TikTok is no different to Facebook (Meta) and as Facebook has already been fined in the billions by the FTC over this, the same should also happen to TikTok and repeat offenders should also be fined in the tens of billions of dollars.
When was Meta fined for secretly building a system to track the whereabouts of specific individuals?
You may be thinking of Lundy et al v. Meta Platforms, in which they were not fined but agreed to a civil settlement and denied they were doing what was claimed. In that cases, it wasn't even alleged that they were trying to make the locations of specific individuals available for human analysis.
> When was Meta fined for secretly building a system to track the whereabouts of specific individuals?
Meta was fined for violating consumer privacy for years, which TikTok has already been doing themselves; but as you can already see they have become even worse than Facebook.
> You may be thinking of Lundy et al v. Meta Platforms,
You see, even when Meta didn't get fined for that, perhaps it's about time for TikTok to get fined in the billions for violating consumer's privacy in the US and repeated offences should be in the tens of billions of dollars to discourage such activity in the US?
> You are being purposefully obtuse or dishonest. You did not answer his question, and you know you did not answer his question.
???
I really hope you have read what I said before commenting.
> Stop being a shill for authoritarian governments. If you really cared about privacy you would advocate banning tiktok and banning facebook. Not this whataboutism nonsense.
Who's shilling what? I already said I want BOTH of them to be fined in the billions?
Since I already disagreed with the spying and privacy violations from what both Facebook and TikTok has done for years. I'd also be in favour of banning all of them if possible. But in the US and given the FTC has given a multi billion dollar fine to Facebook, I'm sure you would want TikTok to have the exact same treatment of a giant fine since they are operating in the US? No?
It's not 'whataboutsism' as I've already agreed with the parent comment.
Ok but you said "Facebook has been fined over this". You admit that's a false claim?
Tiktok and Facebook both should be fined for violating the law when there is sufficient evidence that the violation happened. We don't need to make up stories about Facebook to justify investigations into either.
TikTok is very different because the CPP has leverage over them and can force them to do things we in the West would find abhorent. That's not to find Western companies or governments innocent, because they are not, but the magnitude of the problem matters.
Perhaps true that CCP would use this in a more abhorrent way, but let's not forget PRISM [1] and also the eliptic curve / NSA / RSA fiasco [2]. One could argue these target state level targets or terrorists, but who really knows.
I'm not forgetting, just noting there's a difference between CCP and the US government which matters here. If the US government gets caught using that info to persecute dissidents and their families, I'll be sure to retract my statement.
Tik Tok exists as a corporation for people to "do business in China" AKA be paid vast sums of money for knowledge and skills that would be treason or whatever to otherwise transfer.
At least Facebook people keep up appearances -- pretend to be a capitalist, then shun any regulations or taxes that differentiate capitalism from oligarchy.
(And Federal Trade Commission is a joke, it's a known thing they can often do one test case when a behavior is being done in parallel across industry by many actors.)
I'm a bit dismayed at the attempts at moral equivalence here.
An imperial, totalitarian regime which currently imprisons people for being of a specific ethnicity (or any arbitrary reason), and has no measure of a proper judicial system, tracking citizens of other nations for purposes of pursuing their power - is not the same thing as - Facebook making it possible for advertisers to target groups of people with 'interests'.
Meta can be fined for shenanigans (which FYI mostly do not cause direct harm), and of course - we need better regulations.
But the issue of TikTok is one of national (frankly international) security, and it's on an entirely different level.
TikTok exploded precisely because they let regular people create content, and then showed it to other regular people. Ofcourse they are making cash. FB basically stopped showing regular people's content, and constrained it to accounts/topics that were attractive to advertisers. There's a huge difference. They got caught with their pants down.
Right but this is just the same pattern over and over again. Facebook started off showing regular people regular content; so did Twitter and Instagram. The only reason it wouldn't happen to TikTok is if it's propped up as a CCP data mining operation. There's literally nothing good about any of this.
This is the most confused comment I've ever read. What are you even talking about? What metric did you think that a company whose goal is to make money was going to optimize on? What metric do you think TikTok is optimizing on (hint: it's not "grassroots content" whatever that means)
TikTok lets regular people create content, and then shows it to other regular people. As basic as that sounds, FB/Google have all sorts of manipulation behind the scenes that stops that from occurring at the same scale. And so TikTok exploded because people could actually communicate in an organic way through video media.
I suspect those who can do understand the risk, and are attempting to sabotage the nation. However, I conceded that in terms of results, the two are functionally equivalent.
Agreed. Really disturbing to read comments like that at the top of this thread. Who cares if China bans US apps, we're not China so why should we ban theirs?
Depending on what you view on TikTok, the international cross-cultural aspect can be a big draw of TikTok. Local clones wouldn't be able to replicate that, so I wouldn't be surprised if a sizable minority uses VPNs or Tor or whatever to keep access to the original.
Just makes no sense that this app has been given so much leeway here in the states when it has been proven time and time again that the Chinese government is using TikTok as a way to track US citizens and to influence our young people.
Also, Douyin (owned by the same company as TikTok) focuses on education in China while TikTok promotes the dumbest videos in the states. As the article below so eloquently articulates, "TikTok is making you dumb."
Is "influencing young people" not covered under freedom of speech? Sure, freedom of speech has limits on harmful speech and such, but I think outlawing something on the basis that it's intended to dumb people down would be an interesting case with potentially far-reaching consequences.
Pretty sloppy journalism, if you can even call it that. They don’t make any effort to verify the core claim of Chinese and US TikTok having different types of content. They don’t even cite a primary source, only secondary ones like Tucker Carlson.
We almost did. And while I didn't agree with the man that did that on most other issues, this was one issue he was right on. Unfortunately at that point there was a knee-jerk reaction to everything he did and the ban was successfully stopped.
I’m glad that the Western spyware industry is finally seeing some competition. Hopefully this will raise concerns that will end up outlawing all spyware, regardless of origin.
The Snowden leaks were nearly a decade ago, but I have serious doubts that it has gotten any better since then. The data hoarding for advertisements is just the cherry on top that makes this data more widely available.
The problem is that advertisers are ultimately vulnerable to governments, not to mention not really incentivised to resist them.
In the end, governments just outsource their spying to advertisers (without even having to pay for the service) and can “ask nicely” for any data they need.
Wouldn't the evidence be US law? As far as I know nobody can lawfully resist (nor even disclose) a national security letter. The only workaround is to not hold any data of interest to the government so they would have no reason to send one in the first place.
However, besides national security letters, I'm not even sure one would be needed when there's a healthy industry of data brokers happy to sell the data.
I, the original commenter here, am as white as the driven snow, with no connections at all to Russia or China.
The hypocrisy and the invasion of privacy is what upsets me, not which government has jurisdiction. The Chinese government almost certainly has access to Facebook and Google's data, too. I don't want ANYONE building a profile on me.
Even if it is "just" for ad targeting. It won't be just for ads in the future.
"Whataboutism" is such a silly word to deflect hypocrisy. You can't take concerns about TikTok seriusly from politicians etc that are fine with e.g. Facebook.
I absolutely can. Whether you think they’re principled doesn’t take away truth looking at a major issue. All the other issues you’re referencing are discussed ad nauseam here all the time. Yet no one ever posts to criticism about say Meta by saying “well it’s the same as what TikTok does!” So there’s clearly an asymmetry in the whataboutism. I wonder what it’s like in Chinese media. I bet you they stay on topic, if allowed.
In terms of the sources, it is basically the job of any government to be concerned about such issues of how a foreign agent impacts things domestically, independent of any other job they may or you think they should have.
> All the other issues you’re referencing are discussed ad nauseam here all the time.
Ye, critized by the average HNer, yes. I agree with that.
Usually not on a "national security" basis though, which makes the concern about TikTok a trigger for me since I am not American. And usually countries that ban Facebook are mocked for being paranoid or against free speech.
I meant hypocrisy in the "mainstream establishment", not among privacy conscious tech people. HN has swung significantly on the matter in the last years.
I agree with you. People love to throw around the word "whataboutism" when you call them on their hypocrisy. That's why it's a lot of politicians' and commentators' favorite word.
They never care to elaborate as to why they think the other example you are bringing into the discussion is not comparable to what is currently on the table. Ironically, crying "whataboutism" is, in itself, a form of whataboutism.
Generally, when you bring up another similar example in an argument where someone appears to be applying a double standard, the idea is to start discussion about what the actual standard is. In this case, I would like to know why Facebook is not considered a security risk on this scale when they collect equal amounts of data, given the fact that Chinese and Indian agents are likely deeply embedded at Facebook (as they are at Twitter, per Mudge's disclosure) in positions that have access to the data. That means the standard is clearly not: "Companies who make troves of data about Americans available to the Chinese government are bad."
I would like to know what the standard is. I would also like it to be extended to cover Facebook, Google, Apple, Uber, and all the other American companies who surveil me too. While we're at it, I would like it to be extended to cover the NSA and the FBI, too, who wipe their ass with the 4th amendment.
Facebook, at least, is under FTC consent order and has very strict reporting and compliance requirements. I agree the the US needs similar controls over all major data generation schemes - at least w/ FAANGs, the jurisdiction is available. With TikTok, there is no leverage.
Personally I'm reserving judgement until this is confirmed by other news sources, because the details seem sparse, the motives unclear, and I don't hold Forbes in a high regard journalistically (though this is at least a staff writer, and not a contributor, so presumably there's more editorial oversight). My intuition is that there's a 55% chance this story is true, and a 45% chance it's incorrect or overstated.
Can we all please stick to the topic of the post here? That Tiktok is a threat to the society especially when a foreign company with questionable ethical and moral practices is in charge of American teen data.
If you want to discuss how western companies also collect the data, then go make a different post and discuss there? The false equivalence by comparing Tiktok to other tech companies ruins any discussions we could have here.
For those going, "well, what is the Chinese government going to do, compared to Facebook?" Or saying, well, Facebook does the same thing right?
Well... potentially kidnap you and bring you to China, if you don't comply. They supposedly "convinced" 230,000 Chinese nationals from April 2021 to July 2022 to "voluntarily" return to China to face criminal charges, complete with over 54 "international police stations" and a new law, going into effect this December, claiming extraterritorial authority over their "citizens" for certain crimes.
This, along with other incidents, show that China is more than willing to harass people outside their country, at a minimum.
You seem to be confusing extradition and extraordinary rendition? The former is a legal process built on treaties. The latter is a euphamism for a kind of government kidnapping to circumvent legal restrictions, hence the "extraordinary."
What the “TikTok is just doing what other social media companies are doing” response misses is that US platforms are under the purview of US law and US government.
The US govt’s extensive monitoring and archiving of its own citizens + foreign citizens information is widely known at this point.
This is a source of wide consternation for other foreign governments because the monitoring is a tremendous asset for US domestic and foreign intelligence, defense, and cyber warfare which is of course why China has banned many of these US services.
Meanwhile TikTok has grown like a weed in the US and several times the so called “firewall” supposed to keep the US version of TikTok separate had been demonstrably proven to be effectively non existent.
And considering the scale of election meddling, astroturfing, and psy ops that take place on US platforms - that both private industry and govt have failed to contain - the US intelligence community and govt likely well understands the threat of their unofficial, global arch rival owning the fastest growing new social media platform.
I would love to know what the intelligence community is doing behind closed doors at this point but they must have balanced TikTok as an asset vs liability given the obvious threat it poses to the US’ near ubiquitous control of global social media.
Considering that Stratva has revealed classified information merely by its ordinary function of publishing users' workouts when (foolishly) used ny soldiers in-country, the threat of an app tracking everyone's location to an enemy is terrifying - target any particular leaders, soldiers,pilots, etc., &/or their families, or just the command posts or barracks where they are located. Just connect missile guidance to the live coordinates.
At this point, letting in any software or hardware from China or Russia is beyond idiotic. We can all live just fine without Kaspersky spyware and TikTok videos sending home our locations.
I dunno that isolationism is going to produce better outcomes. I think we should demand transparency and control over our data, and offer the same in return. Refusing to exchange software seems liable to chill economic and diplomatic relations, and result in us all creating our own Great Firewalls.
We were able to negotiate the reduction of nuclear capabilities during the height of the cold war. I don't see why we couldn't negotiate the reduction of cyber capabilities now, were we to make it a priority. Certainly seems worth a try, if the alternative is destroying the internet as an international commons.
Yes, the Internet was supposed to be an international commons. It had only a brief window when it was actually anything like that. That window has been closed for over a decade now, and it is time to recognize the facts.
Considering the uncountable myriad of ways that such agreements could be evaded and subverted, and the fact that it is already rather uncool to be seen as spyware, yet the practice is so ubiquitous as to have a name of "surveillance capitalism", it seems like a fools errand.
Also, CCP has already effectively blocked Google Facebook, etc., there is no reason to allow them continued free access.
More broadly, the Grand Experiment has been fully and exhaustively tried, and it has colossally failed. The idea was that open trade and information exchange would inexorably lead to open markets and open democracies.
This beautiful idea turned out to be entirely false. The measures from open markets and information exchanges have in fact been perverted to strengthen autocracies, and used in hybrid warfare to threaten democracy itself around the globe.
It is past time to shut off access to those autocracies that wish us only harm. The days of the internet as an international commons are, sadly, long gone.
I regularly talk to people from all over the world and share ideas, so I just disagree that the internet has failed as a commons. Commons are messy and it might not feel like they're working, but I think when you're just not talking to each other and telling yourselves stories about the other party, things can go downhill quickly. The value of a commons isn't necessarily that its broadly a healthy place for discussion. It's that it makes such discussion possible, and in there will be pockets where it happens. Even in unhealthy communities, there will be times when healthy discussion happens on accident.
Nuclear treaties are difficult to enforce too. Their enforcement isn't an unqualified success. But I think the world much better for them.
I do agree that the strongest form of the liberalism thesis, where trade and cultural exchange make war impossible and such, is wrong, and was always farcical. That's not really what I'm advocating. I'm not a Liberal or Thatcherist or anything like that. I'm not saying that such exchange creates good as much as saying it reduces harm.
If we break off into little internet fiefdoms, we will have more surveillance (as total surveillance is required to enforce these boundaries), which will empower and normalize authoritarianism.
The internet is only a small piece of the concept of trade and openness that has failed. The openness, instead of encouraging democracy, has merely strengthened the autocracies.
Down to the Internet, the results are very ambiguous. I've also enjoyed conversations across borders. Yet, I've also seen apparently innocuous conversations about industry techniques (I work in carbon fiber composites) turn out to be likely attempts from Iran to get info, likely literally to be used in the Shahed drones now used to attack Ukraine. That particular conversation got shut down politely, but I'm sure there were hundreds more.
Similarly, the western academic world is full of Chinese "students" working to both exfiltrate technology and to intimidate overseas Chinese into not opposing the CCP.
The CCP has broken into the US Govt computers and basically exfiltrated the entire employee database.
And this does not even begin to touch upon the threat of software and hardware spyware, which is the main focus.
I could go on endlessly, but the point is that closed societies are taking advantage of open societies to literally destroy them.
The benefit of our enjoyment of cross-border exchange is trivial compared to the national security situation. This is no longer a game or a 'let's all join hands' situation. It is literally a fight for the future of the free world.
If there is a way to ban CCP, RU, Iranian, NK, etc software an hardware and still allow conversations, then that's maybe allowable. But there's a really easy solution without any surveillance — just logically or physically cut the cord - no routing packets to or from those countries.
If this is a fight for the free world, the strategy you propose is capitulation. I think you should examine your views more closely; you're expressing contradictions that I think you have trouble seeing, and there's an ungrounded paranoia to your assertions. Your comments about Chinese students read like Red Scare propaganda. There's a lot of "clash of civilizations" style essentialism in your views. I think you might benefit from looking into criticisms of that idea.
> US platforms are under the purview of US law and US government
Except when the US gov or their agencies decide that the law does not apply anymore, to the company, data or individual. Because for example you are a suspect of being a terrorist
The rugged digital individual needs Little Snitch for Android quite urgently. In fact, I think that's something Google can and should include in the very next Android revision. It would be a loud and clear statement in favor of security and privacy in a distinctly Android (vs Apple) way - it's more open, more information, and more on you to do the right thing (but I do support Apple-esque default rules).
While I think the best reason to care is because of privacy and security, there's also a more concrete argument in favor of preventing theft. Every network call that is not in service to the user is theft of precious battery and bandwidth resources.
Right now it's not a free market because people just don't know the price they are paying. It would be great to surface that price and give alternative apps and services a chance to win based on substantive differences, and not just on superficial things. (The only app that has succeeded on this basis is, to my knowledge, Signal. But Google would immediately alter the entire marketplace for the better by building Android Snitch into the next version of Android).
Everyone that is trying to justify this by whataboutism, you are defending a regime that is know for going into foreign countries to kidnap and arrest individuals extrajudicially. The people that will suffer are Chinese citizens trying to escape the grip of authoritarianism.
The term for people that defend authoritarians this way is "useful idiot".
Reminder: the US ran a global kidnapping and torture program for years. Innocent people were even kidnapped off the streets in Europe by American agents, and flown to third countries to be tortured.
I'm pretty anti-TikTok - but shouldn't we have some evidence - or any knowledge of who this material came from - before trusting a reporter from Forbes?
I read through the article - but I couldn't find any details on the source this reporter is citing. Worryingly - the author "held policy positions at Facebook and Spotify." Instagram is a major competitor to TikTok - so conflict of interest is pretty strong.
As other posters pointed out - every major company tracks people. We've known about this type of behaviour for decades from big tech.
There is a phrase of set of phrases I am looking for when it comes to astroturfing / election manipulation/ fake news.
The first is that there are many stories, interpretations or perhaps coherent models. Obviously some stories are inconsistent or falsifiable on their own terms. Then we walk up the pyramid - and stories exist like "stories for children". these are things like "love will always triumph, hospitals are where sick people go and doctors make them better again". These stories are true in some directional sense, and they are true in that there are many facts that will support them, but there are facts that falsify the stories.
And so we travel up the pyramid, and the stories become more complex and nuanced - failed prime ministers should not get 100K pa pensions, but if we don't give officials fat payouts they are at risk of bribery on the job which is more expensive. There are facts that support that argument but it seems less cut and dry - you need a model of bribery and human nature and revolving doors to match up.
As we go further up the pyramid more and more falsifiable stories don't just need the same facts as me to agree with me, but they need other mental models to agree with me. Deserving poor, mentally ill people need to buck up a bit, believe in yourself, etc
I think that surfacing mental models matters as much as surfacing facts. Debunking can only go so far and facts that might help cannot be used if the mental model is the wrong shape.
you're using falsifiability only as a negative, whereas most people will be familiar with Karl Popper and falsifiability as a necessary element of scientific discourse and progress.
They say that falsifiability is a best case scenario and base of the pyramid, as you move up you have to construct dynamic models of measurement to deduce even a probability of being true.
I see falsifiability as very much a positive and love me a bit of Karl Popper.
I just think that for a empirical outcome to falsify a theory we both need to agree on the same theory. If your theory is there is a shadowy cabal of pedophiles secretly controlling wokeness to hold down good old boys from decent jobs and my theory is that factory production in China is cheaper so why keep the factory in Detroit, exactly which facts are going to help us?
It took a lot to prove the Earth even spins, and orbits the sun. And yet if you had polled everyone in Europe or America from 1600 onwards, I am not sure when 50% of people would have said heliocentric, and do wonder when if ever the figure got above 95%.
Somehow the figure that Brexit and Trump votes split not on age but on further education seems relevant here - that university teaches new mental models. But somehow I am dubious that has explanatory power.
I really like this pyramid of "factuality". I wonder if the missing bit is people attesting to their confidence of their statements and/or a prior on bullshittidness of the given source.
All because it's out of reach of being bought by Facebook and can't be controlled via conventional means. TikTok is no more a threat to Americans than any other webpage is.
122 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 98.0 ms ] threadYou may be thinking of Lundy et al v. Meta Platforms, in which they were not fined but agreed to a civil settlement and denied they were doing what was claimed. In that cases, it wasn't even alleged that they were trying to make the locations of specific individuals available for human analysis.
Meta was fined for violating consumer privacy for years, which TikTok has already been doing themselves; but as you can already see they have become even worse than Facebook.
> You may be thinking of Lundy et al v. Meta Platforms,
You see, even when Meta didn't get fined for that, perhaps it's about time for TikTok to get fined in the billions for violating consumer's privacy in the US and repeated offences should be in the tens of billions of dollars to discourage such activity in the US?
???
I really hope you have read what I said before commenting.
> Stop being a shill for authoritarian governments. If you really cared about privacy you would advocate banning tiktok and banning facebook. Not this whataboutism nonsense.
Who's shilling what? I already said I want BOTH of them to be fined in the billions?
Since I already disagreed with the spying and privacy violations from what both Facebook and TikTok has done for years. I'd also be in favour of banning all of them if possible. But in the US and given the FTC has given a multi billion dollar fine to Facebook, I'm sure you would want TikTok to have the exact same treatment of a giant fine since they are operating in the US? No?
It's not 'whataboutsism' as I've already agreed with the parent comment.
The comment was about specific individuals being targeted. Are there any reports of Facebook targeting specific individuals?
Tiktok and Facebook both should be fined for violating the law when there is sufficient evidence that the violation happened. We don't need to make up stories about Facebook to justify investigations into either.
[1]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM
[2]https://blog.cloudflare.com/how-the-nsa-may-have-put-a-backd...
More privacy w.r.t. those wouldn't hurt non-US countries, I would say.
Tik Tok exists as a corporation for people to "do business in China" AKA be paid vast sums of money for knowledge and skills that would be treason or whatever to otherwise transfer.
At least Facebook people keep up appearances -- pretend to be a capitalist, then shun any regulations or taxes that differentiate capitalism from oligarchy.
(And Federal Trade Commission is a joke, it's a known thing they can often do one test case when a behavior is being done in parallel across industry by many actors.)
An imperial, totalitarian regime which currently imprisons people for being of a specific ethnicity (or any arbitrary reason), and has no measure of a proper judicial system, tracking citizens of other nations for purposes of pursuing their power - is not the same thing as - Facebook making it possible for advertisers to target groups of people with 'interests'.
Meta can be fined for shenanigans (which FYI mostly do not cause direct harm), and of course - we need better regulations.
But the issue of TikTok is one of national (frankly international) security, and it's on an entirely different level.
you seriously think tiktok is prioritizing grass roots content and not siphoning off massive amounts of data for profit?
We’re trying to do better than them, not follow their example!
Also, Douyin (owned by the same company as TikTok) focuses on education in China while TikTok promotes the dumbest videos in the states. As the article below so eloquently articulates, "TikTok is making you dumb."
https://www.opindia.com/2022/07/tiktok-china-engineering-oth...
In the end, governments just outsource their spying to advertisers (without even having to pay for the service) and can “ask nicely” for any data they need.
However, besides national security letters, I'm not even sure one would be needed when there's a healthy industry of data brokers happy to sell the data.
Put a stop to this - for everyone.
Your comment reminds me of critiques of Russophobia. Turns out in hindsight Russophobia was completely warranted.
The hypocrisy and the invasion of privacy is what upsets me, not which government has jurisdiction. The Chinese government almost certainly has access to Facebook and Google's data, too. I don't want ANYONE building a profile on me.
Even if it is "just" for ad targeting. It won't be just for ads in the future.
In terms of the sources, it is basically the job of any government to be concerned about such issues of how a foreign agent impacts things domestically, independent of any other job they may or you think they should have.
Ye, critized by the average HNer, yes. I agree with that.
Usually not on a "national security" basis though, which makes the concern about TikTok a trigger for me since I am not American. And usually countries that ban Facebook are mocked for being paranoid or against free speech.
I meant hypocrisy in the "mainstream establishment", not among privacy conscious tech people. HN has swung significantly on the matter in the last years.
They never care to elaborate as to why they think the other example you are bringing into the discussion is not comparable to what is currently on the table. Ironically, crying "whataboutism" is, in itself, a form of whataboutism.
Generally, when you bring up another similar example in an argument where someone appears to be applying a double standard, the idea is to start discussion about what the actual standard is. In this case, I would like to know why Facebook is not considered a security risk on this scale when they collect equal amounts of data, given the fact that Chinese and Indian agents are likely deeply embedded at Facebook (as they are at Twitter, per Mudge's disclosure) in positions that have access to the data. That means the standard is clearly not: "Companies who make troves of data about Americans available to the Chinese government are bad."
I would like to know what the standard is. I would also like it to be extended to cover Facebook, Google, Apple, Uber, and all the other American companies who surveil me too. While we're at it, I would like it to be extended to cover the NSA and the FBI, too, who wipe their ass with the 4th amendment.
we literally have american companies that have been caught doing this with impunity.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/emilybaker-white/2022/10/20/tik...
Personally I'm reserving judgement until this is confirmed by other news sources, because the details seem sparse, the motives unclear, and I don't hold Forbes in a high regard journalistically (though this is at least a staff writer, and not a contributor, so presumably there's more editorial oversight). My intuition is that there's a 55% chance this story is true, and a 45% chance it's incorrect or overstated.
If you want to discuss how western companies also collect the data, then go make a different post and discuss there? The false equivalence by comparing Tiktok to other tech companies ruins any discussions we could have here.
Well... potentially kidnap you and bring you to China, if you don't comply. They supposedly "convinced" 230,000 Chinese nationals from April 2021 to July 2022 to "voluntarily" return to China to face criminal charges, complete with over 54 "international police stations" and a new law, going into effect this December, claiming extraterritorial authority over their "citizens" for certain crimes.
This, along with other incidents, show that China is more than willing to harass people outside their country, at a minimum.
https://safeguarddefenders.com/en/blog/230000-policing-expan...
It’s not China doing this I am afraid of, as a citizen of a third party country.
China's alleged activities do not even talk or rely on authority from their own courts, let alone another country's.
The US govt’s extensive monitoring and archiving of its own citizens + foreign citizens information is widely known at this point.
This is a source of wide consternation for other foreign governments because the monitoring is a tremendous asset for US domestic and foreign intelligence, defense, and cyber warfare which is of course why China has banned many of these US services.
Meanwhile TikTok has grown like a weed in the US and several times the so called “firewall” supposed to keep the US version of TikTok separate had been demonstrably proven to be effectively non existent.
And considering the scale of election meddling, astroturfing, and psy ops that take place on US platforms - that both private industry and govt have failed to contain - the US intelligence community and govt likely well understands the threat of their unofficial, global arch rival owning the fastest growing new social media platform.
I would love to know what the intelligence community is doing behind closed doors at this point but they must have balanced TikTok as an asset vs liability given the obvious threat it poses to the US’ near ubiquitous control of global social media.
At this point, letting in any software or hardware from China or Russia is beyond idiotic. We can all live just fine without Kaspersky spyware and TikTok videos sending home our locations.
We were able to negotiate the reduction of nuclear capabilities during the height of the cold war. I don't see why we couldn't negotiate the reduction of cyber capabilities now, were we to make it a priority. Certainly seems worth a try, if the alternative is destroying the internet as an international commons.
Yes, the Internet was supposed to be an international commons. It had only a brief window when it was actually anything like that. That window has been closed for over a decade now, and it is time to recognize the facts.
Considering the uncountable myriad of ways that such agreements could be evaded and subverted, and the fact that it is already rather uncool to be seen as spyware, yet the practice is so ubiquitous as to have a name of "surveillance capitalism", it seems like a fools errand.
Also, CCP has already effectively blocked Google Facebook, etc., there is no reason to allow them continued free access.
More broadly, the Grand Experiment has been fully and exhaustively tried, and it has colossally failed. The idea was that open trade and information exchange would inexorably lead to open markets and open democracies.
This beautiful idea turned out to be entirely false. The measures from open markets and information exchanges have in fact been perverted to strengthen autocracies, and used in hybrid warfare to threaten democracy itself around the globe.
It is past time to shut off access to those autocracies that wish us only harm. The days of the internet as an international commons are, sadly, long gone.
Nuclear treaties are difficult to enforce too. Their enforcement isn't an unqualified success. But I think the world much better for them.
I do agree that the strongest form of the liberalism thesis, where trade and cultural exchange make war impossible and such, is wrong, and was always farcical. That's not really what I'm advocating. I'm not a Liberal or Thatcherist or anything like that. I'm not saying that such exchange creates good as much as saying it reduces harm.
If we break off into little internet fiefdoms, we will have more surveillance (as total surveillance is required to enforce these boundaries), which will empower and normalize authoritarianism.
Down to the Internet, the results are very ambiguous. I've also enjoyed conversations across borders. Yet, I've also seen apparently innocuous conversations about industry techniques (I work in carbon fiber composites) turn out to be likely attempts from Iran to get info, likely literally to be used in the Shahed drones now used to attack Ukraine. That particular conversation got shut down politely, but I'm sure there were hundreds more.
Similarly, the western academic world is full of Chinese "students" working to both exfiltrate technology and to intimidate overseas Chinese into not opposing the CCP.
The CCP has broken into the US Govt computers and basically exfiltrated the entire employee database.
And this does not even begin to touch upon the threat of software and hardware spyware, which is the main focus.
I could go on endlessly, but the point is that closed societies are taking advantage of open societies to literally destroy them.
The benefit of our enjoyment of cross-border exchange is trivial compared to the national security situation. This is no longer a game or a 'let's all join hands' situation. It is literally a fight for the future of the free world.
If there is a way to ban CCP, RU, Iranian, NK, etc software an hardware and still allow conversations, then that's maybe allowable. But there's a really easy solution without any surveillance — just logically or physically cut the cord - no routing packets to or from those countries.
Except when the US gov or their agencies decide that the law does not apply anymore, to the company, data or individual. Because for example you are a suspect of being a terrorist
While I think the best reason to care is because of privacy and security, there's also a more concrete argument in favor of preventing theft. Every network call that is not in service to the user is theft of precious battery and bandwidth resources.
Right now it's not a free market because people just don't know the price they are paying. It would be great to surface that price and give alternative apps and services a chance to win based on substantive differences, and not just on superficial things. (The only app that has succeeded on this basis is, to my knowledge, Signal. But Google would immediately alter the entire marketplace for the better by building Android Snitch into the next version of Android).
The term for people that defend authoritarians this way is "useful idiot".
Reminder: the US ran a global kidnapping and torture program for years. Innocent people were even kidnapped off the streets in Europe by American agents, and flown to third countries to be tortured.
The State of Democracy in the United States 2021-12-05 - Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the People's Republic of China https://www.fmprc.gov.cn/mfa_eng/zxxx_662805/202112/t2021120...
I read through the article - but I couldn't find any details on the source this reporter is citing. Worryingly - the author "held policy positions at Facebook and Spotify." Instagram is a major competitor to TikTok - so conflict of interest is pretty strong.
As other posters pointed out - every major company tracks people. We've known about this type of behaviour for decades from big tech.
the headline says plot to track specific people, so that is alleging something different than "everybody does it"
The first is that there are many stories, interpretations or perhaps coherent models. Obviously some stories are inconsistent or falsifiable on their own terms. Then we walk up the pyramid - and stories exist like "stories for children". these are things like "love will always triumph, hospitals are where sick people go and doctors make them better again". These stories are true in some directional sense, and they are true in that there are many facts that will support them, but there are facts that falsify the stories.
And so we travel up the pyramid, and the stories become more complex and nuanced - failed prime ministers should not get 100K pa pensions, but if we don't give officials fat payouts they are at risk of bribery on the job which is more expensive. There are facts that support that argument but it seems less cut and dry - you need a model of bribery and human nature and revolving doors to match up.
As we go further up the pyramid more and more falsifiable stories don't just need the same facts as me to agree with me, but they need other mental models to agree with me. Deserving poor, mentally ill people need to buck up a bit, believe in yourself, etc
I think that surfacing mental models matters as much as surfacing facts. Debunking can only go so far and facts that might help cannot be used if the mental model is the wrong shape.
I just think that for a empirical outcome to falsify a theory we both need to agree on the same theory. If your theory is there is a shadowy cabal of pedophiles secretly controlling wokeness to hold down good old boys from decent jobs and my theory is that factory production in China is cheaper so why keep the factory in Detroit, exactly which facts are going to help us?
It took a lot to prove the Earth even spins, and orbits the sun. And yet if you had polled everyone in Europe or America from 1600 onwards, I am not sure when 50% of people would have said heliocentric, and do wonder when if ever the figure got above 95%.
Somehow the figure that Brexit and Trump votes split not on age but on further education seems relevant here - that university teaches new mental models. But somehow I am dubious that has explanatory power.