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Comment by paulpan | Hacker News Reader

It's sort to sad to see TikTok being forcibly sold off due to geopolitical factors, rather than on more business ones (e.g. competitiveness).

Despite the controversy with its personal data leakage, TikTok has been massively successful and put the established players like Facebook, Twitter and even YouTube on alert. Competition forces companies to improve and just as we need Android to hold iOS accountable, etc TikTok is a good counterbalance to Facebook.

Another dimension is that the tech space is either dominated by U.S. companies or regionally segmented (e.g. Whatsapp in Europe, Wechat in China). TikTok was exciting as a non-U.S. product that grew viral globally. If ByteDance is forced to sell to a U.S. company, then it's back to the status quo.

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On the other hand I think it’s good for governments to face the consequences of their actions. If the Chinese government wants to treat technology as a surveillance mechanism, they shouldn’t be surprised when other countries want to avoid Chinese apps. Similarly, after revelations that the US government was messing with American companies, we lost business in places like Europe.

It is unfortunate that there’s less diversity of competition, but the loss of trust happened for a reason.

The comparison doesn't seem proportional at all. American tech companies were not forced to sell their technology to European investors in order to avoid their apps being banned in Europe. They were just fined.

The obvious comparison is that American tech companies are forced to do almost exactly that in China. The absence of reciprocity is foolishness.

> due to geopolitical factors

They kind of dug themselves in hole with how sketchy the app is

and how sketchy exactly is it?

https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/blog/tiktok-seems-to-b...

https://www.theverge.com/2020/7/3/21312821/linkedin-app-ios-...

This does not seem specific to tiktok at all. Would you jump in on discussions on LinkedIn and claim "Not surprised, given how sketchy LinkedIn is?"

There's not only clipboard issues, this Reddit user did some digging and found some interesting things.

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

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/06/tiktok-and-53-other-...

This article further shows the point I was trying to make: not saying tiktok is in the right here but the media focus on tiktok for the entire article and then tag on the full list of 32 apps towards the end of the article in bullet points.

There's been some vulnerabilities exposed but I think overall "sketchy" can be subjective. https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-ban-us-national-security-...

A recent example is the app was caught reading the user clipboard in iOS 14 beta but a lot of other apps were also caught red handed. The oft-cited national security risk about ByteDance providing user info to Chinese government is a bit overblown, when the NSA has been spying on its own citizens for years...

What I also find interesting is that ByteDance is the only Chinese company to become "popular" in the West for a long time (Alibaba, Baidu, Tencent are all years old now), and I wonder how this moves affects them at home.

Stateside, I'm discouraged to see it's VC firms making bids (according to the article), as then it may become a play on how to flip this to Facebook as they are the only ones actually monetizing social media.

Indeed. Fragmenting is inevitable as software takes over the world.

Countries using foreign products will be more and more wary of espionnage.

Attempts at local data residency are encouraging. Yet they are still a far cry from what is needed.

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