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Leaked Audio from TikTok Meetings – US User Data Repeatedly Accessed from China (buzzfeednews.com)
51 points by cwwc on June 17, 2022 | hide | past | favorite | 12 comments



TikTok is a Chinese spy platform. It was found to be snarfing the clipboard once a second. It was found to be opening reverse proxies to China. It’s an excellent, unparalleled tool to groom and compromise people, most especially children of high value targets. The Chinese and their allies here in the US must be given some props, stopping Trump from banning it was extremely good for China and I would expect all who contributed to the effort to stop its ban have already been rewarded generously.

Hats off to China. THIS is how you conduct warfare in the post-nuclear age.


>It’s an excellent, unparalleled tool to groom and compromise people, most especially children of high value targets.

Two earnest Qs: 1) is there any evidence of that? 2) wouldn't this concern apply to any network where private data is stored? E.g. Were Tim Cook so inclined to be a blackmailer (which I have no reason to think he or Apple is), it seems like he would have access to tons of compromising data on US citizens. Even a successfully enforced requirement to mandate in-country storage that is inaccessible elsewhere seems insufficient to prevent the kind of bad actors you're concerned about, no?


100%. Trump should have banned TikTok, and Biden should do it now. Do not wait. Sanction ByteDance.

While we're at it -- kill Grindr too. It was sold off for similar reasons, but it should have been killed long ago.


I can't say I'm surprised. I had always expected that TikTok was a Chinese intelligence operation designed to mass profile young Americans for future use in political manipulation.


[flagged]


BuzzFeed != BuzzFeedNews, their investigative journalism wing which has broken a number of huge stories. [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BuzzFeed_News#Notable_stories


The investigative part of Buzzfeed is a very reliable award-winning media.


well apparently tiktok felt the need to respond today:

https://newsroom.tiktok.com/en-us/delivering-on-our-us-data-...


There's an archived version of that page https://web.archive.org/web/20220617155011/https://newsroom.... that was published 40 minutes before the Buzzfeed News article. (15:50 UTC vs. 12:31 p.m. ET)

Rather unlikely that the one published earlier is actually a response to the one published later.


>buzzfeed is not a trustable source the US is doing much worse

One does not follow from the other.

That said, yes, and? It seems like pointless whataboutism. If other countries are concerned about US access to their data, as the US seems to be with TikTok, they'd be well justified to take similar efforts to try to localize resident's data storage. Do you find it common for people to suggest otherwise?


i understand that's not what you like to hear, but here we go agane

--

i'm not suggesting nor question whether it is good or bad, or what they should do my sole purpose is to put things into perspective

the question here is not where the data should be hosted, the question is who can have access to that data

if it was where, for data sovereignty, a bill and the problem is solved

but here, they make it linger, because the motive is not about any of that, TikTok's user data is useless, the motive is to weaken and picture China as the evil, manipulate the public opinion to get favors whenever things are becoming dirty in SEA

it's the same tactics the USA did since their birth, and it predates the existence of "America"

what's the point if everything is always one sided, and nobody gets to question the way the world is rotating?

in apocalypse we find life


This account has a history of this mode of low-quality commenting.


that's not because you don't understand that it is "low quality commenting"

you are bad at geopolitics




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