happening, just with a mix of bots and human actors.
Start keeping a list of common "retorts" to certain topics. Then jump sites and see if those retorts are used there too. You'll find almost copy and paste wording.
There are edge cases where it looks like two of these semi-automated groups square off and you get bot gibberish that goes on to infinity.
Dead internet theory may be a bit closer to truth then we like to admit.
They've built the best personalized content algorithm by collecting mass amounts of data and fingerprinting and indexing everything you can from a video.
This isn't new [0] even as shown in June 2021 last year where we have them already admitting they collect this data and shouldn't surprise anyone that after this [1] they are unsurprisingly screwing their users data in a worse way than Facebook was and now you have reports of China who have always been surveilling their user data (even for US users); Also expected and unsurprisingly.
There is no defending this indefensible spyware which is beyond worse than Facebook and it is really the direct opposite of "The best thing to have happened to the Internet." [2]
I tried creating an account yesterday (with a throwaway email, because fuck every other way, not giving you my number, Google account, whatever else) because a relative started posting videos and told me to check them out.
When I tried to enter the security code it said "Too many attempts", "Try later". Apparently this means my IP is banned. WTF. I've had this IP for years (static from ISP on a fiber connection, really nice, I even host shit on it including a website and a VPN because torrenting is legal lol).
Either they banned my whole country, or they don't want people signing up anonymously, or (my tinfoil conspiracy) it interacts with Reddit, where this IP is permabanned.
Anyway, thanks, good riddance. I don't want to get addicted to another site, and from what people say TikTok seems stupid but is the most addictive.
It can collect more or less. But everyone bit they collect is more than the bit you other guy not able to collect. An open society open arm to an external enemy. One day you will pay.
I recall when wifi was first a thing, TV news people would drive around with "hackers" who would "war drive" and find networks, and egads! Connect! Nothing is safe online!
I don't think we need pandasecurity to tell us that. I believe the same info was/is gathered by facebook, google and more or less Apple. I guess double standards are still easier and better for the U.S instead to "empower" the individuals to own their data and secure their communication.
I never seem to have a good sense for whether a post is motivated by an agenda or not, so it's though for me to understand what you are referencing and recommend I should ignore.
Can you permalink those post you consider to be CCP bots?
I don't understand the argument that we shouldn't ban tikTok because Meta/Google/etc.. also collect data. I would rather ban all three, but tikTok is in a whole different league based on how that data is used.
The difference is that the CCP is literally on the board of bytedance and uses this information to arrest, imprison, and harvest the organs of political, ideological, religious, and other dissidents.
Yes, the US has done evil things in the past (and present) but our abuse of data is a far cry from what happens inside many tightly controlled communist countries on a daily basis.
If China really is as bad as all that (and I think it probably is) why are we wasting any time or energy on TikTok? It'd be a lot more effective to sanction China over those human rights abuses than to ban some toy app.
That sounds good too. It does not need to be either/or.
However, sanctioning them won't protect the millions (billions?) of international people who are being profiled though. It's a lot easier to identify, blackmail, impersonate, predict, locate, and anything else a government body might want to do to someone when you have all this information.
I though "whataboutism" was when the USSR points out that you're an apartheid state when you criticize them about their economic system, not when your own citizens wonder out loud why you're criticizing another country for doing something that you also do.
Whataboutism is when instead of engaging with the content of the claim, you instead try to deflect by bringing up something else. "TikTok is collecting data? What about Google?"
Another example: Trump and Stoltenberg argue on camera (<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vpwkdmwui3k>). Who turned out to be right about NATO and Russia? Who turned out to completely, totally, 100% wrong?
- biometrics
- what words are mentioned in the video, popularity
- surrounding wifi, location data
- your contacts (presumably to cross link to social media platforms)
I just can't believe that a powerful country like America is letting a not-so-friendly military/civilian complex infiltrate it for somewhat unknown purpose.