U.S. looking at banning Chinese social media apps, including TikTok
reuters.com
reuters.com
You might fairly ask whether or not it is equally foolish for non-US countries to use US services. I think that is also a reasonable question, and deserves reflection.
Major difference between USA, UK, France, Spain, Sweden etc. Vs Russia, Iran, China, Turkey, North Korea is that you end up in a cell, never to be seen again, tortured for your opinions.
I do believe that there are some scountries like India, Pakistan a a couple of others that play in both courts. Semi democratic and semi dictatorial, at the same time..
No, they will definitely not think. Govs/politicians/people in places of power are so arrogant that they will continue the BAU. They will pass another stricter "patriot act/snooper charter", they will issue a tougher gag order, and they will continue as they already do. They will increse the penalties for violators, but they will not stop. The "beast" has a hungry mouth, and it needs that info.
When was the last time we saw someone with power just turning the volume down? Never. Only if they get a hard slap in their faces, they pause for a minute, then they change/re-org and continue in a new method/under new legislation, and life goes on.
Even in an ideal (human) society (I like to use the "Star Trek TNG" in my examples), someone(s) has absolute power into reading private encrypted messages, and we just see a wise Jean-Luc (Sir Patrick Stewart) that does not abuse his right/privilege. But he does have the access.
You are dealing in absolutes. Let me put is way. In dictatorship non-free spy hungry US the cost of making a request to a private company for a government official is much much higher than the same request in for example China.
Because of checks and balances and more or less working elections and free press and now the free internet.
When request is harder to make, the government makes fewer requests, that’s it.
After what has happened to Snowden and Assange? I hope the leakers share your blind optimism. Snowden literally had to flee to Russia, of all the countries in the world, for political asylum.
Excuse me? I think we've all seen the Snowden and other leaks that essentially prove that all US companies have no problem handing over direct access to the US government.
Are we talking about freedom of speech? I 100% agree.
Otherwise, I don't think Google is a good example. There are actually many bad cases among US and EU companies. Just consider a few blow ups that we had with Google (e.g. Street view), Cicso (the issue with NSA), RSA (also the story about NSA), Facebook scandals, Crypto AG, Gemalto SIM cards, and etc.
Are they less evil or more transparent? I don't think so. It's the system that's more transparent in the West not companies. So when something leaks it's more likely that we are informed and it will blow up.
If you want to link everything to national security, then obviously domestic services are right choices. But, I'm still against banning and blocking other services. It's just against how I like the world to look like. It also sets a bad standard for other countries to inherit it. You don't want to disconnect the world more than it's now. History shows that it has bad consequences no matter where you are standing.
I think the right move would be setting good data protection laws (e.g. GDPR), and educating people about data privacy and help them to understand all the risks that are involved.
Kind of. But also more transparent western system makes private companies behave to avoid making the front page in the next scandal.
> Are we talking about freedom of speech?
We are talking about the level of public understanding of what’s going on inside the company. What data the company is collecting and where it sends it for example. (Please, note the transparency is not binary: we don’t know everything about Google, but we know much more about Google internals than about ByteDance).
It's a fair sentiment (and held by others as well on this thread), but IMHO there's no equivalence. In democracies, violence against their own people (or others) will invite opposition from their citizens - while in China people won't even know what's going on.
The consequences are stark - just last week 7 million people lost the liberties they enjoyed. What's a comparable loss due to US snooping?
The list of interventions in foreign countries by the US is very very long ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_interventions_by_the_U... ), although not all of them are unwelcome or unwarranted. So is the list of people killed by the US. According to their own words "We Kill People Based on Metadata". (e.g., https://abcnews.go.com/blogs/headlines/2014/05/ex-nsa-chief-... )
My phone number and email address spread to many more American marketing lists than European ones, even though I rarely visit. Many of my Facebook ads result from my yearly visit to American cities. I just can't trust American businesses to use my data for the intended purpose only.
In that one comment, you have explained everything anyone needs to know as to why most of the tech innovation originates in the US and not from within Europe, and also why this situation is probably never going to change.
Sure, America does a lot of shady stuff, but the situation in China is just way worse in pretty much every way imaginable.
I guess, in general, within chinas sphere of influence you are better off having the us have your data and the other way around (e.g., ending up in a chinese prison is 'unlikely' while in europe the same way it's unlikely that ending on an american nofly list or in guantanamo is unlikely while in china). The countries inbetween or people traveling a lot would be more interesting.
Unfortunately, the most likely scenario is that everyone gets the data.
edit: I put "risk analysis" in quotes, because it doesn't feel like the right word for this hypothetical thing.
This interference with the free market is about politics, not security.
Leaving aside mechanisms and policies, this is not about seeing videos, this is about the invasive amount of information TikTok collects from devices it runs on.
But it isn't about you. We already know that social media can be, and is, used to track details by nation states on all sorts of things, from the movement of individuals of interest, as well as things such as estimating the population of military bases, discovering military operations, etc.
A foreign government having access to all of that data for a huge portion of the population is 100% a national security risk.
This level of paranoia looks more like the Soviet Union[1] than it does like a free country.
[1] Where you couldn't even buy a map, because heaven forbid, foreign spies might use them to compromise... National security. They might learn the distances between the army base, and the hospital, and then who knows what diabolical plot they may hatch?
A) Your neighbor's laptop is partially compromised, and part of what is obtained is a list of APs with which it has been associated.
B) Your phone has TikTok installed, and part of what is obtained is your location and the available APs (while you're using the app, only).
C) You use your phone to view TikTok videos in the middle of the night, at home.
Because of B+C, the foreign actor now knows where you live (via location services) and the wireless APs nearby. Because of A, they know where your neighbor's laptop has associated. Taken together, they now have a reasonable level of confidence where your neighbor lives even though they have never installed TikTok.
And if they want to know where my neighbour lives, they could just consult a... Land deed registry. Or their resume.
Or... Run a credit check on them. That last one will also give personal information at a level of fidelity right down to the number of nose hairs that they plucked this morning.
But let's cycle back to that. How does knowing my neighbour's address compromise national security? Am I compromising national security by telling you that John Leslie lives in Apt 341 on my floor? Even if he works for the Air Force?
Keep in mind - the man has to live somewhere. What relevance of note does where he lives in particular have to a nation state?
If this is the best argument that can be made, then national security is safe as houses.
Oh you're reading this too literally. When the US government says 'national security issue' what it means is: they want to.
That's it. The list of subjects the US has deemed "National security" over the years to get what it wants is both long and broad.
Had TikTok originated in the US and been bought by a foreign company, The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States could have ordered the foreign company to divest itself of that asset. An example was Grindr being purchased by Kunlun Tech, and CFIUS deciding that this wasn't allowable. --The idea being that the type of data Grindr has could pose national security issues (due to government employees or elected officials being blackmailed, not that Grindr has ever been known for any form of security).
With TikTok, however, it seems to be more about posturing. I'm not sure what legal mechanism they could really use to force the app to be blocked.
What remains to be seen is if said law would be "legal" (as in: not in direct conflict with the constitution).
However, if this were to happen, it would almost certainly be under national security law, which has pretty far reaching powers for this sort of thing. Knowing how much the app spies on you, and knowing that they are ultimately under control by the Chinese government, there's a very strong case to be made.
> the constitution to begin with.
Would that be this foreign corporation that is incorporated in the checks notes State of California?
https://businesssearch.sos.ca.gov/Document/RetrievePDF?Id=03...
(Yes, I know this is a company owned by the Beijing based ByteDance but that’s not immediately disqualifying of this US corporation run under US law being able to defend itself in a US court system as any other US company would.)
Having set up a corporation on US soil does not grant free pass to a foreign government to spy on US citizens.
https://appleinsider.com/articles/20/07/02/apple-google-comp...
Apple also removed a bunch of games on its Chinese app store because of new policies by the Chinese government.
https://www.theverge.com/2020/6/22/21298811/apple-chinese-ap...
on Android at least cirvumenting the Google Play store is quite feasible, see Fortnite most prominently.
it may work only on iOS
Even with VPN people were not able to bypass ban.
The usual reason for tit-for-tat trade restrictions is to punish the original restrictions and try to coerce the other side back to a free trade position. That can't happen in this case, the CCP will never allow foreign social media in China, so it would end up with a permanent mutual ban.
Either we believe that freedom of communication is a paramount principle that should be protected, or we don't and we think it's ok to interfere with it for 'national interest' reasons. Our national interest reasons might differ from theirs, but we'd still be validating that banning social media is an acceptable step to take depending on the circumstances. I realise this poses a problem because letting Chinese social media into our markets creates risks but if they operate in our markets they have to follow our laws and our standards. Playing the game their way by their rules is a losing strategy. We need to get a lot more creative on this.
Think back to 1999-- could you imagine if China had made Napster, the USA would block your access to download and use it? We would all just laugh at how easy it would be to get around it
With TikTok I get bad choreography.
I don't see a lot of people trying to get around firewalls for that.
Let's say the US "bans" TikTok. Younger users around the country then install various VPN clients and learn a bit about security. This in turns leads to an overall more environment for US security services to perform mass surveillance.
That's true, but the start of "they block our apps we should block all of them" seems to weirdly be china, but the argument is usually presented as a general obvious conclusion. I am very much in favor of banning apps that violate local laws and unfortunately that's what china does. So it's more the laws I don't like, not the ban in general. But this prevents me from accepting those bans (edit: banning them because they are chinese) in my (non-us) country.
> The CCP can't complain to get a taste of their own medicine here.
Sure they can. Everyone regularly complains about receiving their own medicine, including china and the us. But that's not the point.
The point is holding yourself, your nation and other nations to your actual standards, not to some arbitrary standards of others. I want my government to enact regulation that benefits the citizens, such as privacy regulations, and enforce it, I don't want them to use nebulous national security regulation to do whatever they want.
If possible, it should be clear what the requirements are so people can fulfil it. I really dislike arbitrarily enforceable laws where possibly everyone is in violation.
I do agree with that, these kind of retaliation laws have to be codified and be precised. But that's not something uncommon outside of tech, countries will implement trade sanctions if they also face trade sanctions from other markets. Banning apps owned by the CCP seems a fair approach regarding on how they behave.
And decisions like this do help to hurt the CCP, it reduces the reach of Chinese tech companies.
In fact ByteDance already has blockbuster app killed by Chinese authorities.
And as the private investors, well, they will soon learn how the CCP works...
If someone made a villainous fu manchu character people would rightly protest it as intolerable. Yet when we actually instrument official government policy based on the same sentiments that the character is based on nobody even reaches for the pearls to clutch.
Once again, fiction and symbols are somehow more important to the political imagination than material reality.
Asian stereotypes in media is pretty well tolerated.
If something like this was made today and the people somehow ended up in court over it, I'd probably think "well, they saw that coming"
TikTok appears to be the first China technology media company, that can actually make a dent in the universe.
It wasn’t WeChat from Tencent. Nor anything from Alibaba; I don’t think they’re in the media space. Nor search from Baidu. Nor Sina Weibo for tweets.
I can’t think of any other Chinese media company, that can actually make an impact, on the world, just yet.
Perhaps the USA government is trying to kill this fledgling company, while it’s still small. It still hasn’t reached the prevalence of Facebook or YouTube or Twitter yet.
The funny thing is, for a while, TikTok was trying to discourage political content. Just stick to fun dance moves. They tried to tell their users to keep that vile political stuff to Twitter and Facebook; and then, they got criticized for censorship. LOL.
And given how bad TikTok is with user data (mostly minors too), I don't see how banning it would be a bad thing.
There will be American or western clones within days that replace it.
If even the US starts openly blocking apps because they think it would be better for a local competitor to fill this part of the market it should be a wakeup call for the EU.
This by itself is not compelling evidence.
Case in point, almost all apps on my Android phone snoops on my "personal information"; Google literally knows where I am all the time; Facebook SDK snoops on the apps I use, and justify the collection of the data with "better personalization of services"; WhatsApp (owned by Facebook) vacuuming contacts off my phone; LinkedIn snoops on my clipboard etc.
The filing also makes these claims regarding video uploads:
>Once TikTok users click the “next” button, but before they click either the “save” or “post” buttons, their videos are transferred from their devices to the following domain owned and controlled by Defendants: [...]
Not very damning.
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In the end, the concern is solely that the Chinese government may have access to the data, or may be able to upload exploits to users. This may be a reasonable fear. But people need to stop pretending TikTok's data collection is somehow worse than that of any other data-hoarding apps (Snapchat, Facebook, etc).
It certainly seems like the world is bifurcating between FAANG and BATH for that reason.
Delisting from AppStore? Or ask ISP to ban tiktok domains? Or both?
Is TikTok doing revenue sharing with the content creator?
If so, then this ban is just going to smack these American end users in the face.
Chinese spying is like 10000 times worse in practice.
But in theory, when dealing in absolutes, there is no difference, both are spies.
Otherwise it is just ZOG theory.
Also, the statement about “being in bed” is very vague and non informative.
Yes, both countries are definitely spying on people via social media apps. But what they're using it for is different.
I'm not here to argue the Chinese government is better than the US one. It's absolutely and unquestionably worse.
But from a perspective in Europe they're both foreign governments that I have no say in and that are not here for my best interest.
I don't think this is entirely accurate...
Not always about ads. Remember Cambridge Analytica data scandal.
https://www.foxnews.com/media/mike-pompeo-tik-tok-china-comm...
Covering a wide range of topics. Mostly it sounded like Pompeo getting ready for the upcoming election.
Am I missing something here? What are you referencing? I'm not sure I understand.
But Americans largely gave up that seperation of power after 9/11 and executive power hasn't stopped expanding since then. It's perpetually an 'emergency'.
With this and the Huawei stuff, battling over advanced control over private networks for surveillance purposes, is a natural outcome of significantly increasing the power and influence of intelligence community. The kind of people who are naturally hyper-paranoid and see everything through a geopolitical risk lense. Which is helpful for a niche limited role but is ripe for abuse when their mandates expand.
Personally I have no problem with people killing themselves with fentanyl, meth or whatever. Knock yourself out. State resources are better spent doing other things. US drug war caused more misery then drugs and most of the police issues are directly related to laws on drugs they are told to enforce.
To ensure that I am not defending Facebook, it is a filthy company, with filthy management, and filthy agendas. Unfortunately they provide the 1-2-5-10 useful features that have captured some audience that would have otherwise dropped them.
The problem is this opens a whole new can of worms regarding Facebook and other American social media. Other countries are equally justified in banning them for the same reason.
But it's A-ok when NSA powered/hijacked/collaborated U.S. social media companies do the same to the rest of the world?
I'm pretty sure PRISM didn't just get dismantled after Snowden.
>Why even bother sending spies to another country and making plans for infiltration when you can get them to download a full spying suite under the guise of social media?
Because espionage involves more than just digging up information that is voluntarily put out on social media? I mean if you upload the blueprint of a stealth fighter onto TikTok/Dropbox/Instagram/whatever the fault is yours don't you think?
Espionage isn't just uploading blueprints. That's 1950s comic book stuff. It's copying users' clipboards, recording conversations, and tracking locations and gathering data from those around you.
I really doubt criticism of Covid-19 handling lands you in jail in US. https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nytimes.com/2020/07/06/worl...
Yes you can't because Americans aren't subject to Chinese law. What do you think is going to happen, the CCP send their best assassin over to get you because they didn't like your cat video?
You've got more to fear from the FBI trying to get into your iphone if they suspect you of a crime than a foreign government that doesn't have any jurisdiction over you.
this is just plain old populism and sinophobia and has nothing to do with privacy
China certainly disagrees with you. Just look at the new Hong Kong NSL - it claims jurisdiction over every person on earth for offenses defined to vaguely as to be meaningless. This obviously has horrific effects for the people in Hong Kong - protesters are already being threatened as being national security threats for having a protest where they did nothing but stand still and hold up white paper - but also chilling effects for anyone who might ever visit Hong Kong, the PRC, or any country friendly with or afraid of the PRC, especially if they have an extradition treaty.
The law had been used to ban pro-democracy books and arrest democracy activists in Hong Kong within a week of its passing. Piss off the PRC enough and go on a trip to Thailand, and you might end up in a Chinese prison for the rest of your life, because article 38 covers any action by any person, no matter where they are and wether or not it was legal where they were. It was illegal in Hong Kong, so you're fair game if you're ever within their legal net.
While the FBI has more power over me day to day, I am not afraid of them arresting me for being a proponent of free speech or democracy. If I was someone who traveled more frequently in those previously mentioned countries, I certainly would be.
Or for that matter has the US currently banned any Russian apps, probably the most notorious country when it comes to cyber-attacks on the US and arresting if not even killing dissidents?
It's a total non-sequitur, it's got nothing to do with security. It's an appeal to the increasingly rabid American population to deflect from covid or the general state of the country. It's the new 9/11. Just start accusing China of random things and hope everything else goes away.
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.
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.
Sure, but what happens when all of our social connections to people in other countries are basically cut, or minimized to the point where they're not really fully fledged friendships anymore, somehow more distant than ever?
I think what happens, ultimately, is that war becomes more possible, because otherizing and dehumanizing people becomes much easier.
Even Facebook itself isn't safe.
You also lose a channel for pushing your own propaganda to other countries.
Here’s an idea: what if you forced any app that goes across borders to be open source and implement decentralized encryption of all data? This is a joke of course....
nobody cares really about TikTok, it's childish thing, but amount of data WeChat harvest is ridiculous and it honestly stops Chinese abroad from integrating with locals, if they keep communicating again just with Chinese within WeChat. if they were forced to use proper international apps with E2E encryption they could discuss whatever they want without sacrifing privacy
I see it here, you have local Chinese living in EU still talking in WeChat groups under control of Chinese government which knows every word they talk