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Comment by rjzzleep | Hacker News Reader

> authoritarian regime saw facebook in 2012 and said

What a weird statement. Facebook has been taking all of that data for a long time. Some of the protections in Android and iOS were specifically added to inhibit Facebook from recording the surroundings in the background. TikTok just does more of the same partly because they just have more audio and video data to work with. Remember how Uber showed how cool they can track hookup dates? All of that is potentially blackmail-able information.

Are you somehow insinuating that Facebook is somehow okay because they are in a "democratic" country?

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I think the comment is insinuating that any country that wants deep personal data on a huge subset of the population should make sure it has a popular social network, so its citizens (and in some cases, citizens from around the world) willingly sit there inputting any and every detail about their lives and relationships into the database.

No, I think they're saying Facebook is bad but having an entity tied to a not-so-friendly government do it on a much larger scale is worse.

As if the U.S is a totally friendly government to the entire world ? Iraq, Afghanistan and many other countries the US destroyed would sure disagree.

Why are you talking about the US government right now? Is Facebook run by the US government?

I did not say the US government was friendly, nor does the context of TikTok operating in the US have anything remotely to do with Iraq or Afghanistan.

There's incredible amount of misplaced belief on HN that every HN reader considers the US government friendly.

I didn't say the US government was friendly, and I certainly don't think that either. But if we're talking about social networks surveilling people in the US, the US government doing it is bad and an adversarial foreign government doing it is worse.

I think the „2012“ comes from the notion that Facebook was somehow more widely used in the past. I also think it’s the case from time to time since my family &friends don‘t use FB, but they have quadrupled their DAUs since 2012

That's not the insinuation at all

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