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Comment by Barrin92 | Hacker News Reader

banning the usage of WeChat for public officials or national defense companies and so on would make some sense, I fail to see however how TikTok is a security threat. It's just a response to the clash over the border and nothing else, and not really a particularly effective one at that.

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Have you seen any of the recently posted analyses of the TikTok binaries?

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastWeek&page=0&prefix=fal...

Yes, some of them are somewhat hyperbolic like the Apple keyboard thing which was apparently related to some sort of anti-spam feature, but in general that makes TikTok a privacy mess, which is undoubtly true but not really grounds for a national ban on the basis of security. By that logic you'd have to throw half the app store out.

> By that logic you'd have to throw half the app store out.

You almost got it. We do indeed need to make it harder to spy on people. Not doing anything is not the better option right now.

The ban makes perfect sense when you add the current India-China conflict and PRC's National Intelligence Law into the mix.

https://www.lawfareblog.com/beijings-new-national-intelligen...

> not really grounds for a national ban on the basis of security

All Chinese companies are completely at the mercy of CCP. No two ways about it. If tomorrow a War does break out between India and China, then the CCP can utilize these apps to spread propaganda to influence Indian public against the Government. Foreign interference is grounds for strengthening National Security. And this ban is not from the Government alone. Indians have literally been demanding a boycott of Chinese apps and goods for well over a year now! So it is actually the Government which has acted late!

You can read more about it here: https://www.thequint.com/tech-and-auto/tech-news/tiktok-app-...

It is not easy to get an app rating to go down from 4.9/5 to 1.3 within few days on Google Play Store when it has close to 1.5 billion downloads. You can imagine the anger among the Indian public.

Tiktok can be a huge threat because their recommendation algorithms are black box. This makes them capable of controlling how potentially dangerous information is disseminated in the United States, including topics influencing elections.

They have demonstrated their capabilities by their censorship of certain types of people. It's not "it could be a threat" it currently is.

>And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?

If you're concerned about Tiktok influence where most content can be described as attractive young people do nonsense on camera you should be much more worried about Twitter, Facebook, Google, News media, Reddit, etc.

Why not both?

All they need is a directive from the CCP. PRC even has a 'National Intelligence law' in place for that:

https://www.lawfareblog.com/beijings-new-national-intelligen...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23634138

I'm not sure where to draw the line between security and privacy and whether this distinction should be made at all, but: http://archive.is/WYLKa

TL;DR TikTok looks waaaaaay more shady than FB with their Android SDK.

(seems like archive.is is down atm, tried to load via wayback machine, but they don't have this site cached, ugh)

have you ever wondered why China blocks all apps from other countries ?

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