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Comment by numair | Hacker News Reader

Most of the anti-TikTok comments that have emerged recently are beyond hysterical. We are arguing about China using this app as a primary nexus of intelligence gathering, in a world where they already have the US government’s entire OPM database?[1]

A lot of apps are doing the stupid clipboard detection thing. As others have commented, there’s reasons for this that range from spam detection to link shortening. It’s lousy, I agree, but this has been a very common thing in a pre-iOS 14 world.

1: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Personnel_Manageme...

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>In June 2015, the United States Office of Personnel Management (OPM) announced that it had been the target of a data breach targeting the records of as many as four million people

I'm pretty sure that tiktok has more than 4M users. I guess you can argue that OPM has more % of "high value" users compared to tiktok, but it's also 5 years out of date and contains different sets of data entirely. OPM data doesn't have your minute-by-minute location history and clipboard history, for instance.

The OPM database was a force multiplier, not a direct source of valuable data.

What it allows the Chinese government to do is filter any other source of data (such as TikTok) and exclude anyone in the US who doesn't have a security clearance. You then have vastly less raw intelligence to sift and try to find the accidental video someone posted with a whiteboard full of secrets in the background.

Intelligence gathering with OPM kind of leaks is passive activity, which can potentially be used for leverage.

Platforms like TikTok are active propaganda tools already, and can be used to shape discourse in democracies.

It is a major concern whether such tools are owned by foreign governments (tikTok) or private companies who do not need to comply with any regulations(Facebook twitter) etc.

When I was younger I would laugh at those ridiculous "forwards from grandma" about, like, secret Satanic messages embedded in Super Mario. Every kid knew these were nonsense; we just assumed it was a consequence of that generation growing up without technology.

I was wrong. Every generation is equally prone to hysteria. We learn nothing.

whats an OPM database? this?? https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3245162/

Thought the OPM hack was common knowledge, guess not. I added a link!

They'll use whatever data they can get their hands on.

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