About 59% of Americans say TikTok a threat to the national security of the United States, according to a new survey of U.S. adults.
Eighty one percent of Americans think God will save them, so why would you care about any of their other opinions?
Kinda proud I’ve never installed/used Tiktok ¯_(ツ)_/¯.
If you’re not involved in anything sensitive then the CCP could give two shits about you. Also if you’ve ever used any META product they already have your info. Zuckerberg has been called out for selling data to the Chinese government multiple times over the last decade.
Yeah, I’m not involved in anything like that, but coming from a country heavily manipulated by the CCP, I simply choose not to install TikTok or anything directly related to them (on my own choice). I once tried to apply for a Hong Kong visa at a Chinese embassy in the US. Ever since then, I’ve been receiving hundreds of Chinese calls and random Chinese messages out of nowhere. It’s been 3 years -__-, I still can’t figure out ways to get my number off of their lists, freaking ridiculous.
Yeah I mean, I downloaded my reddit data and uh… wow. I was surprised to see how much you could learn about someone when it’s all bundled up like that 👀
Which is why I find the whole banning TikTok concept absurd.
It’s picking one easy scapegoat company to rally around, completely ignores the thousands upon thousands of other applications that collect data on us.
It’s not security, it’s security theater. It’s lazy and designed to distract us. It’s to keep us from not asking questions about any company’s practices that might hurt someone politically or financially.
We don’t need to ban TikTok. We need to ban Tik Tok and thousands of others like it. We need to have real conversations and put forth real solutions with regards to privacy, globally. It won’t happen though. Because it’s going to cost somebody money.
You keep trying and failing to ban all social media while China continues to gain a foothold under the current unchanged rules. We’ll all be doing on the front lines of the next world war but at least in the end you can hold your head up high and say that it was worth it to take a stand.
It’s like saying that you shouldn’t ban murder because all weapons should be banned. How they use it matters.
In that analogy Facebook has been murdering people for a decade but we refuse to do anything about it.
In that analogy, Facebook is armed but not even brandishing. People aren’t doing anything because Facebook isn’t waving their weapon around and threatening their families but instead was using their knives to cut up more food to sell you. Sorry, I’ll use a more clear analogy next time.
We are talking about the preparation of the battlefield for the next conflict. It is pretty well documented in cyber warfare circles. conflicts are won and lost before they are fought. conflicts are mitigated when the chances of success are lower.
Facebook has been giving data to the CCP for over a decade. If that’s the big bad, then that’s it. It doesn’t matter who owns the company. If you want to talk about battlefield shaping I can speak to that. I was in the military. When comes down to it I don’t care how the minefield got breached. It’s breached and there’s a hole that can be exploited. I don’t care if company A did it or company B.
There’s giving data through API, and then there’s complete access to everything your device sees. It’s the difference between taking a trench and allowing your enemy to build a complete logistical hub behind your lines. It’s an order of magnitude worse.
Have you looked at the permissions Meta requires to run an app on your phone these days?
There is no difference. They’re taking everything.
I don’t use tiktok because it’s bad for me and makes my older phone heat up, but it’s a great app that leads you to your very niche interests if you guide the algorithm to do so - that’s even despite the ‘heating button’ that their employees use to make favoured (creators/corps) content go viral.
