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Comment by orblivion | Hacker News Reader

Sorry if I missed something obvious, but if we're at the point where the U.S. government is even contemplating banning TikTok, how come it's on Google and Apple stores at this point? They seem to be at least somewhat vigilant about spyware etc.

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Apple earns a lot of money from China, so difficult for them to do something which irritates the Chinese government.

Google behaves the same way, even though they have no income from China right now, but I think they are secretly hopefully of dragonfly.

What does dragonfly mean in this context?

The secret google search engine that google planned to launch in China which would comply with the great firewall.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragonfly_(search_engine)

They don't have to ban it on "Chinese Spyware" terms, they could just ban it on normal "spyware" terms. The fact that tiktok is Chinese is incidental, and not necessarily an indictment on all Chinese apps.

That would then create a double standard for all the American Spyware in the app store.

Dragonfly was canned after Google employees revolted. I'd be surprised if Google could even get a project like that resourced again without more leaks.

I think it might have been canned due to revenue implications more than employee revolt. Google doesn't want to end up in a situation where dragonfly doesn't earn much money, causes constant headache from the Chinese government, and gives ammunition to both left and right wing politicians to use it as an argument against Google on everything.

I think enough money can buy silence from a lot of people, plus it's clear google already has the tech, as they show a banner on every thing relating to covid (search results, YouTube) and do a quite impressive job at that. So I guess they can just tweak it for dragonfly, or even get their Chinese employees to do the tweak, since they already hire in China.

Once the growth slows, companies look for alternative revenue sources, like Apple is doing with services. The problem is that google has shown itself to be wildly incompetent at non engineering parts of their businesses other than search. e.g, Google cloud might be the only cloud to raise prices for anything so far(Google Kubernetes Engine price update)

It will be interesting to see what they choose. I don't think dragonfly can make them much money anyways, since Baidu too isn't making a lot of money in China.(When compared to how much Google makes in the US). I guess mostly due to closed mini app ecosystem on wechat, and probably a smaller internet eco system outside wechat.

China is Apple's second largest market. They are not removing it from the US App Store unless they are legally obligated to do so.

They have no reason to add wood to that fire. Apple's best bet right now with this particular issue is to play neutrality.

This answer makes sense, thank you.

> China is Apple's second largest market.

At least for now. It's important to note that the Chinese government has a very strong campaign against American phones (and it's working), as backlash against the US for banning Huawei.

This is also why Apple is even less likely to do anything to further upset the CCP, not to mention they manufacture the bulk of their products there. But if Apple loses enough market share and/or moves enough production out of China, then they might change their tune as well.

> China is Apple's second largest market. They are not removing it from the US App Store unless they are legally obligated to do so.

That's true. However Apple's hands are tied here due to this and they always bend to the side of China. Due to this, they are still being accused of hypocrisy.

From what I read, I think the issue is people keep claiming it does all this various "spyware" stuff, when it sounds like it's doing nothing that any other app could do, given the (what appear to be) lax permissions of android/ios.

If people are so worried about what tiktok can be gathering outside of the app, that is a problem for apple & google.

For this, I think it's 100% overblown what people think tiktok is doing. It just doesn't make sense. If it was really some kind of massive spyware, I agree apple/google would be all over this.. but they aren't.

This comes down to a lack of trust in China obviously, and I don't think there's anything really more concrete than that.

This also makes sense (in addition to another answer that I said made sense). I didn't look much into the spyware scandals. "This app isn't any more spyware than many other popular, accepted apps, and people focused in on this app and made a big deal of it" is believable to me because I've seen it before.

Yep, I think you're right. Apple needs to put permissions on things like the clipboard for all apps. I certainly don't support the CCP, but extending that distrust to TikTok is somewhat illogical when there is no good evidence of TikTok doing anything that other apps don't do.

It was the whole read write access that was a massive violation of apple and googles store policy.

It can upload and download whatever to your phone.

No other app is even close to allowed that.

Can you please point to any evidence or source? I've never heard of this happening (beyond what every other app can do in terms of downloading and uploading data) and the wording isn't clear as to what exactly you mean.

>It can upload and download whatever to your phone.

>No other app is even close to allowed that.

So an app that is on like a billions people phone is knowingly doing things against google & apples app store policy.. yet they choose to let one of the largest apps exploit them?

If you can read the above and not see why there is a pretty large obvious logic flaw then it's not even worth attempting to convince you otherwise...

China is just US public enemy #1 because it's a geopolitical and economic threat. The US doesn't want to export data to them for free. It's funny America sometimes gives China flak for banning Google/FB/etc because they wanted to control their data (on top of national security stuff but I think the data is just important). And now the US is doing the same.

This wasn't just the clipboard thing though. Some more elaboration:

https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/fxgi06/not_new_news...

This is an anonymous Reddit comment that provides zero evidence.

>Sorry if I missed something obvious

The fact that they aren't doing anything that FB isn't already doing. The beef the USG has is that the CCP will have access to the data, not the fact that they are collecting the data at all.

The privacy hawks have been warning about this exact situation and people are now "surprised" when someone gets access to the data that they might not like.

Because Google and Apple are private entities, and they're not beholden to the government's whims. They have relationships with citizens, who may not necessarily agree with the governments' assertions. And because the government is forced to follow a set of rules for enacting laws. Talk isn't enough to enforce will.

I think a better question to ask is, under what authority is the US government talking about banning TikTok? If there are clear security issues, or TikTok or the people running it are in violation of some US law, the onus is on the government to prove it. I haven't seen any proof of this, just a lot of hearsay.

I would like to know what US laws TikTok has violated first.

Yeah, not to defend Tik-Tok, China, or spyware in general, but it's ironic that nobody has a problem with Google, Facebook, and other American companies tracking everything people do, but when a Chinese company starts doing it, it's suddenly a big problem.

But then again, TikTok probably doesn't answer their subpoenas...

Yeah the difference is that if FB violates my rights, I have some recourse. Not so if its the CCP.

What recourse do you mean, exactly?

One can successfully sue Facebook, etc. for violating privacy rights -

https://techcrunch.com/2020/01/29/facebook-will-pay-550-mill...

That's great for Illinois citizens. Federal legislators are bought off to prevent this from happening nationally.

Facebook had net income over $60 billion dollars in the 5 years that lawsuit was going on.

At that rate they can continue violating people's rights indefinitely, so I really don't see the difference.

The question was only "what" recourse there was (and the answer - some), not whether said recourse fixed the issue entirely, nor even whether it is effective.

The difference between "some" recourse and "no" recourse is not insignificant. It is exponentially harder to move the needle from "no recourse" to "some" than it is from "some" to "more."

There's nothing complicated or unusual about it. It's not ironic either.

China is increasingly an adversary to the US. That context is going to get a lot worse this decade. TikTok is owned by a Chinese company and ultimately must (and will) answer to China. Facebook, Google, et al. are of course American companies.

For a nation, whether Facebook concerns you as much as TikTok depends largely on which side you're on (or if you have a side at all).

The world is going to be aggressively bifurcated, US-USSR style, going forward. There will be the liberal side and the China side. China's direction is fundamentally opposed to the major liberal nations, what they commonly believe in and how their systems operate. That conflict and incompatibility will get worse as China's behavior continues to get worse.

Unfortunately, the so-called "liberal side" is going for all the tools like censorship and banning, state interference in the corporate sector, and more that it berates the other side about, so there is no moral case here, just pure tribalism. Actually the "liberal side" invented all these tools but has had a vastly better propaganda machine and hides under the cover of due process and procedural justice that never seem to deliver actual justice to the people most in need of it. I'm glad the world is getting to see the naked body of the "liberal side" under Trump.

Regardless (I both agree partially yet think you’re omitting major differences here), you still live somewhere. When states are adversaries, that means there are consequences to being involved with the other state.

Does the government have to go through judicial approval to get apps banned from its devices?

Our laws are woefully out of date to account for the technological innovation that has happened in the last, even, decade.

Of course, this is a fact that everyone here is perfectly willing to admit when it comes to topics that are easy to take the "right" side on, like privacy, encryption, and net neutrality. When the topic gets more contentious, like allowing the ability for another country to collect data on the citizens of the US, its not so clear.

But, the core reasoning behind the issues are the same: we don't have the legal precedent to say that they're breaking the law. This is how new laws are made: we get executive or judicial precedent, this leads to a new law, and now they're breaking it. The law is not set in stone, and allowing applications like TikTok to exist simply because they're not breaking any existing laws is not the kind of conversation any decision makers are having right now, for the better.

Privacy incursions have been made by data brokers for 50 years. There's been plenty of time to legislate privacy. The people controlling Congress won't let it happen.

> if we're at the point where the U.S. government is even contemplating banning TikTok, how come it's on Google and Apple stores at this point?

Because the US Government, Google, and Apple share neither leadership nor most strategic goals.

Any tracking that TikTok is doing likely doesn't violate the terms of the Google/Apple stores. So removing it from the stores would just be straight up censorship.

Note: I'm not defending TikTok in any way here. I personally believe that nobody should be using it.

1. Because the app stores don't serve a single country.

2. People don't use the app store at the pleasure of the US government.

Forget countries and governments. Don't they serve the users, at least to some extent? Forgetting the political issues, there have been multiple spyware scandals here, right? Or did I get the wrong idea?

Of course these companies have selfish corporate interests, but I've seen both of these companies show at least _some_ level of care for their users. Even if it's part of keeping up appearances out of concern for their corporate interests.

At this point, no single government has provided a verifiable reason why Tik tok should be banned. if there were verifiable claims, you think Apple and Google will conveniently let them be in their app stores and take the heat for it?

What benefit would they get?

> 1. Because the app stores don't serve a single country.

There are country-specific Apple app stores and apps that are only available in some countries

therefore, see point 2.

I doubt the government even has the right to ban an app. If so, could they also ban a website?

Yes, if the owner or organization is found to be breaking the law. Malicious domains are seized every day. Here [1] is one of the most recent examples. Some people try to evade this [2] with varying degrees of success.

[1] - https://www.msn.com/EN-US/news/technology/microsoft-secretly...

[2] - https://torrentfreak.com/how-to-stop-domain-names-being-seiz...

And if the domains are registered out of the country?

It's less about where you register and more about who is managing the root servers you are using. The article I linked touches on that a little bit.

Perhaps Google and Apple's standard for evidence is higher than the US government's.

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