TikTok shares your data more than any other app and it’s unclear where it goes
cnbc.com
cnbc.com
https://app.urlgeni.us/blog/new-research-across-200-ios-apps...
Just a few of the highlights:
Magazine apps had the highest number of total network contacts (28), and the highest percentage of third party domain contacts (93%)
Social apps, followed by Games apps, made the fewest number of network contacts, 6 and 7 respectively.
Apps making the most number network contacts included iHeartRadio (56), Wall Street Journal (48), ESPN (42), Popeyes (42), and WattPad (36)
These network contacts provide $$$ to those companies. They're low effort, easy revenue for them. Privacy for customers be d*mned.
I once met a senior-level dev who worked for a company, they wouldn't have their own app on his phone, due to those invasive practices tracking his behaviour.
It suggests they control very little of their technical, revenue-generating infrastructure.
Which is interesting when the narrative is "The internet is destroying journalism." But another way to phrase it might be "All of these companies drastically underinvested in web/mobile, and continue to do so." (Although the NYT seems to have a higher ratio than most, but I believe they divorced themselves from Google and brought a lot back in-house?)
These sites have to do that to remain competitive.
The fact that {product} has only 1 connection to {product first party domain} doesn't say a lot about anything, given they could be internally proxying to and from who knows how many partners?
It'd be more helpful to at least see total traffic per domain.
It made me curious that the highest "first-party ratio" companies tended to be tech companies capable of realizing their own architectures (Amazon/Google/Apple).
But what people are really worried about with Facebook or TikTok or whoever building and aggregating information about them, doesn't require talking to a third party at all, and if you clamp down on these direct connections everything could just pass through the "first party" and through to whoever they wish on the server side where you can't see the connections anyway.
For example swapping the SIM card with a fresh installation of TikTok shows different "local" videos. Even if the public IP address is unchanged like when using WiFi instead of Data.
I've also think they use ad categories to suggest videos. Using a fresh TikTok installation and then spending some time navigating a subreddit of a topic, would likely show videos of that topic the next time you open TikTok.
The subreddit was opened in an incognito window, and the native app on the same phone.
Carrier, iso country code, mobile country code, mobile network code, and more are all easily accessible data attributes.
I would guess that your device has been fingerprinted through other app usage you have used, and that fingerprint has an association with the country of your birth.
It's possible that such a service is provided by a state actor, or part of a marketing/advertising service.
Entirely speculation on my part--I assumed that someone would eventually figure out a way to approximate a uuid at the device level, and use that across applications and app installs.
Outside of that I agree. It's unclear what data TikTok is supposedly gathering that other apps aren't already and why that's a cause for alarm.
Phase 2: ???
Phase 3: The world is now controlled by China and we are doing full communism
A bit rude but ok
> TikTok can harvest data on the type of content posted and what users interact with
That's exactly what I said, and I think this is expected by the users and does not worry me.
"all" is so general that I think it's kinda hard to really address that.
This is what I meant by how hard it is to talk about 'all'. Someone says all and then someone gives an example that's not all and so what are we talking about?
Ultimately I think there are differences between country A and country B's methods and etc.
In terms of internet traffic, my understanding is that the NSA would have access to a significant fraction of all of it via this room (and perhaps others). A significant enough fraction that there’s a high likelihood any given internet communication could be intercepted. Maybe not every time but enough stuff routes through the US that eventually it will be seen.
So to me I’ve feel comfortable using “all” in a loose (empirical) sense. But I see your point that it’s not as clear.
I recall when Trump ran into issues with contacts made with some Russian agents he publicly stated that he thought everyone else did it (to be specific he meant sending someone to meet with agents who said they had information he would want). When in fact almost every recent presidential candidate had reported attempted contacts by Russian agents (the lone exceptions were Trump, and George Bush Sr... but Bush had been head of the CIA so it seems likely the Russians might not try).
It seems it makes it easy to imagine these things by default if you're up to it.
There's no uncertainty here. Like in every other case, it goes to any company that is willing to purchase it. Overwhelmingly it will be American companies using it for direct marketing.
I don’t believe that TikTok has a similar internal culture of debate. I haven’t seen anything published by their academic team. I don’t believe that you can check on your friend’s page to see what they posted lately. They are examples of topics that they have favoured or censored that was worrisome and they didn’t adress the controversy. The pool of possible content is much larger so there’s more opportunity to fill strategically.
I know people who work for one but not the other, so I understand that this influence my judgement but I believe that their are objective difference in company values and product design that make TikTok more able to manipulate.
I haven’t seen anyone discuss that, and I have plenty of people who discuss those questions profesionally in my feed.
In my experience, Californians care about justice the same way they care about anything, fashion. Only the injustices that are fashionable to be against ever get any attention.
If you need proof they don't care about justice look no further than they fact the keep electing Peloci.
For example, my TikTok is full of LGBTQ+, PNW housing complaints, DnD and religion.
Edit: and a good percentage of them are around 30.
Those late 20s and up journalists get it, but they recognize (correctly) that like all social networks of this sort the early adopters (kids/young adults) are going to turn into adults with spending power and either change the nature of the platform or move on to something else. In either case, what TikTok is now is largely irrelevant (not to mention trite and shallow).
I don't think it's shallow. I've learned a lot from it. It just gives you what you want to watch and what you want to watch may be based on the idea that you have about the platform.
This perception is just already 3 years old now and so that social network has already gotten its additional audiences and many of those high schoolers (and their influencers) have grown up.
There is a similarity of looking at Facebook in 2005 and looking at Facebook in 2008, and add in a much faster adoption cycle and infrastructure.
I dont see a vine-like fate for tiktok
Bytedance is so much better positioned as well and already monetizing it
What this misses is that TikTok is a radically different experience for different people.
For some people, this description is very accurate. For other people, they would barely recognize TikTok on the basis of this description.
This is what has led to so many mis-representations of TikTok in the media, and the misunderstandings that result from that.
Not following. Who are the "other people" and how would they describe it otherwise?
So for many users, TikTok will not involve “showing off to friends”, will not involve audio trends, and will not involve memes at all.
These users would describe it as containing short-form video content relevant to whatever their particular niche or interest may be.
Whether the content is stupid cat videos or a DIY isn't relevant to my original point: it's short-form video content developed by people attempting to cash in on some meme (or niche), and very much in the vein of showing off for one's peers. Some like to think that if it's not an audio meme, but rather an undergrad waxing poetic about just learning Schrodinger's Equation or some handy person displaying his DIY skills that it's not about cashing in/showing off. But it is.
I still don’t think you get that when you complain about the content being trite or juvenile or commercial(?), you’re outing yourself as someone who will stop to watch that kind of stuff.
If you skip past the memes, fads, dances, etc. it will show you other types of content until it identifies what you will stop scrolling to watch.
It was the same for Twitter and Facebook. Then Trump happened and People With Important Jobs started paying attention to them. There has not been such a catalyst event for TikTok yet. Like with Zoom, there is a vague feeling among the security-paranoid that the Chinese are leveraging it for data-gathering, but as long as they get bazillion videos of teenagers pulling faces, who cares?
If you are seeing political content, it's just because you told the algorithm that you enjoy interacting with that type of content.
TikTok's recommendation algorithm is really second to none.
That's kinda a scary situation...
I think a bigger "conspiracy theory" I'd buy into would be the algrorithm exploiting political extremes and pushing insane voices to the top...but every social media/media company does that in some way (though not always intentionally.)
There are major, major leaps from collection to then even having effective prediction models. Prediction is hard, especially when it comes to longer term behaviors.
Manipulation is extremely hard especially when the content space is so crowded.
My fear of TikTok is far more mundane. It just dulls us into the most passive form of entertainment the world has ever known making us a basically disengaged, lifeless people. Its the modal opposite in life to 'touching grass'.
Nail on the head. When I was first sent a link to a tik tok post, it was jarring, because as soon as that video ended another random video popped up and started playing full volume. It's a constant never ending stream of content. As long as you are looking at the app, there is not one moment where your attention isn't captured. You have no time for independent thoughts. How do you even think in long form topics when you interject your attention span with these videos constantly?
I think there will be a time when there is a mountain of research showing how harmful this 'fast food content' type of platform can be for mental health, and we really do consider platforms like ticktok or other attention demanding patterns like autoplaying instagram stories or a constant stream of youtube videos like we consider smoking tobacco today. People really need to be meditating and thinking freely, but it seems the technologists have decided monetizing (or at least convincing investors you are monetizing) all available time for independent thought is too profitable.
See: https://www.tiktokforbusinesseurope.com/resources/install-ti...
A state actor always desires insight into an adversary. The survival of nations depends on being able to either cooperate with others or subdue those who will not. The result of a state's strategy in these arenas is predominantly determined by their ability to predict the counterpart's behaviors, both at a citizen and leadership level.
Why TikTok is not seen as the ultimate embodiment of these incentives and immediately banned from the US is beyond me.
The company for more money? Similar to the incentives behind Google and Facebook.
Queue the "you can find educational material on tiktok!" posts by the subset of HN who really love the app and the company.
With that in mind, consider how much user data TikTok has and what might be done with it.
It seems like Apple is lacking on tracking enforcement of privacy. This mobile marketing company can do this so I'm guessing Apple has the resources to do this properly. You could even do it for the largest 1000 apps.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/09/23/iphone-...
It's just Vine 2.0[1]. Many Vine videos got ripped and re-posted to YouTube so we have a small piece of internet culture surviving the death of an app and preserved.
But people don't want to talk about that. They want to ban the platforms they perceive as being used to push an opposing political agenda while preserving the platforms they themselves abuse for the same purpose. It is almost funny seeing people who directly benefited from Cambridge Analytica/Facebook turn around and complain about TikTok.
“ Warning: this application sends your behavior to a foreign party. It may be stored indefinitely and used for personal retribution, social scoring, and manipulation of your political views. Proceed with caution”.
If that seems extreme, an outright ban of the app is worse. The US and others have had a good history of getting results this way, but it still respects individual and corporate liberties. Thoughts?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21725139
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23634138
In any other way, social media applications surely are the ones that extract the most data, and TikTok being on top of that list makes it to the top of the list of total applications too.
He was talking about the free apps his children use on their tablets, and while he likes diversity, was astonished at how much of the apps were pushing chinese culture.
Both my boys (neither are ethnic Chinese) speak mandarin. None have come home from school espousing any ideals that differ from our family values, but it will be interesting to see as they grow.
Final off-topic comment, the world of Firefly is one where Chinese culture became the dominant culture (though for obvious reasons the show is in English)
China is not a good faith operator. Given the data needed to influence public opinion and voting, they will engage in manipulation favorable to their interests. That alone is sufficient to run tiktok at a loss, but the market manipulation possible, advertisement platform potential, and other monetization makes it look like just another app.
Google's been caught red handed deliberately manipulating political content.
The idea that tiktok isn't used for the same type of manipulation is dangerously naive.
There's a need for social media manipulation watchdogs that can monitor content being delivered to different users so the companies and countries involved can be held accountable.
It's sad that a massively scaled invasion of privacy can only be countered by more surveillance. Because of the ephemeral nature of tiktok interactions, the only way to combat manipulation is to surveil the content being delivered to user feeds and compare subsequent opinion poling and purchases.
Sorry, do you have a better link handy? This primarily looks like a fundraising page.
But I'm even more curious, would you not describe Tucker Carlson as far right in his views?
Dubious.
On what social issues are excatly Euros more left wing compared to Americans?
> ask any non-European person who has lived on both continents where he feels more welcome.
I gladly concede this, but this is just one element of social issues.
> Universal healthcare, unemployment benefits, workers' rights, LGBTQ rights, prison policy, police behavior and control, social safety net, lack of religion in politics, free or extremely cheap education including higher education
> Matter of a fact in Eastern Europe...
Thats why my first answer was: Certainly not Western Europe. My knowledge of Easter Europe is nonexistent, so I won't dare say anything about their circumstances.
which ones ?? russiagate hrc lies ??
Liz Cheney
Mitt Romney
David French
Reason media (Libertarian)
Andrew Sullivan
These all tend to fall under the more 80s/90s Neoconservative or Liberalism banner instead of the more aggressive New Right
The growing inequality and the increasing government overreach which strangely always seems to benefit a few rich uber-companies is a symptom that our institutions are fairly unreliable.
An alternative to more regulation and more surveillance to prevent mass manipulation would be NOT to have the power of millions of people in the hands of a handful of barely-elected representatives and to keep that power in local communities.
No more taxes that go to Washington and gets "redistributed" - aka used to enrich the usual lobbyists. No more public services - aka monopolies. Just private local companies providing services to local citizens.
Trump admin tried to restrict its use, at least among government/military, and perhaps predictably he was accused of racism/sinophobia...but the threat was just as real then as now.
In the US it really does matter how you do things. Just the whim of the president is not enough for it to happen.
Trump had no legal basis for his order. He liked to act like he was doing things with grand strokes, many of them were doomed to fail. I'm not convinced that he or those around him even cared if they did or not.
I don't think you can read much into an amateur hour / foolish attempt.
I don't think its so clear cut. In any case its hardly the first time that a president made a potentially unconditional to be ruled upon by courts later.
Not sure what we're talking about at this point. Trump's executive orders about tiktok that were thrown out of court were something different.
Trump or just the department who owns a given device can of course say "don't put X on government phones" and so on, but that's way different than what Trump tried and failed to do with tiktok.
Regarding Huawei , Trump basically told the Commerce Department to take action, Huawei was already (or was in the process of being) blacklisted by the commerce department, the commerce department does have the legal right to do that given the nature of Huawei's products and sensitivity of communications equipment.
The commerce department doesn't currently (although I believe lawmakers are looking into it) have the authority to simply blanket ban an app like tiktok on a whim / order. They simply can't do that for any old reason the POTUS says.
As I noted in another comment, in the US it does matter HOW you do things, the courts are independent (compared to say China) regardless how "right" someone might be they need to follow the law.
But as far as tiktok until someone gives the commerce department or someone else new powers, so far that seems out of reach.
Granted, I believe there are efforts to give them that option.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TikTok_v._Trump
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump%E2%80%93TikTok_co...
It's not like others are better, but those three are the worst when it comes to spying shaping public opinion only because they are the biggest and most powerful.
If I had to choose who will influence the public in my country, let it better be some company (or government) that has my country interest first, and not China or the USA interests.
Because there's a rule of law, legal records, required disclosures, all subject to investigation and enforcement by an independent judiciary that creates a public record.
We can bemoan that wealthy people control a majority of assets or that some exceptions slip through the cracks at smaller scale (e.g. offshore shell companies owning assets). But by and large there's no question as to "Who owns Exxon? Or Google? Or Facebook?"
China does not have that.
For a generally accepted instance, see the EU GDPR.
It's the same as Facebook now threatening to leave the EU if they have to comply with EU data protection laws.
A US company operating in China under its own international brand is a sucker who fell for a pretty blatant con.
Also, Google actually has a sizeable office in Beijing. I'm not sure what they do specifically since it's not easy to access any of their public services without an obscure VPN (the most popular ones get blocked pretty quickly).
2) On "China didn't ban ...", that's the case for Google and Linkedin China, but it's actually a kind of "soft" ban that the cost to meet the regulatory requirements is too high to afford even for biggest companies in the world.
3) FB case was a bit different. It was never given any opportunity to operate in China, so FB didn't "chose" to leave. We would never know what FB would do if given the chance. Maybe leave all user data there inside the great wall, as Apple does in its special version of iCloud in China.
Doing anything else means that Chinese companies have the ability to build international platforms—where both Chinese and US citizens can participate—and US companies do not. Furthermore, those international platforms could potentially be made to enforce the CCP's standards for speech, setting the tone for conversations about Uyghurs and Taiwan worldwide.
TikTok does follow US law, so instead of flat out banning it, the reasonable thing to do would be to enact sensible privacy legislation... But oh wait, then tech giants can't exploit the local population anymore.
Facebook is not allowed to operate in China not because they are American, but because they do not want to comply with Chinese law.
Many countries ask this of US companies, so there's no reason we shouldn't adopt a similar stance.
The data collection horse is out of the barn, has legitimate uses, and is an incredibly thorny issue to legislate appropriately. And will be adjusted for the next 20+ years.
What needs to be done now is to say that (1) at a certain user count ("too big to democratically ignore") then (2) production recommendation algorithms must be auditable.
Allow the details of audits to be kept secret from public record, but the DoJ should be able to go to Google, Facebook, Netflix, or TikTok and say "Show me how this works, now."
It's burying your head in the sand to suggest this doesn't have a clear impact on democracy and is currently solely in control of private companies and completely opaque. And it's the opaqueness that's the biggest danger.
Fundamentally, modern media/social is different from everything that came before because of the economic feasibility of microtargeting. Newspapers couldn't afford to track their customers individually & print a unique paper for each of them, which resulted in an auditable public record. All of the companies above can do exactly that, without leaving any public record.
This should be measurable.
Beyond that, I'm not sure how easy it would really be to detect. Seems like the method for that kind of thing would more likely be to have networks of users/bots/whatever that take advantage of facially neutral recommendation algorithms. So would you catch that by auditing the algorithm?
I said measure. We need to understand if we're being manipulated, and if so, figure out what an appropriate response should be. Maybe it's as simple as releasing a report and letting the media talk about it. Knowing gives us the ability to develop a response.
Filter bubbles are relatively new, and it's not yet clear the extent to which they can be used to shape a democratic society.
We don’t need to find that out because we are being manipulated. These are algorithms designed to maintain attention and sell ads. It is impossible for that to not be manipulative. The goal shouldn’t be to understand the algorithms, but to stop them from ruining our lives.
My understanding (vastly simplifying) is that the current standard is: does not infringe on rights of protected classes, does not incite imminent violence, & subject to national security concerns.
All of which are fuzzy lines, subject to court interpretation on a case by case basis, as they should be. (Even national security, which courts have traditionally granted wider latitude to)
All three are plausible rationales under which to bring a hypothetical "antidemocratic" case (to use a catch-all term that encompasses what people seem to be implying).
At core, and first principles, what "we" probably want as a nation is a sliding scale that moves from primacy of shareholder / owner to primacy of public, according to user count & market percentage.
Aka if you're a 10,000 user app, and you think (non-inciteful) racist content will make you the most money, that's your (terribly immoral) business.
But if you're a 100,000,000+ user multi-app company, then public and democratic interest takes primacy over your shareholders. Don't like that? Spin off some products.
I've had this same argument with military friends lamenting the prevalence of ex-military citizens among right wing nationalist groups. IMHO, "make people attend classes to fight indoctrination" is too easily repurposed by a future administration to do the exact opposite.
If a foreign nation's service uses algorithms to promote its interests and quell that of its adversaries or attempts to alter election outcomes to be favorable, then we're in for trouble.
Imagine social media creating worker strikes, riots, getting certain politicians elected, influencing the next generation of kids to prefer limits on free speech, influencing kids to not pursue science and engineering, etc.
This is a complicated issue.
The algorithm can be used for warfare.
Let's say we had this. We had some ML/AI team go up to Congress/DoJ and show them some tensors, some "back propagating LSTM" horseshit. How does that help the people that don't understand how the ad model works?
Hell, I bet there is _no one_ using AI or tensors or any of that shit that can tell you _why_ their model output Foo instead of Bar.
If explainability is a problem (e.g. "We don't know why our algorithm recommends higher-interest rate loan products to African Americans"), then that's a rabbit hole that needs to have funding put towards digging up as well.
agreed and I was flippant to make a point. I did not mean to say there aren't smart people in government. But I would venture to say that people who understand ML/AI are _not_ working in the government. Or put more correctly, the _odds_ of a person working in government being up to date on how LSTM works today is such a low number, that I would be fair to say it is extremely unlikely that anyone on any board would be smarter than Sen Hatch _in this domain_.
> then that's a rabbit hole that needs to have funding put towards digging up as well.
Agreed and is the larger point I was trying to make: we currently, no matter how smart you are, have _any_ way of knowing what your "algorithm" is doing. Or if you do, it's a rule-based system and isn't AI/ML. We should though! And I think pursuing that will give us much higher rate of return than our black-box strategy everyone seems to be using.
I can't see exactly how we do all this, but the root cause of many a social ill is that corporations are taking over social roles from government. This must be arrested, somehow, or we'll sleepwalk into the dystopian future of every damn 70s scifi film.
That metaphor means that there is no stopping it, you can't get the horse back in the barn. How is data collection like that? Why can't we make a law stopping it? The EU limits data collection. Apple restricted it. Nobody told them we couldn't put the horse back in the barn.
A good thing about 'software eating the world' is that it's not like saying, 'train rail gauge should be 1 meter wider', which would take incredible capital and labor. The software can be quickly and easily changed.
Why should we ban people voluntarily using a short video service that shows them things they like and whose business model is virtually identical to every other social media company?
The NSA listens.
TikTok listens, engages, and suggests new content and ideas to millions.
TikTok shows you 80s commercials and clips from industrial films after figuring out that you want to see 80s commercials and clips from industrial films.
Based on the ads that I get, which are pretty unintrusive, easily identifiable and always skippable, it doesn't seem like their analytics are that advanced. Besides random major brands, who are essentially broadcasting ads, I get ads for diesel mechanic tech schools and random wish products.
Who is? I don't mean to be trite or contrary, but TikTok is coming into an environment where norms are pretty damned shady. Google as you and the article say, also consume user data quite unethically.
FB likewise surveil us for their advertising businesses. They both also happen to host and control a good chunk of political and politically adjacent content within that framework. Police and regulate it with no transparency. FB are also gave us our first big "scandals" with third party trackers and/or data sharing.
Other countries (including, but definitely not exclusively) also use tech companies as espionage assets.
TikTok is just a new pig at the trough.
You don't really see much difference? Democratically elected politicians versus central party that allows no dissent and has complete control over information and actions of its citizens to the point of genocidal assimilation.
You're saying the Chinese government is so powerful and competent that they have complete control over information and actions of over one BILLION people? Wild claims like this one should be substantiated.
Although your name is wildly sinophobic and racist so I doubt there is any evidence you can pull up.
How would we know if that was or was not happening, either here or, more aptly (for the analogy to be accurate), abroad?
If the underlying assertion is "ccp is evil," where and why does this relate to TikTok specifically? Why not every other item you are probably consuming?
>> Say what you will about Facebook, Google, et al., but they haven't come that far yet.
They're tech/media companies, not governments. FB & Google are however responsible for the norms under which TikTok can collect data for whatever purposes they want. They're the ones who normalised this sort of shady behaviour. It's a pretty straight line between one and the other.
That was my thought. Listing the 'good faith' operators might be feasible, if only because the list would be very short.
Bear in mind that we don't really know much about how our data is being used at any of these, either directly by the company or by security agencies in their home countries. US security also has access to foreign citizens' FB & Google data via prism or its successors.
The whole argument here seems (to me) to be [1] TikTok collects a scary and unjustifiable amount of data about its customers, just like youtube, FB Etc. [2] We don't know exactly what's collected and why [3] TikTok are chinese.
Singling out Tiktok is neither helpful nor honest, IMO.
This issue isn't a bee stuck in my presonal bonnet, but this is a fraudulent response that convinces nobody that didn't already agree with you. I'll explain why.
The people complaining about TikTok were probably complaining about the others for ages too.
Those complainers were shouted down with some version of "well, they're not THAT bad."
Now there is one actor that is seen (at least by some) as worse than the others. The difference in the actor is being raised as a reason to care about their actions (and maybe renew concern about the category of actions at large).
Your response that their actions are not novel is either ignorant or perpetuating a fraud.
Obviously the behavioral profiles are unaffected by this, considering it focuses primarily on browsing habits.
It's not easy at all to do, there's a lot of grey area, and sometimes I just don't know. But I try.
It's not about the individuals in those countries, I suspect just making their way through life they may have the best of intentions but still could be forced to participate.
(Having said al that, that google research page seems pretty suspect to me.)
With a few days of interactions, you can very precisely logically profile a person enough to figure out how to socially engineer them. You also have enough interest and behavioral data to be able setup a blackmail scheme.
It is not hard to imagine how the close integration with the government allows the law enforcement to conduct very skilled operations using the psychological map that can be built about a person.
The CCP is way past knowing if you vote dem/rep or are a 21yr old female.
Everything he rails against was present in both recent US elections but for whatever reason he seems content to focus only on the most recent one.
Maybe he's spineless and holds that line because right-wing hosts are the only ones that will host him to get his message out. Maybe he really does believe that and is being a complete hypocrite. Neither option is respectable.
My personal pet theory about the recent rise in various 'challenges' is effectively weaponization of this particular medium in an attempt at social manipulation. It is all fun games now, but as recent 'gun challenge' shows, it can be easily turned into mayhem.
Don't let guilt by association bias your thinking in this, but give the subject the deliberation it deserves. If you value the integrity of democracy and public discourse, ignore the messengers for whom the optics are politically convenient and focus on the message.
I don't doubt that Bytedance shares Chinese TouTiao user data with the Chinese government, akin to how Apple does it with iCloud, but Bytedance has been pretty adamant that TikTok is external to China and doesn't share data. Even when there was an executive order to ban TikTok for being a national security threat, they couldn't prove that it was.
Does anyone have actual evidence of TikTok sharing with the Chinese government, outside of political hit pieces like the one above?
Oh well if they've been _adamant_ then I guess it's true.
1. The Chinese government does not deserve our trust.
2. All Chinese businesses are extensions of the Chinese government.
The default assumption should be that your information is being sent to China and that China is using Tiktok as an extention of their propaganda arm.
edit: but you know what. Since you want evidence I'll give you some. The entire Alibaba debacle where the CEO was forced into hiding because he dared to contradict the Chinese political elite is my evidence that the Chinese government has implicit control over every business based out of China.
Also nice CNN name drop, you clearly know me very well.
So you think his words are much better than "I have friends"? You can find all Alibaba sites are still running. Alibaba Cloud is still providing services. You can also contact to sales and support. Then you still want to believe "entire Alibaba debacle".
Propaganda is not just about "pushing" a message but also about smothering discussion. In fact, pushing a message via something like Tiktok is ham fisted, what the Chinese government can do instead is stifle any discussion related to topics that they consider "dangerous". For example, shadow banning any tiktok videos related to the Uighur genocide.
They can blame any manipulation on some ranking algorithm.
I only wish y'all could hear yourselves when you say these things, with even a fraction more rational clarity, even an ounce more suspicion of the political narratives at work here.
These conversations are deeply troubling to me, makes me absolutely ashamed to be a westerner of any sorts. I think I will go find greener pastures now, thanks for the wake up call, hope you find peace too.
Got it, so since you couldn't argue against my statements with reason you are now attacking my character.
> makes me absolutely ashamed to be a westerner of any sorts
Absolutely nobody that is from the west calls themselves a westerner whatever the hell that means. Also FYI, there is an extreme mistrust and dislike of China from almost every country in the so called East. So it isn't a west vs east thing.
It feels so bizarre to have someone convey seething hate for the government in private while seemingly being supportive in public. What is less obvious is how brittle it makes the country, it could literally dissolve into anarchy tomorrow or last for hundreds of years.
Because changing what is important to a group or people can make pushing your agenda easier.
What would be important to China's propaganda wing? Most important would be to maintain control over China and downplaying anything that reflects negatively. So controlling negative speech or shifting blame to someone else if a covid virus is discovered to original from territory you control would be important.
Tiktok's algo focuses on keeping you occupied in a state of mind where you zone out.
One couldn't say the same.. at all.
What China does inside of China doesn’t have any bearing on the western internet. The topic at hand is the data collection that tic tok is engaging in, which already has plenty of precedent in the west, unfortunately.
It’s completely contrary to the values enshrined in the US constitution to make arguments like, “ah well but that person/group/country is bad and we aren’t” the entire political theory our nation is supposed to be built on is the notion that people with too much power will do bad things.
Reporters without borders reports 2 million employed in government censorship in 2013. https://rsf.org/en/news/chinas-cyber-censorship-figures
> watch every conversation happening in real time.
Even with 2 million people, you can’t follow even a fraction of the conversations of 1000x the population without automation doing most of the heavy lifting.
You only has to shut down the major channels. Over 22,000 influencers were openly censored last year. Even in the past week, several Olympics-related hashtags have been blocked on Weibo. You can control the conversation even with just one person.
https://scmp.com/tech/policy/article/3159947/chinas-internet...
WeChat censors live, and automatically
https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/07/15/134178/how-wecha...
Considering that there are TikTok employees in china - both engineers and moderators, there is no chance that china doesn't influence TikTok. Even Zoom which is a clearly american company that has chinese employees wasn't immune to chinese influence.
source: i personally know a tiktok employee in china.
Also, until recently they employed moderators in china, who by definition have access to customer data. So yes, the Chinese offices have/had access to customer data.
On the other hand, many of the same companies have been involved in scandals where employees abused their position to stalk people or whatever, so maybe their access controls aren't actually that strict.
So it would've been interesting to hear about TikTok's internal security culture.
I'm not sure whether I'd call what moderators get "access to customer data", since it's not like they're in control, right? And aren't the posts they're moderating usually public anyway?
Here is the one on TikTok with references.
https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/R/R46543
I was going to give quotes from the CRS, but there are so many.
If you want to learn about current issues just go to the home page and search with an empty search field.
https://crsreports.congress.gov
I check it daily.
“China to enter talks with the United States about social media” would not mean all Chinese people will talk to all Americans. This is true whether the content is positive, negative, or neutral.
It really depends on what one is optimizing for. If one is optimizing for ethnic division, or just not at all optimizing for change in the future led from within said country.. then sure "China" or "Muslims" not "CCP" or "Wahhabism."
How would an American react to a foreigner saying "America is evil and not trustworthy" vs "American leadership has done X and therefore is not trustworthy?" I have been largely abroad for years and I would still process the information in the latter statement with much less emotion.
The solution to this (and other problems of social engineering) is to educate the general (democratic) population, so they are aware of and resilient against such attacks. I don't think it's possible to stop everyone from using a given service, but if every user understands the real tradeoffs, then we have a chance. If individuals (and more importantly voters) cannot think and reason for themself, given the facts of a given subject, democracy has no future.
In general though, I think people are smart. They make decisions and tradeoffs with the information they have. The problem here is that they don't understand the real risks. More than the loss of privacy and security, the real problem here is that a hostile nation state seeks to influence the thoughts of free citizens of other (democratic) countries. This is how wars are won and lost -- in the hearts and minds of the people. If everyone who used TikTok saw the situation in a similar light, I doubt it would have the adoption it currently has.
Well, neither is the USA and its NSA and its Five Eyes and all these actors who spy on pretty much everything and everyone. American companies are either complicit or blissfully ignorant. They violate the constitutional rights of their own citizens, principles their own country was literally founded upon, so there's no telling what they'd do to a foreigner. People are so afraid of them when they talk security they just assume you won't be taking them on.
The process can sometimes result in some of the same things happening, but the fact that they are not being done unilaterally is a major differentiator in multiple ways.
Your data in the US is much more likely to be abused when corporate interests voluntarily want to make money off it, than any abuse by executive power.
Reporting like this is also a refutation of their service.
Actually there's no need to influence "voting".
No, that's not a defense of "China" (whatever that's supposed to mean in internet comments). It's just a defense of HN for its intended mandate, which is curious conversation. Flamewar talking points are incompatible with that.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
Very much a tool to influence Western users and thought.