It is absolutely foolish for any country other than China to allow TikTok within their borders.
You might fairly ask whether or not it is equally foolish for non-US countries to use US services. I think that is also a reasonable question, and deserves reflection.
> You might fairly ask whether or not it is equally foolish for non-US countries to use US services. I think that is also a reasonable question, and deserves reflection.
It's a fair sentiment (and held by others as well on this thread), but IMHO there's no equivalence. In democracies, violence against their own people (or others) will invite opposition from their citizens - while in China people won't even know what's going on.
The consequences are stark - just last week 7 million people lost the liberties they enjoyed. What's a comparable loss due to US snooping?
The US installed a dictatorship in my country in the 70s. China hasn't done anything of the sort, except ship me cheap stuff through aliexpress. I know who I would choose as my designated data thief if I had to choose between the US stealing my data and China stealing my data.
Yes, although you're more likely to be extradited from most of the West to the US than to China. So if you're a dissident against the US you may be safer using Chinese technologies.
What does this even mean? Being a dissident is allowed in the US going by google's definition. What's not allowed is stealing a bunch of shit and then giving it away to foreign nations like Snowden did.
I would be interested in seeing an actual "risk analysis" for people from different countries. While I would like no country to have my data, if China/US were the only (and exclusive!) options, I guess the actual risk of negative consequences from "who has the data" is not equally distributed.
I guess, in general, within chinas sphere of influence you are better off having the us have your data and the other way around (e.g., ending up in a chinese prison is 'unlikely' while in europe the same way it's unlikely that ending on an american nofly list or in guantanamo is unlikely while in china). The countries inbetween or people traveling a lot would be more interesting.
Unfortunately, the most likely scenario is that everyone gets the data.
edit: I put "risk analysis" in quotes, because it doesn't feel like the right word for this hypothetical thing.
It was US government agencies, not private companies who were spying. So, to clarify, other countries can use US private company services, but should not blindly trust their secret data to the US government.
>It was US government agencies, not private companies who were spying.
Excuse me? I think we've all seen the Snowden and other leaks that essentially prove that all US companies have no problem handing over direct access to the US government.
USA has a track record of issuing a request for info (if not other shadier methods) tied with a gag order. So... and if the Snowden/Wikileaks/ATT room 641A has taught us anything (combined with the 5-9-14 eyes), is that we cannot trust any government when it has enough power to spy on its people. IT DOES.
Major difference between USA, UK, France, Spain, Sweden etc. Vs Russia, Iran, China, Turkey, North Korea is that you end up in a cell, never to be seen again, tortured for your opinions.
I do believe that there are some scountries like India, Pakistan a a couple of others that play in both courts. Semi democratic and semi dictatorial, at the same time..
That major difference you mentioned means that the leak will be much more likely in the US, company will try to battle the order in court, the government will think twice before issuing a request to a company, and the net result is spyings are several orders of magnitude less often in western countries (I have no data to back up that statement).
> the government will think twice before issuing a request to a company
No, they will definitely not think. Govs/politicians/people in places of power are so arrogant that they will continue the BAU. They will pass another stricter "patriot act/snooper charter", they will issue a tougher gag order, and they will continue as they already do. They will increse the penalties for violators, but they will not stop. The "beast" has a hungry mouth, and it needs that info.
When was the last time we saw someone with power just turning the volume down? Never. Only if they get a hard slap in their faces, they pause for a minute, then they change/re-org and continue in a new method/under new legislation, and life goes on.
Even in an ideal (human) society (I like to use the "Star Trek TNG" in my examples), someone(s) has absolute power into reading private encrypted messages, and we just see a wise Jean-Luc (Sir Patrick Stewart) that does not abuse his right/privilege. But he does have the access.
You are dealing in absolutes. Let me put is way. In dictatorship non-free spy hungry US the cost of making a request to a private company for a government official is much much higher than the same request in for example China.
Because of checks and balances and more or less working elections and free press and now the free internet.
When request is harder to make, the government makes fewer requests, that’s it.
After what has happened to Snowden and Assange? I hope the leakers share your blind optimism. Snowden literally had to flee to Russia, of all the countries in the world, for political asylum.
> Google is 1000 times more transparent company than ByteDance. It is OK to use US services for non-US countries.
Are we talking about freedom of speech? I 100% agree.
Otherwise, I don't think Google is a good example. There are actually many bad cases among US and EU companies. Just consider a few blow ups that we had with Google (e.g. Street view), Cicso (the issue with NSA), RSA (also the story about NSA), Facebook scandals, Crypto AG, Gemalto SIM cards, and etc.
Are they less evil or more transparent? I don't think so. It's the system that's more transparent in the West not companies. So when something leaks it's more likely that we are informed and it will blow up.
If you want to link everything to national security, then obviously domestic services are right choices. But, I'm still against banning and blocking other services. It's just against how I like the world to look like. It also sets a bad standard for other countries to inherit it. You don't want to disconnect the world more than it's now. History shows that it has bad consequences no matter where you are standing.
I think the right move would be setting good data protection laws (e.g. GDPR), and educating people about data privacy and help them to understand all the risks that are involved.
> It's the system that's more transparent in the West not companies
Kind of. But also more transparent western system makes private companies behave to avoid making the front page in the next scandal.
> Are we talking about freedom of speech?
We are talking about the level of public understanding of what’s going on inside the company. What data the company is collecting and where it sends it for example. (Please, note the transparency is not binary: we don’t know everything about Google, but we know much more about Google internals than about ByteDance).
It's not equivalent, but I am certainly wary of having my data handled by US companies that aren't big enough to be scared of GDPR.
My phone number and email address spread to many more American marketing lists than European ones, even though I rarely visit. Many of my Facebook ads result from my yearly visit to American cities. I just can't trust American businesses to use my data for the intended purpose only.
The large companies react to GDPR. Europe has already shown that it's willing to go after Google, Apple and others. It's the small companies that fall in the cracks that worry me.
>>I am certainly wary of having my data handled by US companies that aren't big enough to be scared of GDPR.
In that one comment, you have explained everything anyone needs to know as to why most of the tech innovation originates in the US and not from within Europe, and also why this situation is probably never going to change.
"Foolish" may be a bit too far but yes privacy is a concern and can be imposed to operate within the borders of a country. I dont think banning an app is a solution , tomorrow another app may comeup would you ban that too? It is easier for countries to just pass laws and ask companies to comply with them instead of out right banning them. Also banning is so anti capital. And market will punish you for being anti capital.
Not exactly, and nothing that I can think of that would really fit in this circumstance.
Had TikTok originated in the US and been bought by a foreign company, The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States could have ordered the foreign company to divest itself of that asset. An example was Grindr being purchased by Kunlun Tech, and CFIUS deciding that this wasn't allowable. --The idea being that the type of data Grindr has could pose national security issues (due to government employees or elected officials being blackmailed, not that Grindr has ever been known for any form of security).
With TikTok, however, it seems to be more about posturing. I'm not sure what legal mechanism they could really use to force the app to be blocked.
Sort of. There are a lot of international regulations that prevent things like SaaS companies from servicing Iran and Korea - so they could just introduce some “justifiable” legislation and then ask Apple to enforce it which they probably would.
Informally, the US government pressured payment processors to cut off WikiLeaks. All the major players complied. I'm not a lawyer, but that certainly feels like a violation of the 1st Amendment to me.
> I don't think someone in China seeing my TikTok videos
Leaving aside mechanisms and policies, this is not about seeing videos, this is about the invasive amount of information TikTok collects from devices it runs on.
But it isn't about you. We already know that social media can be, and is, used to track details by nation states on all sorts of things, from the movement of individuals of interest, as well as things such as estimating the population of military bases, discovering military operations, etc.
A foreign government having access to all of that data for a huge portion of the population is 100% a national security risk.
Then ban military people from using it, problem solved.
This level of paranoia looks more like the Soviet Union[1] than it does like a free country.
[1] Where you couldn't even buy a map, because heaven forbid, foreign spies might use them to compromise... National security. They might learn the distances between the army base, and the hospital, and then who knows what diabolical plot they may hatch?
It could be for example if your neighbor works for CIA or at some secret research laboratory. They can learn a lot about them by watching your funny cat videos.
A) Your neighbor's laptop is partially compromised, and part of what is obtained is a list of APs with which it has been associated.
B) Your phone has TikTok installed, and part of what is obtained is your location and the available APs (while you're using the app, only).
C) You use your phone to view TikTok videos in the middle of the night, at home.
Because of B+C, the foreign actor now knows where you live (via location services) and the wireless APs nearby. Because of A, they know where your neighbor's laptop has associated. Taken together, they now have a reasonable level of confidence where your neighbor lives even though they have never installed TikTok.
If your neighour's machine is pwned, they could just look at the addresses on the bills he receives in his e-mail.
And if they want to know where my neighbour lives, they could just consult a... Land deed registry. Or their resume.
Or... Run a credit check on them. That last one will also give personal information at a level of fidelity right down to the number of nose hairs that they plucked this morning.
But let's cycle back to that. How does knowing my neighbour's address compromise national security? Am I compromising national security by telling you that John Leslie lives in Apt 341 on my floor? Even if he works for the Air Force?
Keep in mind - the man has to live somewhere. What relevance of note does where he lives in particular have to a nation state?
For example match car plate numbers with locations and timestamps. By analyzing millions of videos they can build a driving pattern for a particular vehicle.
Given that ~99.999% of the time, the average cellphone user is not recording a video, and ~99.9% of the time, license plates are not visible in videos, and ~99.9% of license plates are utterly uninteresting, this is an absolutely horrible example of a non-threat.
If this is the best argument that can be made, then national security is safe as houses.
they can't ask ISPs to block connections for particular servers? no need national firewall for that it's not like you have that many ISP options and people will switch ISP to have access to bunch of Chinese spyware
Apple regularly punishes privacy-invasive apps, and also apps that they and other tech giants deem misinformation (all apps are banned from presenting COVID-19 data, Infowars was deplatformed, etc). While they do stand up to OS-level encryption-breaking requests, they don't necessarily have a problem with banning apps.
What makes you say Apple is well-known for refusing invasive government requests? They’ve gladly been handling over all iCloud data for Chinese users to the CCP (meaning many of its users were unknowingly sharing all their sensitive videos/pictures/text with the authoritarian government). They’ve also been banning foreign apps from the Chinese App Store, and have similarly banned foreign apps in other countries, such as India.
In the US, they've repeatedly refused the FBI's demands to help unlock people's phones. They seem to view censorship as the price of doing business in other countries; I'm not exactly happy about that, but as far as I can tell it doesn't transfer over to their attitude stateside.
Which law are you referring to? To my knowledge there isn't a "Just do what I tell you to" law on the books. Apple and Google could decide willingly to ban the apps from their app stores but outside of that I'm curious what law could be brought to bear that would force them.
I'm not sure that a foreign company has any rights under the constitution to begin with. It's contentious whether or not it grants rights to a foreign citizen while they are outside of the US's borders, so claiming that ByteDance would have their constitutional rights violated by such a ban would be even more so.
However, if this were to happen, it would almost certainly be under national security law, which has pretty far reaching powers for this sort of thing. Knowing how much the app spies on you, and knowing that they are ultimately under control by the Chinese government, there's a very strong case to be made.
(Yes, I know this is a company owned by the Beijing based ByteDance but that’s not immediately disqualifying of this US corporation run under US law being able to defend itself in a US court system as any other US company would.)
It's not immediately disqualifying, no, but it would almost certainly be squashed quite quickly by the US's NSL. (Funny how the NSL in HK and the US are both so pertinent in China related discussions these past few days!)
Having set up a corporation on US soil does not grant free pass to a foreign government to spy on US citizens.
I would think it's actually Google and Apple's constitutional rights that would be at issue, since they're the ones hypothetically being restrained from publishing certain apps.
All this will do is validate that banning each other's social media apps is a legitimate thing to do, all you need is sufficient justification.
The usual reason for tit-for-tat trade restrictions is to punish the original restrictions and try to coerce the other side back to a free trade position. That can't happen in this case, the CCP will never allow foreign social media in China, so it would end up with a permanent mutual ban.
Either we believe that freedom of communication is a paramount principle that should be protected, or we don't and we think it's ok to interfere with it for 'national interest' reasons. Our national interest reasons might differ from theirs, but we'd still be validating that banning social media is an acceptable step to take depending on the circumstances. I realise this poses a problem because letting Chinese social media into our markets creates risks but if they operate in our markets they have to follow our laws and our standards. Playing the game their way by their rules is a losing strategy. We need to get a lot more creative on this.
This is such cancer. I didn't expect that trade wars and centralized app stores would lead to this, but here we are.
Think back to 1999-- could you imagine if China had made Napster, the USA would block your access to download and use it? We would all just laugh at how easy it would be to get around it
This may or may not have to do with trade war, but the banning TikTok makes sense -- it's just quid pro quo. The Chinese government banned FB, Google, Twitter, Netflix, after all.
That's... actually an interesting thought experiment.
Let's say the US "bans" TikTok. Younger users around the country then install various VPN clients and learn a bit about security. This in turns leads to an overall more environment for US security services to perform mass surveillance.
Many countries have banned some or more services (especially uber and the like received many bans). But even if others didn't, it seems like a very weak argument to me.
Very few countries have banned to the extent of what the CCP did, walling off completely their internet. The CCP can't complain to get a taste of their own medicine here.
> Very few countries have banned to the extent of what the CCP did
That's true, but the start of "they block our apps we should block all of them" seems to weirdly be china, but the argument is usually presented as a general obvious conclusion. I am very much in favor of banning apps that violate local laws and unfortunately that's what china does. So it's more the laws I don't like, not the ban in general. But this prevents me from accepting those bans (edit: banning them because they are chinese) in my (non-us) country.
> The CCP can't complain to get a taste of their own medicine here.
Sure they can. Everyone regularly complains about receiving their own medicine, including china and the us. But that's not the point.
The point is holding yourself, your nation and other nations to your actual standards, not to some arbitrary standards of others. I want my government to enact regulation that benefits the citizens, such as privacy regulations, and enforce it, I don't want them to use nebulous national security regulation to do whatever they want.
If possible, it should be clear what the requirements are so people can fulfil it. I really dislike arbitrarily enforceable laws where possibly everyone is in violation.
> If possible, it should be clear what the requirements are so people can fulfil it. I really dislike arbitrarily enforceable laws where possibly everyone is in violation.
I do agree with that, these kind of retaliation laws have to be codified and be precised. But that's not something uncommon outside of tech, countries will implement trade sanctions if they also face trade sanctions from other markets. Banning apps owned by the CCP seems a fair approach regarding on how they behave.
Does this hurt the CCP? No. It only hurts ByteDance and its investors , which are mostly private entities; while the CCP gets to gloat that look told you, they are no better than us.
There's no independent large private company in China right now anyways, ByteDance is controlled by the CCP just like any other large Chinese company (tech or not).
And decisions like this do help to hurt the CCP, it reduces the reach of Chinese tech companies.
The CCP high officials don't really care about anyone but their own relatives and cronies, while your assumption is mostly right as in the cases like Alibaba and Tencent, ByteDance isn't exactly like them, it has a kind of autonomy and internationalization those companies wouldn't dare to dream of. ByteDance isn't as beholden to the party as those two since it's a startup capitalized on the app economy, it's growth is organic, didn't rely on government policies and protection.
In fact ByteDance already has blockbuster app killed by Chinese authorities.
All the large companies are used for diplomatic purpose internationally by the CCP, ByteDance being that successful won't escape it. Basically they will have two solutions, either move out of China or obey the CCP like the other ones, there's no option to be independent in China.
And as the private investors, well, they will soon learn how the CCP works...
This is more of the protectionism/mercantilism/nationalism stuff. Sure, there's a B-story for it but it's all seated in revanchist nationalism and a tropish "suspicious foreigners" framing.
If someone made a villainous fu manchu character people would rightly protest it as intolerable. Yet when we actually instrument official government policy based on the same sentiments that the character is based on nobody even reaches for the pearls to clutch.
Once again, fiction and symbols are somehow more important to the political imagination than material reality.
This sounds like a protectionist move from the United States, than anything else.
TikTok appears to be the first China technology media company, that can actually make a dent in the universe.
It wasn’t WeChat from Tencent. Nor anything from Alibaba; I don’t think they’re in the media space. Nor search from Baidu. Nor Sina Weibo for tweets.
I can’t think of any other Chinese media company, that can actually make an impact, on the world, just yet.
Perhaps the USA government is trying to kill this fledgling company, while it’s still small. It still hasn’t reached the prevalence of Facebook or YouTube or Twitter yet.
The funny thing is, for a while, TikTok was trying to discourage political content. Just stick to fun dance moves. They tried to tell their users to keep that vile political stuff to Twitter and Facebook; and then, they got criticized for censorship. LOL.
This would be a good moment for the EU to reassess it's dependency on American apps like Whatsapp.
If even the US starts openly blocking apps because they think it would be better for a local competitor to fill this part of the market it should be a wakeup call for the EU.
Tencent owns 40% of Epic Games ... shall we ban Fortnite as well then and make all the kids play Minecraft since it is wholly owned by a US company ???.
If you view digital contents as industrial goods, the internet today which allows apps, services to flow around the world without much burden (e.g. tariff, import control) is already a miracle. It's no surprise of countries to start building "customs" on the internet and that may become a trend considering the deglobalization happening these years.
This report lack a lot of technical information. What counts as "personal information"? What did they send exactly? Is sending app analytics count as personal information? Why don't you hold American software companies to the same level of rigor?
Case in point, almost all apps on my Android phone snoops on my "personal information"; Google literally knows where I am all the time; Facebook SDK snoops on the apps I use, and justify the collection of the data with "better personalization of services"; WhatsApp (owned by Facebook) vacuuming contacts off my phone; LinkedIn snoops on my clipboard etc.
Made a (very) brief scan of the filing. The notable personal information mentioned: phone/social network contacts, MAC, IMEI, IMSI, device serial #, browsing history, cookies, "metadata", location. Pretty par for the course. (I'm not sure "browsing history" and "cookies" is correct, at least on Android versions after KitKat.) I believe you'd need to give permission for most (all?) of these before you download the app, or when you run it the first time.
The filing also makes these claims regarding video uploads:
>Once TikTok users click the “next” button, but before they click either the “save” or “post” buttons, their videos are transferred from their devices to the following domain owned and controlled by Defendants: [...]
Not very damning.
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In the end, the concern is solely that the Chinese government may have access to the data, or may be able to upload exploits to users. This may be a reasonable fear. But people need to stop pretending TikTok's data collection is somehow worse than that of any other data-hoarding apps (Snapchat, Facebook, etc).
The headline is somewhat misleading. If you read the top comment, you'll see that many other apps also were "caught in the act", including ones that most people would agree are innocuous.
I like Chinese tiktok "for you" recommendation than YouTube's recommended. Tiktoks reco is like yeah I will watch that, most of the time I am like thanks. Keep recommending like this. Youtube is like, algorithm thinks it has figured me but it's sort of showing me the same old videos like it's new. I will throw my data to China.
So it is not ok for a foreign app the spy on its user but it's perfectly ok for Google and co to do so? Anyone remember what Uber did with their app and tracking users? What about the king of tracking, facebook?
There’s a quite a large difference between Google spying and China spying. When Google “spies”, users get more relevant ads. When China spies, people get into “Vocational Education and Training Centers” and other bad things happen.
Chinese spying is like 10000 times worse in practice.
But in theory, when dealing in absolutes, there is no difference, both are spies.
Let's be honest: Google has been known to be in bed with the NSA and other agencies as well. It's very disingenuous to pretend Google only serves you ads but has no relations to the US national intelligence community but Chinese apps do.
the difference is that the US is using spying to stop people from doing illegal things. China is using spying to silence/monitor anyone who disagrees with it's government.
Yes, both countries are definitely spying on people via social media apps. But what they're using it for is different.
US is not great, but i would want the US to be the police of the world and not china. I am not a US citizen. The reason is simple USA is built on democracy and individual freedom.
The US government almost certainly doesn't have the power to do that. (It's not tremendously clear how they'd even be able to ban Tiktok; they'd have a hard time getting Apple and Google to take it off the app store and an impossible time convincing Internet providers to block it.)
Since the beginning of the "tensions" with China people keep pushing the same key: "the government cannot do this, they don't have the authority, the constitution blah". And every time they have been proven wrong, as Trump has established travel bans, restricted visas, put people in concentration camps, imposed tariffs, and who knows what they will do next. People that keep pretending that freedoms are not eroding are just exercising wishful thinking.
Dictatorship means the dictator makes the laws. This is a case of the executive branch interpreting laws passed by congress (presumably national security laws here) and which has to be defended in court if challenged.
Ideally coming from congress, then yes. There might be some valid arguments on national security grounds, but I personally wouldn't be comfortable having an all-powerful executive branch who could do this sort of thing unilaterally. Unless it's a wartime or emergency sort of thing.
But Americans largely gave up that seperation of power after 9/11 and executive power hasn't stopped expanding since then. It's perpetually an 'emergency'.
With this and the Huawei stuff, battling over advanced control over private networks for surveillance purposes, is a natural outcome of significantly increasing the power and influence of intelligence community. The kind of people who are naturally hyper-paranoid and see everything through a geopolitical risk lense. Which is helpful for a niche limited role but is ripe for abuse when their mandates expand.
I care less if the Chinese gov is grabbing my data than if the US government is restricting what I can see or not. The freedom to access what I want is much more important for me in the long run. Moreover, how can I trust the US gov to do the right thing? This should be decided by the people, not by some bureaucrat sitting in an intelligence agency.
It is kind of dictatorship. US could achieve the same effect without banning, eg by forcing stores to display warnings to users about where their data and what data is being send. That would be a reasonable compromise between freedom and safety.
Many would argue that yes most definitely we should allow sales of any drugs people want to consume.
Personally I have no problem with people killing themselves with fentanyl, meth or whatever. Knock yourself out. State resources are better spent doing other things. US drug war caused more misery then drugs and most of the police issues are directly related to laws on drugs they are told to enforce.
We should allow unregulated fentanyl sales as long as we provide cheap regulated fentanyl sales as well as drugs and services to deal with addiction. This way we will kill drug mafia and drug related crimes and reduce the numbers of addicted people.
So this is how it's going to happen - with every country banning each other's social media apps, we will enter into a future of digital borders, limited speech, and broken international relations. All in the name of making sure people don't dare think some wrongthink.
I think the issue has nothing to do with it being Chinese, but with the extent at which it swallows up data on Americans. Why even bother sending spies to another country and making plans for infiltration when you can get them to download a full spying suite under the guise of social media?
The problem is this opens a whole new can of worms regarding Facebook and other American social media. Other countries are equally justified in banning them for the same reason.
>I think the issue has nothing to do with it being Chinese, but with the extent at which it swallows up data on Americans
But it's A-ok when NSA powered/hijacked/collaborated U.S. social media companies do the same to the rest of the world?
I'm pretty sure PRISM didn't just get dismantled after Snowden.
>Why even bother sending spies to another country and making plans for infiltration when you can get them to download a full spying suite under the guise of social media?
Because espionage involves more than just digging up information that is voluntarily put out on social media? I mean if you upload the blueprint of a stealth fighter onto TikTok/Dropbox/Instagram/whatever the fault is yours don't you think?
In the very next paragraph I mentioned that other countries have the right to respond to America the same way.
Espionage isn't just uploading blueprints. That's 1950s comic book stuff. It's copying users' clipboards, recording conversations, and tracking locations and gathering data from those around you.
This is just classic whataboutism. You should be careful of all of these companies as well. But you can't really equate the rule of law in both the countries in good faith.
>But you can't really equate the rule of law in both the countries in good faith
Yes you can't because Americans aren't subject to Chinese law. What do you think is going to happen, the CCP send their best assassin over to get you because they didn't like your cat video?
You've got more to fear from the FBI trying to get into your iphone if they suspect you of a crime than a foreign government that doesn't have any jurisdiction over you.
this is just plain old populism and sinophobia and has nothing to do with privacy
>Yes you can't because Americans aren't subject to Chinese law.
China certainly disagrees with you. Just look at the new Hong Kong NSL - it claims jurisdiction over every person on earth for offenses defined to vaguely as to be meaningless. This obviously has horrific effects for the people in Hong Kong - protesters are already being threatened as being national security threats for having a protest where they did nothing but stand still and hold up white paper - but also chilling effects for anyone who might ever visit Hong Kong, the PRC, or any country friendly with or afraid of the PRC, especially if they have an extradition treaty.
The law had been used to ban pro-democracy books and arrest democracy activists in Hong Kong within a week of its passing. Piss off the PRC enough and go on a trip to Thailand, and you might end up in a Chinese prison for the rest of your life, because article 38 covers any action by any person, no matter where they are and wether or not it was legal where they were. It was illegal in Hong Kong, so you're fair game if you're ever within their legal net.
While the FBI has more power over me day to day, I am not afraid of them arresting me for being a proponent of free speech or democracy. If I was someone who traveled more frequently in those previously mentioned countries, I certainly would be.
Hong Kong is part of China. Obviously going to China when you're a well known dissident is playing with fire. But I don't see what that has to do with banning apps from the app store for regular US users? This isn't actually news. Their are currently European and American citizens under arrest in Turkey, or Saudi Arabia say, has the US taken any Turkish apps from the app store?
Or for that matter has the US currently banned any Russian apps, probably the most notorious country when it comes to cyber-attacks on the US and arresting if not even killing dissidents?
It's a total non-sequitur, it's got nothing to do with security. It's an appeal to the increasingly rabid American population to deflect from covid or the general state of the country. It's the new 9/11. Just start accusing China of random things and hope everything else goes away.
>Hong Kong is part of China. Obviously going to China when you're a well known dissident is playing with fire.
Up until VERY recently, you would have zero reason to fear being a political dissident in Hong Kong. That's kind of what these protests have been about.
For the NSL in specific, the problem is that it's no longer just a 'You can get disappeared in China', but a 'You can get disappeared in a significant portion of Asia on China's behest', because there is now a law that applies to you, even if you're an American citizen, and China has extradition treaties and huge amounts of power to exert political pressure on other countries.
Two months ago, if I was a vocal critic of the PRC, I could travel to Thailand without concern. Today, I cannot.
My point was primarily about your comment of "what is the prc gonna do send assassins?" - being on the PRC's bad side is dangerous in ways that might not be readily apparent, unless you plan to just never travel to many countries.
As for whether or not the app could be a national security threat, we already know social media apps can be used for all sorts of intelligence gathering purposes. Outside of the obvious, social media GPS data has been used to track specific people via interactions with others, even if their phone was not "compromised", it has been used to estimate the number of soldiers stationed at military bases, and it has been used to detect training and other military operations. Not exactly the sort of data you want to hand over to a foreign country.
TikToks data isn't being handed over to a foreign country as they've gone to pretty big pains to separate the Chinese business, which is actually on an entirely distinct app, to the tiktok service precisely for that reason.
And hilariously enough in that GPS case, if I remember correctly the two offenders were Strava and Fitbit, which are American companies, who happened to just throw that information out to the public.
If you're concerned about the safety of Americans the point from the first post still stands, you're more likely to have your elections undermined by Facebook and CA than by the CCP.
> Other countries are equally justified in banning them for the same reason.
Sure, but what happens when all of our social connections to people in other countries are basically cut, or minimized to the point where they're not really fully fledged friendships anymore, somehow more distant than ever?
I think what happens, ultimately, is that war becomes more possible, because otherizing and dehumanizing people becomes much easier.
Governments don't care. We've still had war and conflict even with the internet. Networks like Facebook have made it even easier to otherize and dehumanize people in the same country. I mean, ISIS actively used (and probably still uses) social networks to radicalize and recruit people. Algorithms feed you content that politically aligns with you and they drive you into more exciting and farfetched stuff to get clicks and attention. Social networks are not going to stop a global conflict.
Social media connections with China are already as cut as they can be. (Remember that Tiktok itself is not allowed in China - Chinese users have to use a separate instance of the product named Douyin.)
On that note, this will be tough for people with relatives in China, since they might lose their only way to chat for free.
You also lose a channel for pushing your own propaganda to other countries.
Here’s an idea: what if you forced any app that goes across borders to be open source and implement decentralized encryption of all data? This is a joke of course....
Facebook, on the front end, manipulates what you see just to piss you off and increase "user engagement". On the back end it collects and sells data to anyone with money (see Cambridge Analytica, and whoever else). It is a filthy game, but a different game. They don't filter/block what you say/write, unless you go very extreme with your opinions posts.
To ensure that I am not defending Facebook, it is a filthy company, with filthy management, and filthy agendas. Unfortunately they provide the 1-2-5-10 useful features that have captured some audience that would have otherwise dropped them.
nobody cares really about TikTok, it's childish thing, but amount of data WeChat harvest is ridiculous and it honestly stops Chinese abroad from integrating with locals, if they keep communicating again just with Chinese within WeChat. if they were forced to use proper international apps with E2E encryption they could discuss whatever they want without sacrifing privacy
I see it here, you have local Chinese living in EU still talking in WeChat groups under control of Chinese government which knows every word they talk
You might fairly ask whether or not it is equally foolish for non-US countries to use US services. I think that is also a reasonable question, and deserves reflection.