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Comment by mauvehaus | Hacker News Reader

Situations can change, as can our understanding of the situation. What seems benign at one point in time can seem like a bad idea with more information. Revisiting decisions based on new information or a changed situation seems like a hallmark of good governing to me.

Consider Freon. It was legal to use for a long time. With evidence that it's bad for the environment, it's no longer legal for most uses.

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Then make very specific company-agnostic behaviors illegal, like with Freon. They didn't say "we ban company X from making any fridges", it was a general ban. If there's a certain behavior that's problematic (still not sure what specifically you would be referring to here), then ban that, not handpicked companies.

This is the TikTok crap all over again. They want to help national security and user privacy, but instead of banning data collection, they target TikTok specifically, because they know other US owned apps do very similar data collection.

> This is the TikTok crap all over again. They want to help national security and user privacy...

Am I the only one who thinks that TikTok was more about geopolitics concerning US/China and much less about user privacy?

Facebook selling your data to advertisers is annoying. TikTok et al vacuuming up data to be stored by the CCP for things like blackmail[0] is horrifying and basically geopolitical chess moving to give them leverage on things like putting Muslims in detention camps [1]. Treating the two as equivalent is somewhere between intentionally ignorant or acting in bad faith.

[0] - https://www.theepochtimes.com/china-has-a-database-on-americ...

[1] - https://www.msn.com/en-au/news/other/china-confirms-death-of...

> Facebook selling your data to advertisers is annoying.

Facebook selling your data to advertisers is also horrifying. American "businesses" accept foreign investments and money all the time. Nothing stops those same countries from buying data from Facebook. The only difference between that and TikTok is that money is exchanged. It's just as horrifying.

Unlike the CCP, Facebook isn't literally harvesting organs [2] or implanting intelligence assets [3]. Facebook shouldn't be reckless with user data, but when it's users start getting black bagged and having their vital organs removed, then we can compare the two.

Mind you, all the major foreign companies are already banned in China so they can't possibly be involved.

[2] - https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/china-forcefully-harvests...

[3] - https://thediplomat.com/2020/09/two-recent-alleged-episodes-...

> Facebook shouldn't be reckless with user data, but when it's users start getting black bagged and having their vital organs removed, then we can compare the two.

TikTok's association with CCP is horrifying, yes.

Facebook's hands aren't clean either.

There’s levels of clean.

No they just interfer with local politics via lobbying, i.e. buying politicians, i.e foreign agents.

Facebook isn't selling your data. They're selling access to you.

That's an arbitrary line to draw, and really misses the forest for the trees.

It makes little difference in the end if it's a corporation blackmailing and ruining a person's life or a government. Facebook can share your data with whoever they want to, so the government can probably get it anyway. We have no idea who Facebook shares data with, who inside Facebook can see it, etc. Every company claims they have great security and follow best practices, until it's found out that they don't, so taking their word for it that your data is safe is naive.

In both cases the end user is powerless unless they stop using the service altogether.

Um, Advertizing is not the same as blackmail. Not even close.

I don't see how those two things are really any different. Would it be okay if the CCP bought Facebook's data and used that to blackmail people? What if Facebook itself decided it wanted to blackmail people, is that any better? What if China just uses that information to sell to advertisers, is it okay then?

I mean it obviously was, that was kinda my point. If they cared about user privacy they would've passed a user privacy bill instead. I should've phrased it "They pretend to care about national security and user privacy..."

As one youtuber put it, if the CCP wanted to cause chaos in the US, one thing they could do is have an "accidental" data breach and disclosure of every TikTok users private communications. Or like FB use the platform to influence what people see in order to cause unrest. So yes? It's a geopolitical thing and not about user privacy.

Surely the CCP could get better value for $75B rather than burning one of their tech stars to the ground.

A data breach has rarely burned a company to the ground. The other option of using it for direct influence is probably a bigger threat anyway.

> [the CCP could] have an "accidental" data breach and disclosure of every TikTok users private communications. [...] So yes? It's a geopolitical thing and not about user privacy.

That sounds like both.

From an individuals point of view yes. But if the US government cared about our privacy they'd do something about FB, Amazon and Google.

More effectively, they could use tiktok data to blackmail specific people.

If the CCP wanted to cause chaos in the US, they would stop container ships from leaving China bound for North America.

the problem is that unlike chemical compounds, no two companies have exactly identical business models.

banning "specific" behaviors is the exact opposite of what you want, because then companies will rules-lawyer their way around it in the corporate equivalent of "I'm not touching you!"

what you need is strong bans on general patterns of activity such that companies decide it's better not to try and find the exact limit and just stay the hell away from it. The model here is fincen "structuring" - it is illegal to avoid financial controls, and it is illegal to try and find ways to get around the monitoring regimes. If you think you've found a clever way to avoid it, that is itself illegal and they will fuck your shit up.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structuring

It's not a popular sentiment here on HN where many people's salaries depend on pretending not to understand it, but this is what GDPR gets exactly right. There isn't a prohibition on specific usages of data, there is a blanket ban on using private customer data for any purpose that is not directly related to the provision of serve. People pretend not to understand it because they want to keep doing the things that are prohibited but the regulations are actually quite clear and quite simple. Could the service be provided without the use of the data? If no, use it. If it could, don't use it, and don't collect it. That's the bright-line. If you don't attempt to push the limit, structuring style, then you won't get in trouble.

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