"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?
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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.
"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...
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-08-13/facebook-...