>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.
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.