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Comment by threeseed | Hacker News Reader

TikTok collects a lot of user data:

Geolocation data, including: longitude, latitude, and time zone

Device information, including: Android ID, International Mobile Equipment Identity (IMEI), Address Book Access, Device carrier region, Device region, Device type, Device OS version, Device language, Device connection type, and Mobile network code

App information, including: App name

https://www.proofpoint.com/au/corporate-blog/post/understand...

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Should american apps be therefore banned by the other countries? I'm talking about american apps as the issue here is china vs usa, otherwise any other country that produces apps is probably guilty of the same collection.

1) Most non-Chinese apps are already banned in China.

2) The world trusts US companies because unlike China the US is not a dictatorship, has a functioning, independent judiciary and generally abides by international law. So there is a far greater level of trust there because there are legal mechanisms to prevent breaches.

> The world trusts US companies because unlike China the US is not a dictatorship, has a functioning, independent judiciary and generally abides by international law.

I feel like this always get short shrift in whataboutism discussions.

In China, everything is by law in service and subordinate to the Party.

In the US, not.

That seems like a pretty big difference.

This seems to ignore the Snowden revelations. I don't think most of the world trusts US companies qualitatively more than they trust Chinese companies for these kinds of apps.

Also, the discussion was about national security and you are giving different arguments here. How is this related to national security?

Is this really true? You do not think China's actions in Hong Kong has put more doubts into China's policy on human rights compared to United States?

If you tell me you believe they are equal, I'll take your word for it. While the United States has plenty of flaws, I think they are still far more trusted when it comes to human rights.

Maybe an unpopular point of view, but from where I'm standing, it's sure starting to look scarily like one.

“The world trusts US companies” is definitely not true in the sense we are talking about.

Legal mechanisms exist everywhere and can be broken if not by selective enforcement but also by the voters.

It takes years and significant effort to overturn laws in most countries.

In China they can do it anytime Xi Jinping snaps his fingers.

That's why countries do not trust China.

You discount how easily and quickly it is for countries (e.g. the US) to go full retard, when the evidence is literally right in your face. That's what a blind ideologue looks like, folks.

Then isn't it strange that TikTok and Huawei have issues in US (where laws "cannot be overturned") but not in China?

1) it doesn’t matter what other countries without our constitutional protections do.

None of that information even remotely threatens national security outside of the military.

If the military is doing things that civilians commonly do then maybe, you know, they should stop that.

Might want to read up on what happened with Strava:

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-42853072

And the military has already acknowledged that they have a problem with the rampant use of private devices. So any app that harvests a lot of real-time location data can be a problem.

Also if I was the Chinese government I absolutely would be analysing audio/video and capturing contacts for any phones at known military GPS locations.

First of all, you didn’t mention anything about the military in your first post. So maybe you should read up on how to make a point comprehensively before telling somebody else to read up on something. The information that you mentioned, by itself, does not affect national security. And obviously, any sort of information that one can gather on the military is helpful to the enemy. That’s why they don’t do all sorts of things that civilians commonly do.

Anyway, maybe ban the military from installing apps or using civilian phones if it’s a problem??

That article you linked to was not even about TikTock it was about some other app. So removing TikTock is not going to fix the problem.

Sure. And TikTok isn’t going to be used by China to send commandos into the US to kill you. China isn’t going to harm you with TikTok. US national security is not threatened by Americans using TikTok.

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