FCC: TikTok is unacceptable security risk and should be removed from app stores
blog.malwarebytes.com
blog.malwarebytes.com
I get it. We want corps to stop hoovering up our data because they can use it to manipulate us with advertising, and they can mishandle it such that other bad actors can exploit it. I'm with you, this is a valid concern that we should address. But I think TikTok's specific case warrants additional concern because it's all that, plus it puts a geopolitical adversary in control of the data, countless devices, and a media channel central to the current cultural zeitgeist.
I don't think it's reasonable to wait for general regulation of social media corps while TikTok continues to do its thing, particularly if targeted action against TikTok is politically viable.
Edit: typo
While I would love to take that on I am genuinely puzzled by what you mean. “No one can question American democracy because they don’t have a better one?” Sorry but if that’s it that’s a dumb take.
Actually no, it comes from far earlier in our history that that, GOP may have had it has a talking point not sure, and dont really care, but the GOP is not the origination of this
>Saying the US is not a democracy but a constitutional republic is like saying a car is not an automobile.
No, not all Republics are democratic, and not all Democracy's are republics.
The US has every very very limited elements that are democratic, and at our founding even less so then today. At the founding only the House was democratic everything else was not. IMO we need to go back to that, less democracy would be good
Again, to say the US is a republic and not a democracy is incorrect. It is both, just like a Civic can both be a car and an automobile.
What? No, this is not a recent talking point, it's the core philosophical difference in this country since day 1. The names of the parties Republican & Democrat aren't just random words, they represent the philosophical differences in where the bulk of the power in government should rest (the republic being the system with input from the people, or the democracy being the direct will of the people).
Republicans generally believe direct democracy is dangerous and instead rely on the framework of the institutions of our Republic to act as guiderails preventing potential mob rule and other acts of capriciousness. The people get their say, within reason.
Democrats generally believe all power and decision making should come directly from the people, and the systems should be more fluid. They don't see them as guiderails they see them as unnecessary constraints on the people. The people get their say, and their will is done.
I would never argue that our politicians of each party believe in this fully, nor the voters for that matter. But this is a huge philosophical difference that predates the early 2000's by a couple hundred years. It's been a talking point since before our Constitution was drafted.
You are thinking federalism vs anti-federalism. That was Jefferson and Hamilton. The federalists won a long time ago, mainly through the interpretation of the commerce clause. Recent decisions by the SCOTUS is pulling back on that a little bit.
>Republicans generally believe direct democracy
Nowhere did I say the US was a direct democracy, I think that's what's tripping everyone up. I'm arguing against when people say the US is a republic and not a democracy. That is incorrect. If they had said direct democracy, I would agree with them. To say the US is a republic and not a democracy when every position of power in government was either elected, or appointed by someone who was elected, is incorrect. The democratic process is obvious.
>Democrats generally believe all power and decision making should come directly from the people, and the systems should be more fluid. They don't see them as guiderails they see them as unnecessary constraints on the people. The people get their say, and their will is done.
I don't see any evidence of this in modern politics. Which democrat has mentioned implementing a direct democracy?
Nope. At least not exclusively. The party's change over the years but we have essentially always had one party pushing for more direct democracy, and one party pulling against. A rose by any other name is still rose, but the philosophical idea of Republic government vs Democrat government is always there. And it's the key difference in the two parties.
>I don't see any evidence of this in modern politics. Which democrat has mentioned implementing a direct democracy?
The entire State of California is constantly riddled with ballot propositions, which is direct democracy in many case overturning the work done by their own representative legislature. And California is essentially a one party state so there is no one else to share the blame.
Federally, I can't go a week without reading about yet another proposal to eliminate the Electoral College and use a popular vote for President.
So if you're not seeing any evidence of it, where are you looking?
Ya, I was thinking federally only. California is its own animal and they do put a lot of things to vote, so you certainly are right with this example.
>Federally, I can't go a week without reading about yet another proposal to eliminate the Electoral College and use a popular vote for President.
That's just people complaining when their candidate doesn't win. If their candidate won the electoral vote but lost the popular vote, they wouldn't let out a peep about it I'll bet. Democrats won't actually remove the electoral college because they use superdelegates to ensure the party can put its thumb on any candidate's scale (see Bernie v Clinton and Bernie v Biden).
>So if you're not seeing any evidence of it, where are you looking?
I'm talking about actual politicians proposing actual legislation and recruiting votes in the senate/house, not just lip service from the stump. They don't do it because it doesn't actually benefit them.
Most GOP states will then instantly forget their principled support for the electoral college and join the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact to kill it.
We know this because in 2000 the George W. Bush team thought it was (contrary to what happened) likely to win the popular vote but loose in the electoral college, and had prepared a legal fight against this scenario.
No, they don't. Also, the two original parties were the Democratic-Republican Party of Jefferson, Madison, et al., and the Federalist Party of Hamilton, Adams, etc al.
Both, BTW, favored what is, I modern terms, a democratic republic and a representative democracy, though the Federalists initially favored a stronger central seat of power and the Democratic-Republicans favored a weaker central seat of power, though the bigger divide quickly became over foreign policy.
The Republicans weren't a major party until after the Federalist Party collapsed leaving a brief period of unstable one-party domination, then the D-Rs fractured, leaving the Democrats and Whigs in the Second Party system, then the Whigs later collapsed and the Republicans and the Democrats formed the Third Party system with the most critical initial issue being over not abstract form of government but slavery. While the identity of the two major parties has been the same since, their political alignment has changed several times; we’re now in what is generally regarded as the Sixth Party system.
The names of the parties change over the years, and the ideologies shift. But we have essentially always had one major party pushing to put more power directly into the hands of voters and another major party wanting to conserve the power in the established governmental frameworks.
The two current parties are no different in that regard. Democrats want to abolish the Electoral College and run government from Ballot propositions (direct democracy in action). Republicans are against those things and want to shift more power to the states of the Republic.
You've shown examples of where the Democrats want more direct democracy, so there's that too. I don't know if this is a recent phenomenon or not. I've never known the Ds to make much about it either way until you mentioned it.
Colloquial misuse of the word only sets people up for disappointment when they find out that a government they call a democracy isn't one.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Representative_democracy
This is about as useful as arguing about communism vs socialism, you may be right, in the typical HN pedant way, but all that does it make dumb threads dumber.
Recently, major changes of governmental policy that affect millions of people have been made by an unelected body of officials who have lifetime terms. You may have even seen it in the news.
There are some internationally recognized standards what constitutes a democracy, and the USA fits some and not others. For example, the USA wouldn't meet the criteria for democracy to be considered for EU membership, in the unlikely event it would apply for that.
The main sticking point is that it practices capital punishment, together with countries such as People's Republic of China and a handful of African countries. Intralegal execution of minors being especially problematic. Several treaties on international criminal law concerning war crimes is not recognized and its citizens are unlikely to ever be subject to the Geneva convention.
The second important point is the lack of an independent legal system. High ranking judges gets hand picked by politicians, in a very literal way. (Which is something that has also has happened in for example Poland. This is widely regarded as a loop hole in the EU democratic criteria. A country could not have been considered for membership under those conditions, but there is no jurisdictional power against reneging on that policy post membership. Subsidies gets frozen, but that's about it.)
I'm not sure it is as black and white as you suggest.
If you were to create a time machine and bring an ancient Athenian to the modern day US, the Athenian would not recognize the US system of government as, democracy. With the exception of jury trials and referendums, the demos do not directly engage in governance.
The US doesn't even allow the majority of the population to select those who perform the actual governing. E.g., a person from Wyoming has much more representation in the Senate than a person from California.
And, for the president, the population votes, but the winner of this election is not the one who got the most votes from the population, it is the one with the most electoral college votes. Again, the Wyoming voter gets more representation with one elector per less than 200K Wyoming residents, and only one elector for over 700K California residents. It is how the US got Bush "W" and Trump even though they both lost the vote of the demos.
With all the money in elections, even if there were majority representation, the US would still have moneyed interests dominating politics.
Some argue that the US is an oligarchy:
https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/mgilens/fi...
The additional data that TikTok tries to gather from the mobile OSs is insignificant compared to what you can get from videos that people take willingly.
Russian soldiers use VK, that doesn't stop OSINT researchers tracking them down on there.
Granted collecting say interest data based on viewing figures would be a precursor (I suppose it's likely that TikTok could figure out if a customer leaned left or right politically). But again that's not what the complaint is about.
It's also hard to ignore that TikTok's responses are at face value reasonable (such as evaluating touch patterns to identify bots... that's obviously something they have to do given the predominance of bots on social media platforms).
A forseeable future is one where Americans are using VPN to access Tik Tok and then we see some government officials clamoring for an American version of the GFW.
Do you think Facebook, Twitter and Reddit should be able to do that?
I don't claim to.
The context is: US regulators arguing for operational restrictions of a foreign-to-the-US company on the basis of being controlled by an adversary of the US.
If you have any insight from a place with friendly relations with China, you're welcome to share it.
Does America represent the national security strategy of essentially all of Europe, most non-Chinese nations in Asia, and much of South America?
Absolutely, and to pretend otherwise is to be dreaming.
If you’re not in one of those areas then you are correct that your adversary is not our adversary. But it’s pretty statistically likely you are, and in that case the two are linked.
You’re welcome to return the trillions spent on your defense, of course, and set up your own naval strategy and naval supply chains to defend your trade routes.
None of these companies should be allowed to store and abuse the sensitive information people divulge when using many of these services.
My point is, if finding the political will required to stop TikTok is easier than it is to regulate data collection more generally, we shouldn't let perfect be the enemy of good.
Furthermore, almost all of the devices and many of the chips we use to run apps are built in China. Why is the FCC not concerned about that?
[EDIT] That is, things like credit card companies selling your purchase history. Obviously they do need to retain some of that information to operate, but they shouldn't be able to sell access to it or use it for any other purpose. Ditto banks, magazines selling subscriber lists, all that crap. Should not be legal.
It is folly to think that "Install Chinese government spyware on a phone" is the same level of effort as "Force the Chinese government to work on advanced persistent threats and install massive exfiltration malware on some of the most secure networks on the planet".
Whoops, a bit too late for that.
How were Snowden revelations of USG<>Bigtech relationship materially different from what's happening here? Maybe it was less transparent?
Any "woke" person can see the cognitive dissonance here. It's all fine that you use the geopolitical rivalry argument but not if you try to paint one side of the argument as "free" and "liberal" and "subject to rule of law" when it's clearly not the case
This isn't to say that the USG should be admired or emulated, far from it, but as someone who's neither Chinese nor American, I think it's an objective truth that most people in the world fared better under 20th century American-hegemony than the worldwide Sinicization which the CCP has made clear is its aim.
It is extremely easy for a government to infiltrate into these organizations and get their hands on it, it has happened at Twitter [1], for instance.
So, yes, the problem IS data collection in the first place.
1: https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/former-twit...
I do agree that data collection is at the core of the problem, but Twitter really should have done a better job.
No amount of "security" is enough for an actor who wants to do this and has privileged to the data. This is almost impossible to out-engineer, if you think a company like Twitter cannot solve "such an easy problem" you're being naive.
There's a shitload of data for sale from brokers. So foreign governments might not even need much from a company like FB. Perhaps just enough to confirm the validity of data purchase from other sources.
China's kompromat and industrial espionage policies differ from those of the US.
It is off base to compare while ignoring intentions and impact, because they're Very different countries.
We don't always succeed at that, but at least we have that as our society and government's guidestar, and legal and political processes for self-correcting.
The Communist Party has exactly zero of any of that, and an ideology entirely oriented around justifying getting and keeping power by any means necessary.
How do you mean exactly? I'm not sure how you can draw that conclusion from what I said. Politically I'm an independent, there's no real home for me any US political party.
In this particular case you support U.S oversight over personal data rather than personal privacy(i.e banning data harvesting).
It's like saying it's fine for the Democrats to harvest personal data because they have a better track record than the republicans and after all "you" are democrat so being part of this select group makes you feel safe from a potential abuse. The sensible/right thing to do would be to ban the data harvesting.
Yeah but instead to ask for a ban on data harvesting "you" complain only about China avoiding the elephant in the room. As it's said: Lead by example!
Let's ban this data harvesting and make this a discussion about individual rights not China social app rise or U.S domination(though the meta apps). That's why I said you are playing "party" politics. Yeah China is bad but why should I choose the lesser evil instead to do the right thing?
I really hoped that China being a rough actor could actually bring something good to the whole world as we have to reevaluate our trust model: Why should I trust a foreign company, a local company, my gov or a foreign gov to harvest all this personal data. Why do they need all this data and they use it?
I think the EU digital market act and GDPR is a step in the right direction not selectively banning certain apps that do not align with the interests of a small government or an over reaching gov such the U.S. We have to fight for our rights not the exclusive rights of super governments to invade our privacy.
We have a system where due process is required. Sometimes authorities break those laws. But the system and culture is nonetheless there and for a reason.
That's kind of a big difference here.
The CCP has mandatory seats on the bytedance board and wants a copy of all the data so they can target people.
Spying is bad, murder is next-level bad.
Stop it all, but start with the bigger issues first.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/china-forcefully-harvests...
Or did you just make it up and it's a word reserved for people in nations you hate?
Dissidents = "Disagreeing, as in opinion or belief"
The government in power decides who this is and then acts against them according. The CCP just happens to use lethal force on a massive scale in this regard.
Speak up for those who can't
The Chinese Government can't do anything to me unless I go there. Meanwhile my own government here presents an ever-present real life danger on multiple fronts. I still don't exactly fear it, but at least I know which is more likely to do me harm. Or for that matter, to do harm to others with my tax dollars.
> The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.
~ John Erlichman, Nixon's Assistant to the President for Domestic Affairs
And decades of those policies have left the US with close to eight times the prisoners per capita of China. https://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/stats/Crime/Prison...
And the US has no problem executing prisoners, and in fact unlike China has no problem executing someone for crimes committed while a minor (only the US, Iran, Pakistan, and Somalia do this).
And that's before even getting into the extrajudicial politically motivated killings like Fred Hampton's murder, the MOVE bombing, or the recent odd proclivity of Ferguson and BLM protest organizers to "kill themselves" by hanging in a public tree, or "shooting themselves" in the head and then torching the car that they were in.
Being spied by Russia, no problem. Being spied by China, no big deal either. But being spied by the USA or EU controlled entities can pose a life thread to any EU citizen.
US citizens have it only a bit better, since they are at least protected from the EU, and only their own government has power upon them.
You should interrogate your assumption that the government inside the state lines is less "adversarial" to everyone's interests than the one outside state lines, even at a level of geopolitics.
- Our phone hardware and operating systems are intrinsically insecure.
- There is no practical/effective data gathering regulation (and I'm not sure it's possible to craft any without destroying innovation)
- All social media companies are doing it, leading to jeers of "hypocrisy!"
- All governments play the same games, reducing the arguments to "Whose side are you on?" That's effectively meaningless in a globalised world. The consequence is more nationalism and an ever more fragmented splinternet.
- The only proposed solutions amount to more authoritarian, controlling and regulatory responses.
What can we do?
There is a solution. Stop protecting these companies. Burn down WIPO. Tear up practically all "intellectual property" laws. Revoke millions of patents. Repeal all DCMA type laws regarding reverse engineering. Kick trademark and brand protection law to the curb.
The real problem is gargantuan monolithic, captive audiences that exist because incumbent monopolies enjoy protectionist measures that amount to a giant international trade racket.
Creating a real market that forces radical interoperability would solve many of the problems we see today. Who would care about TiKToK or Facebook if they were one of 500,000 small "Social Apps" that connected to a standardised international network.
Hell, we could even give it a catchy name, like "The Internet".
Yes there is: Don't
Anything that is not fully and obviously intentionally completely public is e2ee and inaccessible outside of the user's device. Information that is provably necessary for providing a paid service can be collected and kept until the second it is no longer necessary so long as the process is publicly documented. Any weights, faux anonymized data or similar derived from the pii must also be deleted.
Storing data on user's devices isn't great, it takes up storage space (adding cost) and relies on the user to manage the backups (which lots of folks don't do). Users also switch between devices, so you'd need some sort of cross-device syncing or something.
e2ee implies that the data can only be decrypted by the user's key. If the user loses their key, they lose data access. Since keys are user managed you need to deal with user support/education and build interfaces to support key management. e2ee isn't something you can bolt on an existing system. This sounds quite expensive to implement, so you'll shift significant funds away from other development (destroying innovation).
If today I'm running a Django site that allows users to message each other, do I need to change from my server-side template rendered system to a client-side rendered system?
For loop holes, I'd expect people to claim that they can't rely on device storage, need to support multiple devices, need to support customers who can't manage keys, perform heavy-weight rendering that would consume too much device battery and run slowly, etc.
These ideas are very 2020s focused. As the software industry evolves, would we need to convince politicians to allow us to use better technology that challenges assumptions we have today?
For loopholes, the solution is to just not believe the bullshit. Have a very high standard of evidence required and/or require fully informing the user of exactly what is stored, where it is stored, who can access it, and publicly sharing all code that touches it.
It's been proven over and over again that the current model does not work and that the people in charge are narcassistic children who cannot be trusted and lie constantly.
The GDPR is a half measure designed as much around enabling surveillance as safeguarding privacy. Anonymisation is a blatant lie. 'Innovation' is just a codeword for doing the same things we did before but worse.
Matrix probably isn't a good example. That's an impressive project with great developers. Most companies don't have equivalent staff, nor the budget to hire.
> publicly sharing all code that touches it
That's a huge request.
It would also encourage the innovation that you're so keen on because users wouldn't be trapped and you couldn't sit on one feature forever. You'd have to have an ongoing value proposition like every other vocation in all of history.
Hope we are not advocating that everything be owned by the state, as if that would allow more competition.
Will be interesting to see which loadout is more functional long term, China’s or the USA’s.
Republicans had a chance to ban TikTok during the last administration. They did not do it.
Even if he chose to support, say, universal health care, it would be buried in so much deliberate harassment that there would be no way to arrive at a workable plan.
The suggestion is so counterfactual that I just can't address it one way or the other. He achieved very little legislatively because he didn't really want anything except to anger people. The one thing he achieved is by appointing people to a lifetime office that isn't subjected to checks and balances -- and that accomplishes everything he might want.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/07/12/health-20...
The problem is 1) very few of his actual policies were good on the face of them and 2) even some of the milquetoast stuff he did had unsavory motivation.
Realistically, any theoretical universal healthcare proposed by Trump would probably have strings attached that further eroded the functioning of the federal government (which is a common theme between pretty much all R legislation).
It's like when Lois says "9/11" and everyone goes wild [2].
> Mr. Trump, you have said you want to appeal Obamacare. You have also said, quote, "Everybody's got to be covered," adding, quote, "The government's going to pay for it." Are you closer to Bernie Sanders' vision for health care than Hillary Clinton's?
> TRUMP: I don't think I am. I think I'm closer to common sense. We are going to repeal Obamacare.
> (APPLAUSE)
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/02/06/tr....
Foreign countries controlling what information a coming generation is exposed to is IMO much more concerning than collecting and profiling (of course also troubling, but a slightly different league). There is little oversight into what bubbles are formed, who is fed what, etc.
Want to create division in a foreign country? What better place to start than on social media and malleable kids.
This applies equally to TikTok as Facebook, for different reasons. I don't trust TikTok because of CCP, and Facebook because everything is for sale.
Lawyer that opposed net neutrality and now voicing his disapproval of apps built by the China.
Sounds like he's making a play to become a career politician using his version of what 'ok authoritarianism' is.
I'd like to see someone actually prove a security risk rather than hypothetically posing it. I.e. show me 1000 tiktok downloaded videos run through a program with their metadata something of strategic importance to a nation state (like the location of nuclear missiles haha).
We as individuals don't have access to that data, only tiktok does.. so we as individuals can't prove this to you.
Edit: Removed ask to share all personal data, because its bad form.
I know that this is one of the reasons why TikTok has highly invested in Ireland.
https://www.imy.se/en/organisations/data-protection/this-app...
Military bases have controls in place that ban things like tik tok + filming on site and even phones manufactured in China aren't allowed on site (they need to be checked in or whatever when you arrive at the entrypoint).
Prove this claim and then we can talk about the risk of apps like TikTok. Right now it's a false as saying Wifi signals cause brain cancer coz electromagnetism === bad for humans.
Even if we could access all the data, the proof would come too late, by definition.
Of course seeing the proof would be interesting, but that's not the point. Rules are created to protect interests, weighing advantages and disadvantages. That's why allies get more leeway than enemies.
I don't know what your position is, but there are various people in this thread calling such a measure "dangerous" and comparing tiktok to facebook. First: there's more than one dangerous thing in the world, and calling outlawing tiktok dangerous probably says more about their addiction than it does about liberties. Second, facebook is also "social media" that collects data, but that's where the similarity ends. You can't expect two entities to be treated identically just because they share some features. I cannot believe people make such arguments seriously and in good faith.
A security risk is by nature hypothetical. If the risk comes to fruition, it's no longer a risk, it's an event or an incident or whatever.
I think it's right to say such data harvesting posses a security risk. I don't necessarily think the nationality of the corporation collecting it makes a huge difference though. If the concern is state level abuse of the harvested data, sure, it's much easier for any given state to access data when the data is stored by an entity that has strong state influence, but given the patterns of hiring at large scale data collectors, it can't be too hard to get state operatives into positions where they have large scale discrectionary access to data.
Also, I'm not really convinced that the FCC is expected to consider national security concerns, or if they have significant regulatory oversight of the app store market either?
Not true. CPU exploits come out all the time with proof of how to exploit / exfiltrate data. This claim of a 'risk' is unproven as it's based on a poor hypothesis of 'country has our data === bad'
How can they even collect browsing history or biometric identifiers on Android? Isn't browser history stored in the browser's private storage space, or am I being naive here?
Biometric identifiers, I'm guessing mostly facial features: if you take a selfie/self-video with TikTok (which millions of people do) they can just take the data from there.
Now that you mentioned it tho, I'm not sure whether developer tools is showing me the ground truth, how does it give me 200 OK from cache without asking the remote whether the resource has changed? My memory agrees with you, something has changed in the matrix.
* Browsing history: If a user uses a WebView in your app, you can obtain the history of* that WebView instance.
Xiaomi phones let applications have access to the first (100?) bytes of each pcap line. [note: this is probably unintended, but their bug bounty programme didn't care].
* Keystroke patterns: You can track user keystrokes within your app. If you're a keyboard or accessibility provider, you can access keystrokes globally. I haven't used TikTok, but it's very unlikely that they do either of these, the UX to enable them is not pleasant because they're dangerous actions to take.
* Biometric identifiers: If a user takes a selfie, you have their iris/fingerprint/faceprint
What is pcap line?
The files are in: /storage/emulated/0/MIUI/debug_log/common/tcpdump if you have a phone to test.
To my limited understanding, the file on Xiaomi phones is a dump of all the packets that your router would see. If you're using HTTPS, it's probably leaking the sites, but it's mostly garbage.
[0] https://github.com/ankidroid/Anki-Android/blob/31cfbc914a746...
World is > US and China, Europe, SA, Africa, the rest of Asia - this is a clear cut message "you need to have your social networking in-country to prevent others from compromising you".
Sure, we could lose some app integrations but if the internet was more segregated API standards would be developed to mitigate this.
I don't think anyone who has spent much time thinking about it sees the Russia/China/Iran firewalls as a bad thing, but we aren't them and we can't regulate our media in the same way.
Rebuilding social network would take a long time, having it country specific would be pointlessly limiting.
Chunking up internet between countries would be going down further into isolationism for GB since they aren't even a part of EU anymore.
It only seems ridiculous because it hasn't happened yet.
Other solutions can be found to keeping in contact with friends that move away without having to give undue power to some international tech behemoth. And while building a new Facebook wouldn't be easy, I wouldn't say it would be necessarily hard either. It'll just take time. Hell, the competition may even be good for Facebook on the end.
> When challenged if the CCP has seen any non-public user data, he said, “We have never shared information with the Chinese government nor would we […]
Such easy misdirection. Never shared, doesn't mean CCP doesn't just injest it. Most people don't have the ability to understand how information works in tech anyway. I don't blame them. We're in a situation that's way worse than "the 1%", it's the 0.001% that know how information technology works.
As an aside...
I can't tell if it is a comedy, tragedy, or thriller when the story-line that ends up creating AGI most likely will be an Intelligence Agency. With all the data collection they're doing and prediction, they may even already have invented it decades ago.
1. https://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-tra...
2. https://www.pdfernhout.net/on-dealing-with-social-hurricanes...
3. https://www.nro.gov/Portals/65/documents/foia/declass/ForAll...
Yowwiee.. Thanks for the "dot" to connect. Sheesh.
This would force many who would otherwise never think about the consequences of these walled garden ecosystems and their lack of control, to suddenly have to do so.
A lot of people generally really don't care a hoot about this stuff.
Exception handling matters. Your attitude towards these edge cases is likely damaging the argument that you and i both seem to agree on: allowing anon reviews is healthy, freedom of saying what you feel to be fair and true is important. The issue as i see it is if companies ask to let themselves self regulate via moderation of some form, yet allow damage to occur as that’s important to their business model, they have to expect courts and eventually public sentiment to shift perspectives. This is why i say, the attitude of not handling these exceptions well is dangerous and likely damaging to the objective of freedom of expression. The model needs improving to protect privacy yet prevent damage to private individual and businesses. News papers have been publishing retractions for hundreds of years, if it wasn’t for this their business would also have died long ago.
Rephrasing, I think people don't care because they are only thinking of their own "personal secrets", and don't realize the big-data aspect of this type of data collection (which is understandably a bit hard to grasp for people outside of tech). Their lack of concern is simply a reflection of the lack of perspective, not a valid counter-argument to privacy protection - needs a lot longer legs to become a position worthy of consideration.
Uncle Sam asking the 2 great censors of the west to get rid of the most popular app in their stores, so that the east will cease competing with said Uncle on who gets to brainwash their citizens. Gold.
Whichever way this goes, one of these parties loses big, which is a good thing for us humans.
Corporations in China are extensions of the state and tools of foreign policy in a way they just aren't in the West. The US government can also be replaced. That's why China and the US just aren't equivalent here and why something like Tiktok is of greater risk and concern than any US Big Tech app or platform.
Yes, US law enforcement can get access to, say, messages. There's a process for that. Some of it is pretty questionable (eg FISA court, pen registers, NSLs) but at least there's a process. I don't for a second believe that US intelligence has a firehose of everything posted on Twitter and Facebook just because I don't believe the US government has the storage capacity required.
Secondly, China is completely protectionist about access to its market. There are Chinese versions for every app and platform. China uses access to its market as a giant carrot to exact concessions from Western companies but they're chasing a phantom: China will never let any Western company "win" in China.
Part of getting access to China is playing ball with the CCP, which means giving access to data on a whole level above the US government. It means enforcing the Great Firewall and, for example, censoring mention of the Tiannamen Square massacre.
Trade needs to be recipricoal so if China restricts access to the Chinese market, I see no issue with Western countries responding in kind.
The threat model for something like Tiktok is a whole lot worse than any Western equivalent.
Corporations are an extension of the state in this process, as we have learned thanks to Edward Snowden. They have no choice but to facilitate the use of state power on foreign nationals.
As a non-American I don't see the difference for me. If you are an American all you're saying is "only my government should spy on me".
In the meantime, countries still need to act to protect their citizens and their national interests against foreign adversaries-- especially prohibiting adversarial/dangerous behavior within their own economic zones and borders.
(i.e., China also has a rational interest in restricting operations of US firms gathering information on Chinese citizens-- we don't need to choose "good" or "bad" guys).
Spy? Sort of. Generally speaking, US intelligence agencies have a lot of leeway when 1) you're not a US citizen AND 2) you're not on US soil. If either of those things isn't true then it's a different story. There are workarounds (eg outsourcing spying to allies).
Torture and kill? Huh? I'm not even sure what you're talking about. Do you mean in a war zone?
> Corporations are an extension of the state
If anything, I'd argue in the US the government is an extension of the corporations. The US government certainly acts at the behest of the capital-owning class.
> They have no choice but to facilitate the use of state power on foreign nationals.
I mean US companies are subject to US laws and that includes (as stated) pen registers, NSLs, FISA warrants, etc. Still, there's more due process here than for Chinese companies.
> If you are an American all you're saying is "only my government should spy on me".
That's not what I said at all.
What I will say is that given the choice between living in China and being subject to Chinese spying and living in the US subject to US spying I'll pick the US hands down every time.
Why? Because I can talk about US atrocities without "disappearing". I could compare the president to a cartoon character without "disappearing". The US also doesn't (currently at least) engage in ethnic cleansing and eradication through "re-education" camps (eg Tibet, Xianjiang). Nor do I have to worry about my ability to get anywhere because I said something critical of the government and took a big hit to my social credit score. And the US has no equivalent to Hong Kong's "security" laws.
Extraordinary rendition, "targeted killings", enhanced interrogation. The US often kills non US citizens on foreign soil without any due diligence.
> What I will say is that given the choice between living in China and being subject to Chinese spying and living in the US subject to US spying I'll pick the US hands down every time.
That's a nonsensical fallacy of choice. No one here is talking about emigration to China. We are talking about banning TikTok. The choice is between being spied on by foreign companies or by domestic companies. The correct answer is of course neither, and trying to say that being spied on by the US government is better than the Chinese government is nonsensical - if you aren't American or Chinese they are basically the same, and if you are American your own government is the only one that can opress you.
> And the US has no equivalent to Hong Kong's "security" laws.
Of course it does, it has the same standards whenever the US wants to occupy some country.
A single data warehouse used by the NSA stores exabytes of data: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Data_Center
A single exabyte is enough to support Facebook's entire business operations for 5+ years. Photos, videos, posts, everything. I doubt the NSA is storing every photo on Facebook on their own servers, but it's clearly enough space to store every text message, all browsing history, all texted photos, all emails, all voicemails, all financial transactions into perpetuity for every person on the planet.
Thank you, I had a good laugh: Snowden, Amazon Ring, Social Media, many many more. I sincerely hope that you do not honestly believe that Americans 'have to' abide by the fourth amendment. It's violated with ever increasing frequency and while enforcement is prevalent in some areas it is absent in others.
We need better privacy and social media reform instead of targeting tiktok. Also, why should we listen to Brendan Carr who shouldn't be able to speak for entire FCC. He is from Ajit Pai who takes lobbies from Facebook, Microsoft and Twitter. Looks like they are worried that their accomplices can't steal more data than tiktok. Lastly, the funny thing is Facebook was asking me for photo and phone number for verification which I denied.
More risky? Probably pretty easily. There is legitimate risk though, especially depending on who you are, where you work, who your family is, etc.
The Economist discussed this last week:
>The bigger, underappreciated problem with TikTok is the chance it offers China to manipulate what the app’s vast foreign audience sees. TikTok has gone beyond sunny entertainment to become a major news platform. Open the app and among the songs and skits you may see Supreme Court protests or a flailing Boris Johnson. A quarter of American users say they consider TikTok to be a news source. In countries with weaker mainstream media the share is as high as 50%.
>That makes TikTok’s Chinese ownership a serious worry. The Chinese government actively meddles in domestic media; four years ago it shut down another popular ByteDance app, unamused by the subversive jokes being shared on it. TikTok’s content moderators are outside China. But the app’s algorithm is nurtured in Beijing. A tweak here or there could give more traction to videos questioning covid-19’s Chinese origin, say, or blaming nato for the war in Ukraine. Because each user gets a personalised feed, tampering would be hard to spot.
>TikTok insists no such meddling has taken place. But a company vulnerable to bullying by an authoritarian government obsessed with media manipulation is clearly a risk. Anyone who considers this paranoid should consider China’s record in Hong Kong. Without new safety mechanisms, Western countries might one day have to shut TikTok down.
https://www.economist.com/leaders/2022/07/07/whos-afraid-of-...
Maybe in general we should demand absolute neutrality from these platforms. Ban any sort of promotion of certain producers or sides. Or mandate sufficient warnings covering let's say 33% of screen when such is done. Also if there is fact checking offered it should be open to any actor.
YouTube will manipulate you into watching more content, or maybe buying something. TikTik can, and perhaps already has, manipulate[d] you into believing (and then voting) for certain things. It's an extension of the Chinese state.
What US law requires US companies above a certain minimal (~50 employees) size to "hire" government employees to supervise their operations at the innermost layers?
What US law makes all US corporate intellectual property and information legally owned by the government?
Google barely even complies with subpoenas.
Are we going to see a future where every country/economic block has their own separate social media/search engines like China and Russia?
It's is an attack on users freedom but it could also be a big economic opportunity for those who decide to foster their own internal technological ecosystem.
You are way too late to this part of the discussion.
“My data, my attention, my choice!”?
Why should federal government infringe on individuals right to install apps.
I am not sure what makes the most sense from a foreign policy perspective. But we should be careful about our selective attention.
Asking the stores to remove one app won't do it though, time to adopt EU-like regulations.
It's perfectly fine for our governments and corporations to work together to collect our data.
Western ethics dictate that its NOT ok for Eastern governments and corporations to work together and collect our data. That's a security risk.
For the individual, the analysis is clear. All government involvement is a security risk. The are all immoral, and seek ever greater control and power.
This is nothing about security (either represents an insecure position for the individual). This is about which government has greater power and control over individuals.
It's all so filthy...
Which inversely correlates with the importance of the debate to the participants. We see it in this thread
But I don't want to avoid important topics to people for the sake of civility, rather I would like, as is happening here, for those topics to become the best places for people to learn inquisitive engagement
Now that they have what they need, they use the same excuse for market protectionism, trying to remove TikTok so US alternatives can take its place.
A tactic well-used by the US.
To me, it sounds like our government is just trying to play favorites with domestic evildoers.
Now instead imagine that TT decreased the ranking of content by 10% that went against the agenda of the CCP. Users, the government, and creators never know.
As an aside, what? Is this an opinion? Like... Is the FCC just dumping their shower thoughts on the internet?
I remember Bill Gates once said in one of his interviews that Microsoft showed the source code of Microsoft Windows to various governments around the world in order for them to review it because they were afraid of NSA surveillance. Maybe that's the way for TikTok instead of going full open source but who knows.
“It’s not logging what you’re typing. It’s an anti-fraud measure that checks the rhythm of the way people are typing to ensure it’s not a bot or some other malicious activity.”
I'm not saying that they should be collecting this data, to be clear, just that, from everything I've read, it doesn't seem like they are doing anything uniquely untoward. I'm hoping there's something I'm missing.
I think it's best to assume if it can be used against you, it will.
That's why we pushed back on Apple's CSAM plans to scan images on the device.
Does anyone remember how we even know TikTok is tracking keystrokes? It's because Apple updated their security to notify users when the clipboard was activated by the app, and TikTok was doing it for every keystroke.
It was made by Brendan Carr, who works for the FCC, but the request is not an official FCC request.
Also, China is not the US.
This is a Giant Thing.
China would never, ever, ever allow US companies to have direct influence over their media, so even by basic tit-for-tat rules, this is reasonable.
Moreover, even from a 'trade' perspective, if China does not allow such social media apps from US over there, which denies US companies that Ad revenue, the same should be applied in reverse. No sense in letting TT get Ad revenue, it should go to some entity playing by the same rules US, Europe, Japan etc.
Hiding behind pretexts to make it seem based on law will only add an absurd legal precedent to app developers.
I suggest that the 'deal' should likely involved localized data and internal controls, with oversight, so that the CCP just doesn't have operational access to the data.
Companies at a certain scale have regulatory requirements, it's just like in other industries.
It woke me up to a profoundly different worldview than the one we've been raised with in the west. That's what this is really about, not privacy. Or more precisely, yes security is a concern, but I can't believe that's the only reason, because we've all been lied to so many times that all I hear now is the establishment crying wolf.
In previous, less enlightened times, this might have been seen as treason.
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/facing-hostile-chine...
I mean here brilliant computer engineers build content platforms that are virally additive to the brain. The platforms track every users movement and decision, yet there is zero regulation! What could possibly go wrong here?
Yeah! Why do I have to sponsor hires who happen to be not legal citizen. I have to hop all these hops to hire while your local grocery store doesn't have to sponsor anyone! So annoying /s obviously
Google and FB and beholden to US regulations, and have shown zero evidence that they would defy Uncle Sam. They aren’t the same thing at all.
Ban TikTok now. China banned our apps decades ago. What is taking us so long?
They don’t want the possibility that another country could be doing this, even though there’s no evidence China is doing this, like Snowden unleashed for the USA. They could solve this with a law requiring data on US citizens be stored in the USA but then that’ll fuck up 5 eyes agreements for them and they can’t have that.
Personally: burn them all down, I would be fine with this happening because we need to eliminate all social media, period.
Same for trying to ban Turkey selling drones, Europe using Huawei, Europe buying Russian gas instead of American LNG, etc.
As far as I can tell, this is just some random commissioner (who also wants to get rid of net neutrality and Section 230) making a political statement, and nothing more. Yes, you should be worried about big companies collecting your data. Yes, you should be worried that the CCP has a direct line to VERY influenceable kids. Both of these are legal; the first amendment guarantees the right to publish propaganda that is potentially bad for national security. If you want to stop propaganda, start investing in education, Congress.
I don't see how TikTok is doing anything out of the ordinary here and why they should be specifically targeted. Everyone is doing the same things they're doing. I get that the US is scared that China is going to replace them as "the superpower". Getting rid of some social media app is not going to change that. We're closing the barn door after the horse has bolted. We lost this battle decades ago, and it's too late to stop it.
I really feel like this is a token stance against China and not a whole lot else. They won't stop buying our soybean exports if we take a hard line against TikTok, whereas they would if we took a hard line stance against stealing American intellectual property or invading Taiwan, which is the problem we're actually worried about. So nothing changes, but when Commissioner Carr runs for some political office (his term is up next year, and I'm guessing Biden isn't going to re-appoint him), he has some token "I did a thing" to point to. (And knowing his political affiliation, "I hurt people that aren't white" is probably a good selling point for his candidacy. Sad that such a thing is true in 2022.)
If someone wants to do something about this, Congress should make some laws. "It's illegal at the federal level to bypass device privacy protections to sell ads." or "It's illegal for a US company to help law enforcement track users." or "We don't import goods from countries that have concentration camps that kill ethnic minorities." This will never happen. Congress loves it when companies bypass device protections to sell ads, and they demand that companies like Apple break the security on their devices to aid law enforcement.
Finally, if the FCC really wanted Apple and Google to delete an app from the app store, I doubt that posting a poorly-researched rant to Twitter would be how they go about doing it. I'd be surprised if Tim and Sundar even read this letter.
Maximize division, influence elections, spread misinformation, censorship, the like. Already happening in US-owned social networks, imagine what China can do on a China-owned network.
From a geopolitical viewpoint this makes complete sense. You don't want your rival to have a backdoor into influencing/manipulating/discovering how people in your nation are behaving, especially when you consider how much data about sensitive information might be getting onto tiktok, like videos made by military service members on bases, videos showing gaps/issues/etc in infrastructure, or at ports and other locations.
As for me, I'm an American and it is in my best interests that USA stays top dog. I didn't immigrate here to downgrade lol, so I want USA to do whatever it needs to be the top player.
I am really (I am european) pissed off by the fact that someone decided we needed a war with Ukraine when we do not have anything for/against Russia or Ukraine in principle and they start to make pressure to all private business, etc. to make them do what these people want us to do. Literally in Spain I saw even bad press for people selling clothes (Mango) or yoghurts (Danone) just because they kept selling those products to normal Russian people. So govts can sell/send weapons to Ukraine with our taxes and without our permission at the same time they encourage and point to private company doing regular business so that they stop selling there? Seriously?
I really do not accept that, I want to have friends from wherever, go with whoever and do business with whom I deem appropriate without asking permission to anyone. If I am not selling intelligence for spying or weapons, what is wrong? I really do not get it.
Ask yourself what Ukranian citizens would answer to that question.
You are arguing you should continue to help fund the war, the weapons, the rapes and murders by Russian forces while they invade Ukraine.
You might have dressed it up in pretty prose, but your position is "guess a little genocide is just something we have to live with".
To me it makes no sense, honestly.
The reason that systems of economic sanctions exist is to provide alternatives to war. Europe learned some very rough lessons in the 20th century and earlier, leading up to the formation of the EU and before that the formation of the UN. These institutions and other institutions were created by people with memories of large-scale war fresh in their minds.
I am not talking about this. I am talking about the fact that it is an oligarchy who chooses whether we go to war or not. I do not think most spanish think that Spain should be involved in a war that is at the other side of Europe where either of those country did anything to us. This is what I mean.
These wars respond to oligarchies interests, not to normal citizens interests.
I do not know if you get my point. Maybe there are real problems in Ukraine, well there are. But how is that really a reason to involve Spain? Why? Diplomacy, yes, sending weapons no. What if Russia decides we are in a black list later? Were we able to make a choice? Bc this involves our security and our economy and affects normal citizens.
So there is necessarily someone interested in this that is not normal, average people like me.
If you find this truth to be offensive, tragic, or overly inconvenient, well... so do all who live to see such times, as the guy with the long gray beard said.
If we are going to make mistakes, I hope we make new mistakes, instead of making the same mistakes from 100 years ago.
I get the paranoia around China, I honestly do. I'm not at all unsupportive of the Chinese regime either. But this "one rule for us another for them" principle really needs to stop.
We need to learn to find a saner middle ground if we're ever to advance as a species.
Edit: I guess we can just see if any research has been done. If you trust this source, Americans seem to support (60% supporting versus 10% against) GDPR style data regulations [1].
1. https://www.insiderintelligence.com/content/americans-say-br...
I appreciate from a high level the two questions overlap in this specific case study. However it's the framing of the question which really matters here, not the practical overlap.
US needs friends just like everybody else, alone it can project only so much influence. You don't keep friends by screwing them over continuously and having an untrustworthy upper hand over you all the time. And once we're not friends anymore, china may be an attractive alternative, whether you like it or not.
> But this "one rule for us another for them" principle really needs to stop. Why would any nation treat foreign companies equal to their own? I don't see the problem especially when its from an adversary or a nation who's companies are an extension of their government.
I was talking about the commentary I see on HN. I don't think everyday Americans care what China does either, let alone the EU.
Because they don't operate under the same rules. Tiktok isn't some free market startup at this point. Their CEO is ex Xiami and clearly a party member. I would bet a lot of money the CCP is putting unlimited resources into spreading Tiktok and harvesting data, plus manipulating sentiment of tiktok users.
This is NOT what US based companies do. They don't have government resources, and they sell ads. And the US government doesn't give a shit if snapchat or whoever else destroys facebook. They are not going to bail them out, or help them.
So it's not the same, it's not a fair fight, and in the background what the data is used for is probably completely different.
I would argue that admitting that the only way to convince Chinese apps to not track American users is to ban them (mostly because it's eating their own dog food with TikTok that's nowadays much more popular than America's own spying apps) doesn't sound much top dog, more like small dog barking at the big one.
America's spying "apps" aren't "apps", they're called operating systems and firmwares.
Good for you, but try imagine hearing this from a Chinese national.
"Whatever it needs" to do...
Like, for example, retake control of Taiwan.
https://eurasiantimes.com/perturbed-by-2nd-incursion-china-w...
And every single country on this planet has baggage. I have people in my family who are living who remember what it feels like to be considered sub-human by British imperialists as they allowed famines. On the grand scheme of things, if we add up the sins and good deeds, the USA has done more to improve the lives of people who are here than other places. It is one of the major reasons my family and I immigrated here. Is it perfect? No. But it is a place where a bunch of different types of people attempt to build something together. Gridlock sucks, sometimes it feels pretty awful, but just speaking personally for myself there's nowhere else in the world where someone like me (with my skin color, religious preferences, etc.) would be able to go as far, or further.
For all its faults, the USA has
- elected an African American president twice
- fought itself and destroyed its own people and cities over slavery
- helped stop 2 world wars
- most of the top companies and talent
- created a sense of world stability where people for the most part chill the f out when they see and want $USD
And it has also caused some problems along the way, I'm sure you can name many of them. But again, in 2022, when I do a simple calculation of where I (with my own baggage and attributes) would most prosper, I can't think of another country. I have been to Japan, loved it there, but it isn't the melting pot that America is. Again these are just my opinions, as someone who immigrated to the USA and is proud to call themselves a US citizen.
Realistically, you have it backwards. In some areas, the education is fine. In many - probably the majority - it simply isn't and you'll be indebted for the rest of your life unless you are really lucky. We (Americans) pay teachers poorly and treat a number of students like criminals while punishing those same students in ways that they cannot get the same education as their peers. And this is after we've failed to make sure children have food and housing so that they can put effort towards learning.
"Lacking in some areas"... yeah. With a generous definition of some.
This is a bit of a fallacy. The institutions/administration from top-to-bottom is important. For example, Scandinavia never had a black/brown head of state but still the police would not treat you badly like it happens in US. Yes, I have lived there.
Another example, India had head of state from all different religions but does not mean all is fine and clean.
The institutions are important - not the person.
PS: In principle, you as US citizen want your country to top dog. All fine. At the end if every country thinks they themselves want to unilaterally be top - conflicts happen.
At some point one needs to think universally - and establish a level.
As an outsider, to me the American society doesn't seem like a sustainable one. And it corroborates the fact that so many Americans are emigrating out of America.
https://www.city-journal.org/school-shootings-horrific-but-s...
“the annual odds that an American child will die in a mass shooting at school are nearly 10 million to 1, about the odds of being killed by lightning or of dying in an earthquake”
But keep in mind, while Americans find it to be a commonality, it's rare to see news like this in other parts of the world: "...but students don’t need the active-shooter drills now conducted in over 95 percent of the nation’s schools..."
Active shooter drills? In schools? You folk live in a first world country but act like you are living in an active warzone
"Active shooter drills? In schools? You folk live in a first world country but act like you are living in an active warzone"
These things happen due to the same kind of fear mongering and statistical illiteracy you demonstrate in your comments. School shootings are horrible, but extremely rare. It would, of course, be better if we didn't have them, just like it would be better if we didn't have earthquakes, electrical storms, plane crashes, etc. but it's not rational to make life choices based on 1 in 10 million events.
You're also wrong about support for gun control. A majority of the US population supports stronger gun control. Unfortunately, in our political system, that's not sufficient to make it happen.
> A majority of the US population supports stronger gun control. Unfortunately, in our political system, that's not sufficient to make it happen.
Isn't US a democracy? If majority of the population supports stronger gun control, it should be easy to pass.
Anyway, I don't mean to put you on the defensive. I understand that you love your country.
Also, it's a big country. When you have a population of hundreds of millions, a lot of things that are extremely unlikely to ever impact an individual citizen will nonetheless happen on a regular basis somewhere in the country.
"Isn't US a democracy? If majority of the population supports stronger gun control, it should be easy to pass."
If only it were that simple.
"Anyway, I don't mean to put you on the defensive. I understand that you love your country."
I love some things and hate other things. I just think the discussion should be based on facts rather than emotion and hyperbole.
I agree that school shootings are a problem here and would like to see stronger gun control as much as anyone, but it isn't helpful to exaggerate the (very low) level of danger kids face in school.
Interestingly enough, this is the same pro CCP argument but applied to the US.
I will say that the melting pot is true and that the US is one of the most immigration friendly places I've been to. (from a cultural side, not from a paperwork side). In other places you can be there for 20 years and never be considered a true citizen while in the US people would consider you a true American.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_websites_blocked_in_ma...
China has unelected* leaders that at least in theory holds only Communist ideals.
While flawed, in a republic at least you get to vote for your leaders, and thus choose what ideals you like the best.
Of course republicanism or democracy does not preclude a country from committing horrible acts, but they are cleaned up much sooner, and those who are responsible for it are thrown out of office (and sometimes even into jail). Not so in authoritarian countries like China.
* You can technically vote in China, but due to its authoritarian nature only one party is allowed and you're expected to uphold the party line.
How so? Both parties are all in on the prison-industrial scam. Likewise for healthcare, etc. I agree that the US has a largely 'liberal' system, in the classical sense of 'liberal'. I.e. capital trumps human beings.
And you ignore the fact that the US imprisons a much higher percentage of its population than other countries. Part and parcel of the authoritarianism (which is only increasing).
Edit: To answer your claim that:
> “(...) the US imprisons a much higher percentage of its population than other countries. Part and parcel of the authoritarianism.”
No, it's not. Every guilty prisoner in the USA had a public trial with a lawyer before they were sent to jail. In other words they had due process which is the mark of a liberal democracy. On the other hand due process is constantly broken in authoritarian regimes. A great example is, again, China, where you can be "vanished" just for having the wrong opinion, if you're not simply sent to a re-education camp that is for all intents and purposes a modern style of concentration camp.
Before you even try, can the USA be accused of the same thing? Why yes, because it imprisons enemy combatants which are then subjected to cruel an unusual treatment, for instance at Guantanamo Bay (which is amazingly still open for business). But crucially the USA does not do this to American citizens, so while they act horribly authoritarian towards external enemies, they do not act authoritarian against their own citizens, not even towards domestic political opponents.
-- Put a million Uighurs in camps
-- Persecutes followers of pretty much all religions --- Muslims, Christians, Buddhists, Falun Gong, etc
-- Flat-out censors anything that offends them in the slightest
-- Puts whoever they want into detention with no kind of due process, from small-time activists to billionaires
-- Harvests the organs of (not previously dead) prisoners
-- Had drones peering into apartment windows during the latest COVID lockdown, broadcasting the literal message "control your soul's desire for freedom"
-- and of course is an autocracy in which Xi Jinping has absolute power
The USA is far from perfect but one thing we learned from Trump in 2016 and Bloomberg in 2020 is that money isn't everything in American politics. The parties do have major differences and bad actors can be held accountable.
I'm not American, but this equivalence that some people like to draw between the governments of China and the USA drives me crazy.
(Though viewing China as a full autocracy with absolute power of a single individual is extremely simplistic)
> (Though viewing China as a full autocracy with absolute power of a single individual is extremely simplistic)
It's overly simplistic, but less "overly" than it was 10 years ago.
People online vastly overestimate the actual effect of money on political results, naturally disregarding all the donations made to candidates that lose and ignoring races where the lesser funded candidates win.
If Americans wanted a leftist government, they’d vote for it, simple as that. And yet even in the most left leaning states and cities in the nation , leftist principles have failed to gain much electoral ground.
And yet, Russia heavily used Facebook to influence/manipulate American behaviour during the election.
If not, do you distinguish between companies that are homed in the US and the US government?
Second, it's not necessarily in one's best interest to live in a "top dog" country. There are plenty of happy and prosperous people living outside the USA. The USA ranks 26th for median wealth. To give another example, even if China took the top dog spot, the average US citizen would still be better off than the average Chinese citizen.
Thirdly, I don't think the US remaining top dog is a realistic objective in the long term. In my opinion, it would be smarter to lead by example knowing that your successor will be judged by the standard you set.
I think the parent post means top dog in military and power sense, not welfare of citizens which is all well and good until another nation is trying to undermine your core values.
> Your successor will be judged by the standard you set
What successor are we thinking of here? Is that China? India? Russia? These are all very scary regimes.
gp's argument has no parallel to appeasement.
That's what I was referring to. Not appeasement exactly but seems like similar logic.
Making enemies of people who are not enemies is one of the stupidest moves imaginable. It is hard to overstate how mistaken that sort of mistake would be.
All this ignoring for the moment the general Western enterprise of erstwhile colonialism and current economic neocolonialism that makes the destruction wrought upon developing nations by direct war/attacks pale in comparison.
Limiting ourselves to the currently existing states, India has annexed Hyderabad, Junagardh, Dadra, and Nagar Haveli, while China has invaded India and Vietnam, and is presently annexing the South China Sea. This doesn't excuse the US actions in Iraq, but it does show that they are less unique than you claim.
Now compare this to Afghanistan.
The same Afghanistan that was invaded by the Soviet Union?
If you consider Taiwan a country, that's technically true but misleading. China would have invaded long ago if the US weren't capable or (claiming to be) willing to defend it.
Feel free to prove otherwise; note that Chinese statements are quite often misquoted.
“The PLA [People’s Liberation Army] would have no choice but to fight … and crush any attempt of Taiwan independence, safeguarding national sovereignty and territorial integrity.”
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/6/10/china-tells-us-it-w...
My biggest concern is domestic policy, given that being "top dog" would probably imply a general cultural and political movement towards whichever regime wins.
USA has done awful things, and nowadays seems to have a very uncertain future but values such as freedom of speech, freedom of religion are important to humanity and happiness imo and they still stand in the US despite all the craziness.
China and Russia shouldn't need any explanation in that respect, I can point to many sources. India's BJP is almost openly persecuting Muslims and doctoring history to be more Hindu.
Wealth is also a function of age - older people tend to have more - and that ranking is not normalized by such extraneous factors.
The US is number 2 by median income, and number 1 for median disposable income, both of which are pretty important, especially to younger people that want cash flow to enjoy life.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposable_household_and_per_c...
not sure how accurate wikipedia is here, but I've seen this claim elsewhere
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposable_and_discretionary_i...
Apparently what I meant above is discretionary income, which would include all fundamental bills/payments such as healthcare etc. Disposable income does not include those, it only includes income plus direct payments from the government.
What would interest me is discretionary income, which includes healthcare, mortgages etc. plus education, public transport, daycare, energy and I'm possibly forgetting some fundamental things.
"Disposable" is very much misleading here. If you have 1000$ "disposable" income but you still have to pay for or cannot afford all of the mentioned things then you are in worse shape than someone who has 500$ "disposable" income but can lean on public infrastructure and subsidies for those things. The difference can be quite massive.
The reason I'm specifically suspicious of the US here is that public infrastructure seems to be quite a bit behind and fundamental things like healthcare is substantially more expensive than in some of the most developed countries.
>The following table represents data from OECD's "median disposable income per person" metric, which includes all forms of income as well as taxes and transfers in kind from governments for benefits such as healthcare and education and is equivalised by dividing by the square root of household size. This metric, in addition to using a median rather than a mean, uses "data calculated according to the new OECD terms of reference"; compared to previous terms of reference, these "include a more detailed breakdown of current transfers received and paid by households as well as a revised definition of household income, including the value of goods produced for own consumption as an element of self-employed income." As OECD displays median disposable incomes in each country's respective currency, the values were converted here using the World Bank's PPP conversion factors, accounting for each country's cost of living in the year that the disposable median income was recorded. Unless noted otherwise, all data refers to 2019. Data are in United States dollars at current prices and current purchasing power parity for private consumption for the reference year.
[1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10]
[0,0,0,0,5,6,11,11,11,11]
Another example that I know fully well is Brazil: the mean is 8,560 BRL and the median is 8,220 BRL for monthly salaries, that is, very close. But these monthly salaries are known to vary widely from 2,170 BRL (USD 417) to 38,200 BRL (USD 7349), so hardly anyone is really making 8220 or close to that.
Yes, they do. I am a PhD mathematician with decades of work using these tools. I am quite clear on the meanings and shortcoming of all sorts of indicators. I am also aware how real world data trends instead of cooked up examples that don't match reality.
Median is a common value used by economists precisely because it more likely shows what a person makes as opposed to the mean, especially in cases of high inequality.
> If you don't believe
Yes, you can make up all sorts of nonsense. Not a single country follows the distributions you made up.
>Another example that I know fully well is Brazil:
You conclusion does not at all follow from your claim. Or from the actual data.
> so hardly anyone is really making [the median] or close to that
Well, by definition, over half of people make the median or more. Is that hardly anyone?
If you look at the data [1] (income by decile in Brazil), besides the 50% making median income or higher, another 30% of the people make within 30% of median. That leaves 20% of the people making under 70% of the median income.
What is your definition of "hardly anyone"?
Look at the data. Clearly median is much more accurate than mean for explaining how much people make, as this example showed.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1251075/average-monthly-...
???
Did you compute them? do you know how?
The Brazil data I just posted has median around 1383, mean of 2308.36, which is 65% larger.
An interesting test: compute with details the median and mean of the data I just posted. I already gave you the answers. I think you don't understand these terms.
That you don't like the outcome of the most two commonly used indicators is not the fault of the indicators - it's the result of you wanting to put things in the data that are not there.
Your claim about Brazil having "hardly anyone", which I showed was nonsense, shows exactly what you're trying to do - put things in data that simply are not there (and in the case of your claim, are mathematically invalid no matter the income distribution).
>Now, if you start using the percentiles as you're doing here, then you are looking deeper into the data
Percentiles have the exact same graph as dollars, or pesos, or anything you desire.
% = exact$ / total $.
So they have the exact same graph, merely a different label. Do you understand this? The % of total income versus income shows nothing different, there is no "deeper into the data" or "more accurate and reflective of reality" for this.
It's simply scaling ALL the numbers by a constant. No one changes place. No income compared to another changes in ratio. There is no subtle nuance pulled out of anywhere.
>which just proves my point.
Is your point that you don't know what any of these terms mean? Then yes, you proved your point. Mean, median, percent, ratio, decile, all the terms related to income - you have screwed them all up beyond reason.
Don't bother replying until you answer the questions I poste last time:
Do you admit 50% of people in Brazil make median income or more? What amount of people did you mean by "hardly anyone"?
Also answer: is the graph of income by % the same geometric shape as income by $, or yen, or peso, or any currency you care to pick, thereby giving no "looking deeper into the data"?
You're pretending to not understand what I said. The figure for median income of 8K is very different from what most people make in Brazil, because a lot of people will make less than that, and a lot make more than that. So, the median has little value, because there is just a small group that makes close to that figure compared to the other groups that make more or less. It is a society with large inequality that is polarized on the two sides, instead of concentrating on the middle. My point is that this measure is more useful for societies that have more equality, such as a few countries in Europe. For the US, the median is less and less useful to get a clear picture.
I see you've moved from "hardly any" to "a lot". Nice goal post move. I bet if you look at the actual data enough you might get to what the data shows.
The majority of people, for every country for which there is data, are close to the median income. End of story. You so far have posted so many simple math errors that it's hard to know where you got your understanding of these things.
> It is a society with large inequality that is polarized on the two sides, instead of concentrating on the middle.
There is no such country. Don't believe me? You can check this yourself:
[1] has all the data to check. Select the datasets showing income share. Select them, pick years, say 2016-2021. Download the CSV. There are 114 countries in the dataset for which all 5 quintiles of income are available for recent years.
For each compute the median. Then look at how close the middle 60% of the people are to the median.
If you really want to see that distributions are not what you believe, graph every single one. If you need tools, jupyterlab using python, pandas, and matplotlib make this task pretty easy.
In EVERY single one you will find the majority of people are decently close to the median. I just checked. Do it yourself so you stop believing all this mystical non-existent income distribution where people are not majority near the median.
I know you're convinced there are income distributions like those you made up, but there simply are not. It is empirical fact.
So, if you want to continue to claim what you are - do what I told you to do, pick the country you think best supports your claim, and post the actual data.
Until then you are simply wrong.
This is why economists, even those working in inequality, start with the median income when discussing income. It is the best point indicator of what the majority of people in a society earn.
GP even mentioned the reason in their post.
For example, in the US the median network for an 69 year old (right around retirement) is over 33 times as much as an 18 year old [1], with values in between spread as expected. So a society with significantly more old people (such as Japan) would have higher median wealth but not necessarily more income (for example, US pays more than Japan on average [2], but we're younger).
So, if you move to Japan from the US assuming you'll end up richer, you may be making a mistake because you made that choice based on comparing things incorrectly.
This is why it matters.
[1] https://dqydj.com/net-worth-by-age-calculator-united-states/
[2] https://countryeconomy.com/countries/compare/japan/usa?sc=XE...
Ito does, it's PPP adjusted. Just look it up instead of projecting flaws to obtain a result you desire.
>My point was that there are many countries, including ones that are tiny in comparison (definitely not "top dog"), that enjoy a comparable standards of living.
I agree completely. All the top countries would be good places to live, with tradeoffs here and there.
But for most of the world, the US is a terrific alternative to where they are, at least if one wants to raise their standard of living.
https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/field/gini-index-coef...
Last I checked, poverty line in the US is at the 85th percentile in world income.
And most importantly, most of that inequality and poverty levels are what are called pre-tax-transfer: they do not account the value given the poor and lower incomes via benefits, which lowers a lot of that inequality (and makes our poor even richer than most of the planet).
For fun, pick a country that you think is better for lower income people, and let's look into it :)
Inequality is relative. Absolute income means a significant amount, even more so to the poor.
I guess you'd have to be an idiot like Trump to even suggest such a thing.
Most of the studies about “people are irrational” are times psychologists fail to realize that people are acting on an iterated (rather than single round) game — and enforcing reciprocity through their “irrational” acts.
We know at an instinctive level that reciprocity is necessary in game theory — eg, Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma.
You always start out by cooperating but if someone defects on you, you defect on them.
Your argument is so general as to be almost meaningless. It can be used to justify not responding to almost anything.
The Chinese "elite capture" program is well-documented. They intentionally ensnare govt & business elites (and family members) in extremely lucrative deals with China to ensure they remain pro-China's interests. And there are some big names in there (Bidens, Pelosi, and McConnell etc).
The media doesnt talk about this corruption as they all have movie studios and want to sell their movies into China.
Its why there may be occasional discussion of the problem (like here) but for some inexplicable reason, simple and obvious steps are never taken.
The political will simply isn't there due to elite capture IMO.
This is true, but it only works if everyone does it. If one country is the main one that safeguards trade, releases costly scientific research (and open source codebases) for nothing and plays as well as it can, but others don't (and even look down on the safeguarding country for spending so much on defence instead of bread/circuses) then it takes a massive force of goodwill on the part of that one country to keep doing it.
(I am not a US citizen/resident, to pre-empt the standard ad hominem :)
By what metrics? As an example, longevity is slightly higher in China than in US (77.30 years vs 77), it is GROWING in China while decreasing in US, or china has a transportation system that is orders of magnitude better than the US one. Ever heard of the high speed train system and how quickly was it built?
Median income alone isn't enough to judge the quality of life of a country. I'd rather be poorer but live longer and in a country that works also for non-millionaires, but you can take more money with the lower longevity if you prefer.
In China if you're the wrong religion they put your men in prison camps and assign a rapist to sleep in bed with your women and indoctrinate them into the communist party.
If you are in prison, China will murder you and sell your organs.
In China the labor conditions are so bad they have to install "suicide nets" in factories because so many people try to jump out of windows or off roofs to kill themselves.
America has MANY warts, but there's really no comparison.
And US is Russia with better PR? :-D
So the answer is that even in purchasing power parity terms, the average American is 4x richer.
The pont being that you can still have somewhat higher life standards with less purchasing power but a stronger social state.
Not everyone lives in Shanghai or Beijing you know.
What do you mean by USA though? It's not a monolithic object and has plenty of rivals too. Also if USA is top dog, it may get freedom to do whatever it wants to you, be careful about what you want. When was the last time absolute power produced good results?
It never makes sense from a human rights standpoint.
Are you sure? Several months ago I've woke up to learn, that my country start to kill civilians of other country with bombs, missiles and shelling, to become "top player". And, what is even worse, many of my fellow citizens support it.
Now I'm trying to leave this country for some other, which don't have ambitions to be top-player but don't kill civilians and don't attack malls and hospitals.
> Are you sure?
Would you rather have someone else / some other country (other than the US) be the hegemon? If so, who? And are they willing to do it?
And many top players.
MAD, as insane as it may sound, actually works. Everyone being fearful of massive retaliatory strikes keeps everyone in line. You get all sorts of bad behavior when nations have no fear of massive retaliatory strikes.
Regional powers (which is what we would devolve to) are demonstrating exactly what the world would look like without America running the show: conquest and genocide in Ukraine, saber rattling in the south china sea, genocide of the Kurds.
We don't have an interest in solving for all the world's ills, and we are the source of many.
But the world has been less stable and more dangerous in the past.
What you are espousing is a luxury belief.
The only difference is that they were careful to not do it directly, or do it in secret. Exactly the same way they are doing in Ukraine now, where they avoid giving the weapons directly to Ukraine, but instead they use the well exercised muscle of influence.
Promoting a better way for countries to adopt, partnering with them in economic activity and education, and helping them to defend themselves when neighbors try to use aggression to oppose that partnership is a much better mechanism for bettering the world than outright war and conquering other nations.
Does the US do shady stuff that bites them later? Yes. Is the world overall better with the US as one of the biggest out there for now? Also yes. Both things can be true.
By all means shine a light on, and oppose the shady stuff but don't make the mistake of thinking that the world doesn't need a strong entity who can both promote and also defend better ways to govern.
We're less extractive than the alternative, and the US having an effective monopoly on violence has been a stabilizing force.
Europeans really don't deserve a voice in this whole conversation given that they rely entirely on the US for protection. Germany's decision to build Nord Stream 2 demonstrates how detached they are from realpolitik.
Meanwhile with America running the show: entire regions - South America and Middle East - largely destroyed, with tens of millions of victims.
America isn’t the “world police”, they are just the main bully.
Middle East has also been invaded by Europe and Russia
China has been running concentration camps on middle eastern (for now the ones within their borders)
The effect of their existence as a power base then cascading into politics, etc.
That said, most of South America's recent woes have generally been economic (Guatamala, Venezuela), and the rise of Chavez (and the US not directly acting against his movement for decades) undercuts the "US is responsible for what happens in South America" position.
War is a constant.
It was in the past.
It is a constant today.
And it will be in the future.
All nations are, at heart, "evil" in this regard. Essentially, nations are just scaled up street gangs with more destructive weapons.
The only proven method of keeping these street gangs from getting too far out of hand, of keeping all our war at the level of low intensity conflict, is MAD. Nations behave only at the barrel of a gun. To argue that America is "evil" is as irrelevant as it is to argue that America is "good".
For instance, I know that all nations can be said to be "evil" at root, and "good" at root. Here's the thing though, do you think it matters to me if China is "evil" and "good"? Of course not, they're just a different street gang. The US has a responsibility to humanity to keep them in line. Should it matter to China that the US street gang is "evil" and "good"? No. They have a responsibility to humanity to keep the US in line.
In the age of weapons of mass destruction, only mutually assured destruction has ensured these street gangs don't come into conflict. Relying on sunshine and rainbows and unicorns that crap out skittles is nonsense. This is not a children's game of "good guys-bad guys". There are no good guys or bad guys. Only nations, (street gangs), pursuing interests. They are kept in line only at the barrel of a gun. Take that gun away and they will run rampant.
The best way, in my mind to minimize conflict is through a global monopoly on violence, one street gang to rule them all
This is what the last 30 years have been
Only they haven't.
The reason the US and Russia haven't run rampant the last 30 years is because the US and Russia can blow each other away. So Russia satisfies itself with Georgia and now Ukraine. And the US satisfies itself with those nations in the MidEast region. Remove Russia, and the US would have been all over the yard. Remove the US, and Russia would have been all over the yard.
And now with the rise of China, mankind is even safer. Not only that, but more of mankind have begun to enjoy the benefits of safety. The US and Russia were perfectly willing to fight a proxy war in Korea 70 years ago. They wouldn't dare do that today. Why? The Chinese presence in any MAD calculations.
Today Africa is much safer, it is developing much faster. A large part of the reason for that is the presence of China. Now instead of proxy wars, the great powers compete to see who can deliver Africa the most undersea bandwidth for instance. This is a much better situation for Africans than the situation that existed when only the US and Russia were superpowers. And this situation exists because of MAD. It proves that an armed society is a polite society.
The US, China and Russia are all fulfilling their responsibility to keep the peace by maintaining lethal arsenals of weapons of mass destruction so that they are each confident in their own ability to destroy the others. And that is good for all of us "little people" in the world. Whether we are American, Chinese or Russian. (And even good for us if we are Korean, African, or from South America.)
North Korea is insane in its own way, but hereditary personality cults do have a history of acting in the interest of self-preservation.
Basically, betting that there were scenarios where the US wouldn't risk escalation to nuclear war in response to a calibrated Russian tactical nuclear strike in a third party country, thus allowing Russian nuclear effects to nullify superior western precision weapons without consequence.
https://thebulletin.org/2022/03/russian-military-doctrine-ca...
At this point there is no support for the idea that US weapons have superior precision. The Russian campaign is showing the opposite.
A) NATO's air campaign in the Kosovo War (1999) certainly scared the shit out of Russia.
B) That Russia is currently bombarding Ukrainian cities with repurposed surface to air missiles doesn't inspire a lot of confidence in their ability to produce sufficient quantities of precision missiles for even a moderate scale conflict.
C) The majority of Ukrainian platforms at this point still aren't Western, and thus incapable of firing NATO precision ordinance.
Here’s a good video showing the difference.
https://mobile.twitter.com/revishvilig/status/15402647613292...
"Stable" in some kind of Platonic absolute sense, or "more stable that things would have otherwise been"?
But this is just an examination of practical reality. Ideally we wouldn't have a hegemon. Ideally maybe we wouldn't have countries either.
As an American, I would love for the EU to get more unified and take the reins, but in the mean time, a US hegemon is required for global stability
This is laughable. The US initiated way too many wars and other offensive / disruptive actions. If you call this stability then I have a bridge to sell. The only stability it provides is it's own. Well maybe some to the allies.
During pax americana, we've seen massive increases in quality of life around the world. Do you think the world is going to be more stable as the US retreats and other players fill the power vacuum and we have to deal with the rising threat of climate change?
Non military conflicts could be better than being poodle under the threat of war which will happen if the world is ran by a single country
Do you think the world would rather have China in charge?
I assume you are going to claim that we can either have no major power or that the EU could be that major power. I highly doubt either of those could occur.
I believe some wars can be just and as such enforcing things through the military can be just. The idea that military use has to be bad is ridiculous.
>"Do you think the world would rather have China in charge?"
I prefer the world "ruled" by few major entities / blocks. No need to be either US or China alone.
>"I believe some wars can be just and as such enforcing things through the military can be just."
Like bombing the country that refuses to trade in certain currency?
Typically when that happens I have to click the time posted on a post and then I have the option to reply. Not sure what causes that.
>I prefer the world "ruled" by few major entities / blocks. No need to be either US or China alone.
I don't think that is possible.
Do you have any historical examples where this has happened? Please don't bring up a time when there were multiple major powers but they were so far away they couldn't reach the other, assuming they even knew the other existed.
If you do not have any examples of this occurring, why do you think it would work in the present?
>Like bombing the country that refuses to trade in certain currency?
I am not suggesting that the US has only done good and just things. Only that the US is better than China.
China is currently taking over Hong Kong (despite having a 50 year agreement for autonomy starting in 1997), attempting to take land from India, trying to dam a river that provides water to India, is consistently threatening Taiwan, etc. China does the same crap. And all of that is within the last few years. If you want to go back further we can.
I would also note several of the US invasions were not in fact US invasion but NATO invasions. This likely means one of those blocks of country you support to be a world power were involved with these invasions.
Let's talk about internal affairs. China has a terrible record and potentially holds the record for causing the most deaths of its own citizens. Obviously they don't care about the people. What about freedom? Do Chinese citizens have more freedom than US citizens? Why would China treat people who are not its own citizens better than the citizens?
The US is better for the world and the people under its control than China.
Once again you are pushing a choice that should not be there in a first place. I do not want to choose between either. Period. If you let any country run free and control the others it will devolve to a dictator. So I prefer to have the US, Europe, China, BRICS and whatever else is coming.
Do you have any historical examples where this has happened? Please don't bring up a time when there were multiple major powers but they were so far away they couldn't reach the other, assuming they even knew the other existed.
Also, you are advocating for more than 2 blocks. As far as I can tell there are only two super powers right now.
You can believe whatever you want. We have totally different point of view on subject and do not have to agree.
Until one thinks they can get an edge over another one by jumping them:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_wars
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Military_history_by_c...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Military_history_by_p...
You have your own take on a subject and we do not have to agree
The wildly different allocation of resources and population (on a country border basis) suggests some country will always have the means to be hegemonic (especially if other contenders all decide not to be).
Which in practice means there will always be a hegemony.
If the US ceded its role tomorrow, China would step into it. If China ceded it the day after, Russia or the EU would step into it. (I'm skipping over India and Japan, as both seem to have cultural aversions to strongly projecting power overseas)
Счастливо тебе, и если тебе надо помочь, послай мне dm, не знаю что могу делать, но могу стараться помогать.
Прости за мой плохой русский, меня научали мальчики когда я жил в Украине на обмене в средней школе.
All will be well soon - the world is changing fast, and there are opportunities to work anywhere you want.
So long, and if you need help, send me a dm, I don't know what I can do, but I can try to help.
Sorry about my bad Russian, I was taught by the boys when I lived in Ukraine on a high school exchange.
I wrote a bit about this the other day: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32131878
Avec la technologie actuelle, nous devrions pouvoir parler dans la langue de notre choix sans problème.
Well said.
Good luck man, there aren't many such countries. I live in slovenia, we're like tiny, point a finger at putin and meanwhile have soldiers in syria.
You should stay and make a change.
> When the war began, some sensible Russian people had stated that they were ashamed to be a Russians. Others had stated that they were not responsible for Putin's actions, because he was always a usurper and they were always against him. I think the both sides are wrong. On the one side, it is foolish to be ashamed of your nationality, just as to be proud of it, because the origin of a person does not depend on his will. Only your actions can be a sources of your pride or shame. On the other side, unlike the legal responsibility that may be personal only, moral responsibility may be both personal and collective. Personal responsibility is a responsibility for own acts that constitute the objective aspect of a crime. Collective responsibility is incurred when a persons have not done all measures within their power to avoid the situation in which the crime is committed on behalf of society of which these persons are a part.
> Just some examples. Anna Politkovskaya and Boris Nemtsov are not responsible for this war, because they resisted Putin's regime, fought for Russian civil society, and, as a result, gave their lives. Alexei Navalny is alive but he survived an assassination attempt, was imprisoned and is still fighting Putin's regime, so he is not responsible for this war. Yuri Nesterenko is not responsible for this war too, because he distanced himself from Russian society in advance, stating in 2010 that Russia was always absolute and pure evil growing out of mentality of Russians, and he had for ever left Russia and was granted asylum in USA.
> Quite simply, if you want to avoid the collective responsibility you should stake your life on the line fighting for your society and become a hero or sever all ties with your society in advance and become an outcast.
> As for me personally, I have not severed all ties with Russian society and I'm alive and even not jailed. Therefore, I share collective responsibility for all what is going on now.
> My beliefs have evolved, and there are some things seemed right earlier but not seem right now. I was constant in one thing – in categorical opposition to Putin's regime. I always believed that the expression of discontent is not enough, because words don't change the world. I carried out actions using all tools available to me. I was a lawyer (even good, in opinion of some people) and tried to uphold the law, rights and freedoms, not just as a representative of a party to the proceedings – for money, but also on my own behalf – for an idea. Fight for an idea has brought nothing but problems; however, I knew what I was about. I wasn't naive man, I saw dictatorship, a priori incompatible with justice, was being established in Russia, but at that time I felt obliged to use all available legal arrangements. However, in 2020, after the amendments to the Russian Constitution was approved, I realized that I finally had enough. The country where the law was replaced by schizophrenic delusion of psychotic führer, really doesn't need lawyers, and, under these circumstances, I considered it shameful to continue to pretend that well-written legal document has any meaning. I saw that elections, mass protests, petitions, legal proceedings didn't work. I saw that attempts to change the situation through a violence against government structures (see this) did not work too, because it didn't resonate with society. I don't know what I should do now to change the situation. Anyway I realize that all things what I did earlier were inefficient - I haven't prevented the transformation my country into fascist dictatorship. And so, again, I share collective responsibility for all what is going on now.
Cut the crap. We are all part of a single society - people of the earth. Follow your logic we should be doing nothing else but trying to stop the world acting the way it does. The atrocities are everywhere. I would not be able to sleep and function at all if I've felt that "collective" responsibility. This is not how humans work.
When Putin captured all the power in the country, rigged the elections, killed journalists no one cared at all. US, EU, UK, etc - no reaction at all. War with Georgia - no reaction.
When Russia actually started this war 8 years ago and annexed Crimea there been really weak reaction and after everyone just did business as usual. EU even sold Kremlin equipment to fight protesters as well as military weapons on condition they will only be used "inside the country".
When Russian opposition leader Navalny was poisoned again no real sanctions were introduced. Now US, EU and UK expect people to go on streets and protest.
PS: I am from Russia and I immigrated to Turkey on 25th of February and there is nothing fun about going into unplanned political immigration. I dont try to remove all responsibility from myself or someone else, but even I as software engineer have very limited capacity to do political activity. Since I have a job and my family to feed.
Now from abroad I help my friends from Ukraine when I can and I publicly share my political statementa that will land me to prison if I ever come back. But sorry I'm not going to destroy my life for the cause.
World is being destroyed because of this kind of view point. We need more collaboration, not 'me first'.
The country or its people? This seems like a very selfish sentiment. Shouldn't we want everyone to prosper, no matter where they are from? There are countless who may not be able to afford to emigrate to the US
Who loses out if I buy you a beer? Or if my wife and I love each other? Or if people are nice to others?
Like seriously - if I treat someone else with respect and dignity am I required to shit on someone else? Of course not.
The zero-sum game is life stuff is nonsense.
Even if it was a vegetarian meal, it got transported to you and dumped CO2 into the atmosphere. The truck probably hit bugs and maybe ran over some small wildlife.
If you didn't exist, there would be slightly less demand. If 300 million of you didn't exist, there would be a whole lot less demand. The world would be noticeably different.
Everything is energy expenditure and reallocation. Even hugging your son expends ATP that could have been used elsewhere. Hug him a million times and you will be very tired.
I'm not arguing that you shouldn't love your son. I'm saying that the world, at the most fundamental level, revolves around the availability of energy and resources. All of these things in the micro add up in the macro. And even if you aren't concerned about it, your government likely is.
Every single choice has some quantum of opportunity cost and will play out in butterfly effect fashion.
Hell, we don’t even know if the energy budget for the universe is a constant - we just haven’t observed the opposite yet.
Similarly, if I am good at making stuff but terrible at growing stuff, by being in a community I can survive despite an utter lack of agricultural abilities and produce stuff that the farmers would not know how to make. Again, not zero sum.
You could argue that this is civilisation and unnatural. But nature is full of symbionts, not only predator/prey dynamics. “Life is a zero-sum game” sounds like something a social Darwinist would say to justify their pre-existing beliefs. It is in some instances, but it also isn’t in quite a lot of cases. It comes from a very incomplete understanding of life and ecosystems in general.
> When I go shopping I give them a bill and I get something to eat. Both parties are better off after that transaction.
Yes, you go shopping and exchange N dollars for N dollars worth of goods. The net change is 0. That’s why it’s zero sum. Of course, life isn’t truly 0 sum. Otherwise we’d have no total economic growth, which is clearly false. However, how those economic gains are distributed probably is 0 sum.
“Zero-sum game is a mathematical representation in game theory and economic theory of a situation which involves two sides, where the result is an advantage for one side and an equivalent loss for the other”
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-sum_game
> Zero sum doesn’t mean you can’t exchange money for goods and services.
Zero-sum means that when I win, the other party loses. It means that there cannot be a voluntary exchange, because to agree about an exchange both parties need to see an upside.
> Yes, you go shopping and exchange N dollars for N dollars worth of goods. The net change is 0.
That is not what it means, though. In any case, I am better off after the exchange because now I have something to eat. The merchant is better off as well because now they can buy an iPhone or something. We are both better off at the end, and nobody has to lose. A zero-sum game in this instance might be the farmer who was pressured to sell €10 cheaper so that the merchant can take these €10 as margin. There was a net transfer from one party to the other with no other upside. But it is far from the only type of situation in life.
The initial assertion was “life is a zero-sum game”. Not by a long shot.
> However, how those economic gains are distributed probably is 0 sum.
Again, that is not what it means. Game theory does not need the concept of currency.
Besides, even assuming that it were the case, the fact that the amount of most currencies in existence just keeps increasing is a proof that it does not work like that. Someone, somewhere has to generate that money, therefore there are net emitters.
Again, zero sum does not imply like for like trades are impossible.
Pricing isn’t perfect. It is typically the same for all. If I hadn’t been drinking water for a whole day, I would probably buy it anywhere I could and pay whatever the price. If I really need a medicine to live, I would probably pay whatever the price as long as I can afford it. And there are more examples of this
So, if something prices at 5 dollars, it can be worth more than 5 dollars to the seller and / or the buyer
Money gets created from banks lending money from their deposits. This makes sense even in a zero-sum world.
What about the externalities of that transaction?
* If meat, what was killed to produce it? If veg, what was removed from the ground (and how will it be replaced)?
* Who was exploited in the production?
* What damage did you cause while traveling to the store?
* What damage was done while getting the goods/supplies to the store?
* What infrastructure was required to facilitate the transaction? What damage and opportunity costs did that inflict?
The economist would hand-wave all that away as being priced in by the "efficient" economy. Yet even the tiniest inefficiency (say, un/under-accounted damage to the environment caused by burning petroleum to power the vehicles involved) compounds over billions of such transactions every day over decades into massive debts that humanity must ultimately account for.
You’re entirely right, though for now I am indeed going to wave my hands and argue that it was a first-order simplification, and that externalities do not turn it into a zero-sum game :)
In the grand scheme of things, yes, lack of foresight is going to bite us in the backside.
The only source (I can think of) of positive sum benefits is innovation. I can, for example, take iron ore, learn how to smelt steel, and use steel to get more iron ore. Smelting iron is still zero-sum, but learning how to smelt iron is what increases the size of the pie.
You accidentally revealed your own zero-sum thinking in associating “top player” with putting other people down.
Just show's how well they've integrated into American society.
I believe that America was founded on the idea that we could be great because we are free, and that giving our people the opportunity to thrive and be productive will only, in the long run, make our prosperity that much greater.
It's been said that the Constitution is not a suicide pact. You would interpret this, I think, to mean that we should toss out the Bill of Rights anytime it seems inconvenient to our short-term ends. But I see it as a statement that, even when it seems contradictory, investing in the people rather than the power over them will lead to a greater nation even when that seems counterintuitive.
We already do this. You have the right to bear arms - just not nuclear ones.
America has always had to place reasonable restrictions on rights to ensure the public good.
It is your data they are collecting, not some other dog's.
You can still upgrade, you know.
The interests of your government might not necessarily be aligned with yours.
Likely, their personal gains or the interests of lobbyists would come first and not necessarily align with borders/the colour of your passport cover. If you wanna stay "top dog", perhaps think it through a bit more and think a bit broader.
How far are you willing to go? Do you give a shit about people being killed so that your country stays rich and "on top"?
Speaking as a friend - this attitude is becoming an existential problem for the US abroad. More and more countries are wondering if it's the US that's the problem.
Facebook and Google have a NSA servers that get all the traffic even before they reach them and have complete access into their info, then you can't complain when Chinese do the same, after all, they are admiring USA and copying what we are doing.
If we want Chinese to do better, we need to do better, they will follow.
From [0]:
> The above code taken from the TikTok APK, shows the collection of cellphone data, specifically the IMEI of the cell phone. The IMEI number of a phone is literally created to identify the phone.
> We at Penetrum believe that everyone should have the right to know what data is being harvested by companies and would like to give our readers a clearer understanding of what happens when you download the mobile application TikTok. From our understanding and our analysis it seems that TikTok does an excessive amount of tracking on it’s users, and that the data collected is partially if not fully stored on Chinese servers with the ISP Alibaba.
So essentially, a 900GB data breach at Alibaba suggests that TikTok user tracking data which ties hundreds of millions of users has been exposed out in the open to be used by criminals, and scammers. This is nothing new or surprising as I have already questioned a TikTok fanatic about the excessive tracking in this app but decided to deflect with more whataboutsims. [1]
On top of that denial from their own users, all this tracking was made possible due to TikTok's spyware and their mass collection programme, with the additional fact that TikTok staff in China DID have access to US data after lying and denying it. [2]
So something that is even worse than Facebook is hardly 'The best thing to have happened to the Internet.' [3] Especially when TikTok was found to do even more invasive tracking than Facebook with sending biometrics, IMEI numbers and voice prints, and is required to give up and funnel all this data and traffic to the China and the CCP meaning it is another honeypot surveillance tool luring in the sheep to willingly give up all their data and they cannot be trusted.
TikTok should get either a massive fine in the billions just like Facebook did or it should be totally banned until it is verified to rid of its invasive data collection just like what India did recently. Failing to comply, it should get both.
[0] https://penetrum.com/tiktok/Penetrum_TikTok_Security_Analysi...
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28137000
[2] https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/emilybakerwhite/tiktok-...
[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28135484
[4] https://www.nrk.no/osloogviken/xl/tiktok-doesn_t-show-the-wa...
The problem should be that the data is collected and provided to the government whenever they want - not that it's not the Chinese government. We had this discussion after the Snowden leaks and nothing changed whatsoever. Back then it was the US government and the US gov had the chance to change the rules so this could not happen. Now they're up in arms because other governments do the exact same thing. It's really annoying.
Ban every app that collects "problematic" user info. Make the collection itself illegal, give users control about their data but don't argue that the practice suddenly becomes problematic when others do it.
See how Chinese censorship applies to mRNA vaccine conspiracy theories. A person that debunked them was banned from wechat.
Do you see western governments doing this?
In the US algorithms ban content, often by mistake. In China a political official or someone working for the government reviews the content personally. Big difference.
Also, who’s to judge that these poor algorithmic decisions are “mistakes” when only the companies are privy to the mechanics of the algorithm?
My argument is about having the same rules for everyone. The argument about data collection and privacy is a good one. It's just completely dishonest and hypocritical and doesn't serve the end user any purpose if it doesn't apply to everyone and it just clearly doesn't.
Different censorship, different disinformation - but we have that in the west as well. The EU is several steps ahead in this race thanks to their Digital Services Act (making it criminal to spread some information, and threatening service providers with million-Euro-fines if they don't delete quickly enough [as in: within hours]), but the US has its very own 'Disinformation Governance Board' located with DHS, which is in all but name a Ministry of Truth. You are supposed to use the Internet to earn money and consume and spend, not to question the narrative.
There are no good countries. All nation-states suck. Some are better at marketing their alleged superiority to their less-intelligent (and thanks to controlling the education system: kept less-intelligent) population through "patriotism", though.
Do you happen to have a decent source for that since it seems rather weird given China's gov stance on covid.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/vaccines-c...
To be clear, I'm not in favour of the Chinese regime but your particular point does still require a citation.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/vaccines-c...
I’ll find the wechat story when I’m more awake. ADV china covered it though.
No, because what you claimed requires substantiation. Please lets be calm about our discussion here.
> https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/vaccines-c...
> I’ll find the wechat story when I’m more awake. ADV china covered it though.
Thank you :)
https://thefederalist.com/2021/07/09/teslas-struggle-in-chin...
First the PRC government made an exception for Tesla:
> To entice Tesla to China, the Chinese government agreed to let Tesla become the first non-Chinese auto company with a solely owned subsidiary in China.
Once Tesla was established in China, there was a faked scandal to discredit the company, supported by state media:
> In April, a Chinese Tesla owner’s video claiming “Tesla brakes fail” went viral in China and was viewed more than 200 million times. It is essential to know that sometimes the Chinese government pushes for or encourages such online outcries to achieve its political goals.
While the story was pushed by Xinhua, it turned out the actual brake failure was faked:
> https://driveteslacanada.ca/news/owner-fabricating-china-bra...
Around the same time, Chinese police were preferentially pulling over Teslas:
https://electrek.co/2021/04/23/tesla-owners-stopped-going-on...
Example with apple: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_of_the_iTunes_Sto...
In China, when the government asks a company to do something, the company has no choice. When was the last time you heard US companies follow arbitrary ask of US government?
> The problem should be that the data is collected and provided to the government whenever they want
Maybe in someone's ideal world that doesn't exist this could be the problem formulation. In real world, TikTok is not strictly under control of EUSIAN blob so it's a threat and it's natural for state to restrict its influence.
Furthermore the behavior of intelligence agencies sanctioned this kind of surveillance. Ironically the decreased trust will be vastly more relevant to lessened security than their surveillance attempts could ever make up for. So they failed their primary mission too. In a supposedly free country it is a strategy that only produces losers and there is not change in sight.
I kinda feel this way. On a national security level, China having everyone's data is absolutely a disaster.
But on a personal level - if I lived in the United States, I would rather the Chinese government surveil me than the US government.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/vaccines-c...
China's big players from what I have seen have incompetent at even just advertising in the west. I remember reading an American study that went into this around the time these alerts around foreign misinformation started to get big. Turns out Russia is pretty damn good at it. The bit China tries is small and again incompetent (An example given was at small scale shelling out to buy popular content accounts and suddenly turning them from a volkswagen beetle account into a full on propaganda account only to get instabanned) and there's somehow a lot more anti china bots on twitter than pro. Having no horse in either place i'm not particularly outraged about the attempts especially considering the US does similar more effectively.
Now they manufacture practically everything: the computers that drive our lives, makeup that fancies our wives, widgets for all of our digits, and even some foods to feed our broods.
Why can’t China improve in other areas like influential advertising and media campaigns? Having more data from TikTok doesn’t hurt their chances.
The extent to which it's problematic depends on who's doing it, even if all cases are problematic.
Data collection aside - relying on a single Appstore that is governed by US law is not acceptable.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/dec/11/french-officia...
https://phys.org/news/2018-05-german-spy-agency-tabs-interne...
https://www.thelocal.de/20200519/court-slams-german-spies-fo...
https://www.thetrumpet.com/17338-germany-can-legally-spy-on-...
https://www.rfi.fr/en/france/20210708-french-spy-agency-dgsi...
https://www.france24.com/en/20130704-france-uses-vast-electr...
And while I do think that state agencies nowadays have crossed most lines of what may be be deemed acceptable it should still be clear that in some cases it's necessary for a government to have the authority to do things a normal citizen doesn't (eg you're not allowed to sentence people to jail, vigilantism etc).
Also one of the articles is actually about a German court striking down one of the surveillance tactics so this just sounds like whataboutism to defend one nation and bash another. Despite all its faults, concerning spying and data-collection, the EU is likely the smallest offender out of the big players in this world.
I'm sorry, was I the one that mentioned that the US is a hypocrite because the STATE spies on the internet? I think you're confusing my post with the one that I responded to.
>Despite all its faults, concerning spying and data-collection, the EU is likely the smallest offender out of the big players in this world.
So they're just small hypocrites instead of big ones?
>whataboutism to defend one nation and bash another
Who's defending who? If the US are hypocrites, then so are the EU. Both are spying hypocrites. The whataboutists are the ones that rush to defend Europe because they view it as a utopian ideal.
If anything, given that the fines are largely based on scope of offense and capped at a percentage of turnover, the larger US companies have been getting off lightly compared to smaller companies given their settlements..
Very much this. As a European who doesn't intent to set a single foot in China, I'm much more comfortable at the thought of China having my data than my own government.
---
The US government is more ethical and more respectful of the rule of law and human rights than Russia or China.
Let me paste it in again, so we know it isn't a typo:
The US government is more ethical and more respectful of the rule of law and human rights than Russia or China.
---
The US government is not perfect. Portions of the US government are a danger to the rights of some people, particularly civilians in the middle east. Regarding "cyber", it has several major stains on its history, including PRISM, XKeyscore, warrantless wiretapping, and the current president's support of the Clipper chip in the 90s.
I support privacy protections on mobile devices and mobile apps, and support in general stronger regulations against the collection of personal information by tech giants.
I resent Meta and Google for the amount of data they collect about me and everyone I know with any Android device/Meta app installed.
Every statement I have made can be made while non-hypocritically supporting the statement by the FCC regarding TikTok. It isn't just economic protectionism - it's national security. I don't think a Chinese politician or military official should have Facebook or Instagram installed on their mobile phone, either.
As consumers, we do have a horse in the race. I would cheer for the horse with fewer regulations, but that's just me...
Kettle. Pot.
Hell, even the Vietnamese don't hate on the US as much these days - even though they'd have every reason to.
.. are you sure about that? The argument is often made that the First Amendment (and the second amendment!) provide Americans (and not foreign nationals or companies operating within America) with a constitutional right to work against American national security.
The thing is, yes Facebook and Google's data collection is horrendous, but TikTok it literally on another level.
Quite a good explanation here:
https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/fxgi06/comment/fmuk...
It's not much help to "ban TikTok" while the ad networks run wild. If we're going to be worried about China I doubt it'd be too much trouble for them to place a few engineers into ad networks and exfiltrate the data from there.
[1] https://www.aclu.org/news/privacy-technology/new-records-det...
iOS has been quite good to me in this regard, although it still needs improvements (e.g. add a permission for accessing internet).
https://www.reddit.com/r/tiktok_reversing/comments/i8gig3/be...
*
- Phone hardware (cpu type, number of course, hardware ids, screen dimensions, dpi, memory usage, disk space, etc)
- Other apps you have installed (I've even seen some I've deleted show up in their analytics payload - maybe using as cached value?)
- Everything network-related (ip, local ip, router mac, your mac, wifi access point name)
- Whether or not you're rooted/jailbroken
- Some variants of the app had GPS pinging enabled at the time, roughly once every 30 seconds - this is enabled by default if you ever location-tag a post IIRC
- They set up a local proxy server on your device for "transcoding media", but that can be abused very easily as it has zero authentication
The scariest part of all of this is that much of the logging they're doing is remotely configurable, and unless you reverse every single one of their...
*
Not trying to be flippant, but that list just sounds like google play services to me. In fact, I assumed play services collects way more data.
Also, tiktok surely must be collecting some engagement / interaction analytics... That list doesn't seem complete or legitimate.
I would not think any of these points would be ok. You seem to argue that this is something "everyone does", that does not make it ok. I really thought we had gotten further in the privacy discussion.
[0] https://penetrum.com/tiktok/Penetrum_TikTok_Security_Analysi...
These apps are hoovering crazy amount of information. They should be banned, universally. No matter which country they originate at. Giving politicians this kind of power over the population in a democratic society is a huge national security risk. No less than a foreign power having these capabilities.
The US government do not hold large corportations to account, quite the opposite. They put people in jail for successfully fighting them legally or turn a blind eye when whistleblowers are car bombed. They make deals with facebook and google for the data so they can say 'it's a private company and independent entity'.
China would likely be just as bad if they were as powerful, but from the point of view of most of the world they have stolen far less of our natural resources, killed/deposed far fewer of our democratically elected governments, bought up far less of our media and turned it into propaganda, spied on our citizens less, and abused treaty law to curtail our freedoms far less.
> Phone hardware (cpu type, number of course, hardware ids, screen dimensions, dpi, memory usage, disk space, etc)
> Other apps you have installed (I've even seen some I've deleted show up in their analytics payload - maybe using as cached value?)
> Everything network-related (ip, local ip, router mac, your mac, wifi access point name)
> Whether or not you're rooted/jailbroken
> Some variants of the app had GPS pinging enabled at the time, roughly once every 30 seconds - this is enabled by default if you ever location-tag a post IIRC
> They set up a local proxy server on your device for "transcoding media", but that can be abused very easily as it has zero authentication
Wait a minute - Why was Android or iPhone - built by West allows everything... Or if tiktok are the topdog in writing apps and FB missed out on writing these? Sour grapes?
The proxy server is disturbing if true. Only reason I could think of that being necessary would be to use customer devices to perform distributed transcoding of other people's videos. Can't imagine that being something Apple would allow.
Yes western governments are totally full of shit too, the proof of this is that Julian Assange is still being crucified for leaking information, for being a whistle blower.
We're all so trained to thinking the Government is ok now that it's really hard to know what to do about it.
That’s just not true. Many leakers and whistle blowers aren’t prosecuted every year.
Julian Assange is a pretty transparent Russian asset and has been for a number of years. There’s a reason he never leaks anything that is negative of Putin. Meanwhile if it’s anti-American he leaks it in full without taking any standard journalist precautions.
Of course he can pull the “I’m just a journalist bro” card, but the act is over and his time is up.
If it's true, what does saying it's anti-American mean? Would you rather be in the dark about shady shit your government is doing?
It's entirely possible that he just has better access to US sources than Russian ones.
Sure, as long as it’s accompanied by safe journalist practices (which it isn’t) and also calls out the shady shit of other, opposed, countries (which (which it doesn’t).
> It’s entirely possible that he just has better access to US sources than Russian ones.
That’s fine and possible, but even if that wasn’t the case - and he had access to Russian leaks but didn’t leak them - this is still exactly what he would say.
And it’s possible both are true - that he’s simply releasing what is given to him, and the Russian state saw this and took the opportunity to feed him information as a result. At that point, after he has continually irresponsibly released covert information from a hostile state, how is he any different in practice than an intentional hostile actor?
I don't think this is true. And I've run a privacy advocate organisation and I'm a complete Snowden fanboy. But if I had to choose between giving my data to the CCP or the American government, the choice is easy.
Even though a lot of data collection was done without warrants in the USA, there's been a lot of blowback, and there is still changing presidents/executive, changing representatives, and rule of law (not perfect, but still there).
On the other side you have a CCP rolling out social scoring, running concentration camps, etc etc.
It's just not the same. Let's not pretend it is somehow equivalent.
Was there? Who went to jail for it? Did anyone even get fired?
James Clapper lied to Congress[1] about data collection, the only reason we even know is a leaker who can never return to the US for his "crimes". Meanwhile Clapper served out the rest of Obama's presidency and now has a cushy job at CNN[2].
If this "blowback", accountability is dead.
[1] https://www.techdirt.com/2013/07/02/james-clapper-admits-he-...
[2] https://dailycaller.com/2019/08/23/cnn-msnbc-15-spooks-mccab...
Here is another idea that could give users control about their data, and that could be more easily accepted by governments and companies.
All the data of user X living in country Y should be stored on a server handled by country Y. Moreover, add the following features:
- User X should be able to see all the people and companies that have access to his or her data.
- Country Y could put some tax on each request, that should cover at least the costs for maintening the servers.
This would give users more control about their data, and this would give countries more compensation on the monetizable data coming from its land.
The compensation would be a motivation for the governments to implement and maintain these servers.
Moreover, as opposed to a full ban on data collection, this approach might be accepted by companies since they would still be able to work with users data: just now they would need to pay for them and also they would need to let users know exactly who they sell the data to. In particular, if they sell the data to agressive ads companies, this would be known by the users and this could decrease their reputation.
From a technical point of view it seems doable and a service with similar features is already implemented in Estonia for example [1].
[1]: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12553-017-0195-1
0. https://www.kommersant.ru/doc/5458430 (Russian)
The same rules mostly do get applied across the board, which is why this story is about some guy writing a letter to private companies asking them to please find TikTok in breach of those companies' terms of service.
He doesn't actually have sweeping powers of censorship that would allow him to just ban them on a whim, so he does the next best thing and raises his political profile so he might get considered for a more important job the next time his political party is in power.
I think it's unlikely that Apple or Google will find TikTok to be in breach of their terms, and even less likely that Americans will be completely banned from accessing TikTok.
All countries have primarily a duty to their citizens, and only then to foreign entities. Even though there are plenty of points of improvement the US can make here, accepting that at least some discrimination against external citizens or companies should happen seems to be an axiom of governmental organization.
I'm European btw and have a US-incorporated start-up.
There is no innate duty of a state to anyone, it's a function of the policies of the people we elect. In many peoples view laws should apply equally regardless of where you are from.
All people I know will treat their childred differently than random children on the playground, I'd imagine some analogy to this situation is not entirely lost on anyone.
From the data listed, it's a lot but personally with the current state of mobile os computing none of this seems all that out of the ordinary, it's just what is the sad state of those platforms. This is why I think the data is being used as an excuse.
Eligible US Voters can elect a new US Government at various branches and change what US companies do with data through regulations/legislation.
Even that theoretical route is not possible when it comes to a foreign company. Therefore the FCC guy (who is theoretically beholden to US citizens, or wanting to be perceived that way, or wanting to do so for his buddies at Western tech companies) is making the recommendation.
This is too simplistic. All systems of government are not equal. It’s disingenuous to claim otherwise.
https://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2014/06/28/326453204/fa...
It's a numbers game. They have ~80,000,000 Americans tuned in. They can turn knobs when they need to alter US public opinion. A subtle shift of 80,000,000 people is big.
Many people also get their news from TikTok:
> TikTok, on the other hand, has seen a slight uptick in the portion of users who say they regularly get news on the site, rising from 22% to 29% in this period.
https://www.pewresearch.org/journalism/2021/09/20/news-consu...
Less free nations are worthy of special attention.
The differentiator here is national security, which raises an entirely different set of issues than the typical data collection and user privacy ones.
It's like the difference between sharing your bank password with your wife vs. some dude you aren't very friendly with who has a history of wire fraud. "Treat everyone the same" is not a workable policy.
Apple's data in China is handled by China government affiliated entity https://technode.com/2018/01/10/apple-icloud-guizhou/ . China's typical play book in tech field is to have the original products banned and have their own copycat flourish.
They are already NOT playing fair.
Which means that all countries other than the US also should be banning Facebook, and most US companies. As Snowden showed, most of them have a history of wire fraud.
https://www.independent.ie/business/technology/ban-on-facebo...
https://news.yahoo.com/facebook-instagram-face-europe-ban-16...
If Facebook kept EU data subject data in the EU, or even if they use Standard Contractual Clauses to transfer it to different third countries without the same kind of problematic surveillance laws that the US has, there would be no issue.
We would be doing the same of course if we were not much weaker and if our products were actually used over there.
Also, don't be one sided on this. The EU countries also spy on the US.
I do not understand. What does a war has to do with the fact that countries spy on each other without rest? Merkel's phone was bugged by the US - not something nice you do to an ally, right? (https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-24690055)
> Also, don't be one sided on this. The EU countries also spy on the US.
I am not and this is exactly why I wrote the second sentence. Our capacities, unfortunately, are way lower.
In case you hadn't heard (I presume you have, us being on HN and all), there is some movement within the EU towards that end
Facebook threatening to close their site in Europe because of regulations is not the same as EU banning them.
Judiciaries in multiple EU member states have judged Google to be breaching EU regulations (in regards to Google Analytics). That is not a ban; Google is welcome to do business in the EU if they observe EU laws and regulations.
https://blog.simpleanalytics.com/eu-moving-closer-to-faceboo...
I dunno, "stopping data transfer" sounds like a ban by another name to me.
> Which means that all countries other than the US also should be banning Facebook, and most US companies.
Like many sibling comments have already pointed out, many do.
But the answer to your statement is "no." You're trying to pull an oversimple rule out of a pithy comment and neglecting other important distinctions. It's not just a black/white distinction like foreign country vs. domestic, but more more nuanced one like enemy country vs adversary country vs neutral country vs allied country vs domestic. The answer to the question "should country X ban Facebook for national security reasons" will be different for different countries based on their context.
If you assume equivalence between (1) Facebook and Tiktok and (2) the U.S. and China's data collection practices.
And I don't think those are equivalent, and therefore it's not necessary to treat the dissimilar cases the same.
Maybe the issue is abusive social networks hoovering up data with no controls and no regulation.
Because no one can hack Facebook and get that data anyway? hell, maybe they don't even need to
This is exactly right.
> The US government is not your wife no matter where you live
You're missing the point by taking the analogy too literally.
If the FCC clarified their stance and highlighted very specific threats, I might be swayed but only if it was demonstrated that the US government isn't doing exactly the same thing.
All opaque data harvesting of public platforms, no matter who collects it, is bad.
Your example is garbage as well. In both situations you highlighted you have something that you don't have in face of data harvesting...choice. You can decide whether or not to give your banking password to a stranger or your wife. You usually have no choice when it comes to data harvesting...because usually the data is harvested out of the backdoor of a platform by selling it on.
Why do you believe this, and based on what evidence? By “anyone outside the US”, are you referring to the population of China? What US threats are you referring to, and why do you believe they’re worse in the US? While the US has ample room for improvement, as do all countries, there’s a fairly wide range of serious humanitarian issues that are documented and indexed by a large number of people globally, and there seems to be very little disagreement about how China compares to the US on various censorship and freedom rankings. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_freedom_indices
The problem with privacy law is that some foreign powers won't abide by the laws. It's not unlike violence- a country can try to make a global law saying "Nobody is allowed to have a military", but if they actually get rid of their military, they will just get taken over by a different country which does have a military.
Depends which nation you are in right?
The world isn't split into two: US or China.
I wonder if, for instance, Google an Meta are banned in China.
Which shouldn’t be too big of a surprise I guess, especially since ‘national security risk’ almost always means ‘threat to gov’t security in practice’.
That won’t change unless there is some kind of disaster that makes it untenable. I mean, just look at Nuclear proliferation for a really clear example.
There is no equivalence with western governments.
That's a matter of perspective. From the US perspective, it's much more problematic for an adversary to have information about their personnel.
It’s similar to the paradox of intolerance… the paradox of force. Should we live by the rules of fairness while others don’t? Should we expose ourselves to the same risks that others expose themselves just out of fairness?
Huawei went through basically the same thing when western chip companies and telcos were beat to market by nearly a year for 5G. Grinding the red scare axe to an audience of bought and paid for octogenarians is still a pretty good grift it seems.
I disagree, because this is a "both things can be true" situation. It's true that data collection is a problem inherently and it's true that China's unprecedented scale of use and abuse of data escalates the urgency of Tiktok's case in particular.
I also think as a practical matter, "we should apply this to all apps" has the functional effect of being a poison pill ensuring nothing gets done. I think we should accept imperfect forward iterations to improve security over poison pills.
If you want to argue for more laws, go ahead. But don't do this whataboutism where you pretend like you care about these issues, and argue against ways of stopping, at least some of the bad things happening.
The Chinese government isn't going to use nefariously collected data about you in order to get a search warrant or something. The American one is.
They could intentionally influence the public opinion about anything, e.g., elections.
A healthy middle-class in America, with immediate needs like healthcare and housing met, is China's best interests as that means Americans have more money to spend on consumer goods.
The Koch Brothers want to dismantle all the organs of state they don't approve of.
China never did that to me.
We don't have "fair" elections after the FCC scrapped the Fairness Doctrine in the 80s under Regan.
We don't have "fair" elections for the president since we don't directly elect the president.
The scenario where china somehow designs a dastardly TikTok video that convinces---I'm sorry "manipulates"---young people to vote en mass in a way that somehow advances the national interests of China and against their own material concerns is remote. But, I'm not sure how that's worse than any other garden variety Super PAC, or billionaire debutante like Mike Bloomberg or Howard Schultz.
> The scenario where china ... "manipulates" ... young people to vote en mass in a way that somehow advances the national interests of China is remote
Didn't it already happen with Russia affecting the elections via Facebook?
But if you wanna beat the drum of Jingoism, here is a counter argument: the Chinese Government has little interest in the activities of most domestic US citizens. Its the US Federal Government that cares if American citizens are feeling too rebellious.
Including influencing public perception of domestic and international events? You may as well say the Chinese government doesn't care about world politics.
Also it's not "Jingoist" to assume that a foreign government (with whom we've had friction) has less of our interests in mind than our own government.
Practically, I'll be more concerned about my government having the data vs a third world. I rarely get involved in Chinese politics/threads and have little interaction with them except everything is manufactured there. I may visit China/Taiwan/Hong Kong as a tourist sometime in future.
For my own country I am actively interested in and sometime involved in political discussions/forums. I have stronger opinion in favour/against current government and will have lot more influence on my local.
So the govt./org. trying to suppress/persecute me will be with high probability my own vs China or Russia.
FAANG has a data sharing mandate with the US government. My own government spying on me is more dangerous than some foreign government spying on me, because it is unlikely I wake up looking into the barrel of a Chinese exfiltration team at three in the night. Getting woken at gunpoint by the local village idiot/Sheriff because they don't like my surfing pattern is a lot more likely.
killing tiktok because it's too successful will undermine US credibility as a fair entity in any kind of business negociation, with any country.
I wouldn't be surprised if this case would be used later by the EU in regulating FAANGs even more and inventing taxes just for them ( which, as a european i find completely outrageous, for the same reasons).
It still matters.
It's not like that hasn't already been a part of history for a long time.
More or less just depends on your POV.
I do think that how it works from nation to nation is very different.
TikTok is an ominous name. It's literally creating tics in teenagers. TikTok also seems like a psychological weapon, which is a ticking time bomb until the Chinese take over the world (their stated goal)
Tic defined as "an idiosyncratic and habitual feature of a person's behavior." Yesterday, Tucker Carlson (bad man) did a segment on the difference between American TikTok and Chinese Douyin. It's clear that the Chinese are curating the algorithms differently. Douyin content is made to be good for society, whereas TikTok content is degenerate. The algorithm is everything.
China has every incentive to push our young people to be mental cases and TikTok has the potential to do this.
For example, TikTok is likely speeding up the rate at which teen girls experience rapid onset gender dysphoria. A teen may be confused about who they are, they watch one or two videos related to the topic, then they are sent down a rabbit hole of this content.
I am happy to see the FCC of this administration speaking out. TikTok was going to be banned by the last administration but this administration put a stop to that in their effort to roll back all of Trump (bad man) policy.
I'm not sure I agree with that, maybe TT could have incentives to _actively_ sow distrust and division, but I think it's fair to say that FANG companies are doing this today, driven mostly by maximizing ad views & creating negative feedback loops where we get echo chambers
Imagine what would happen if a Chinese regulator decided that Tesla's telematics stack was a massive national security risk? One random comment from some loser trying to build a political career (like this guy) and you'd see the stock go through a small crash.
The capture of American bureaucracy by paid interests is going to be the downfall of the country. Michael Lewis has been talking about this quite a bit recently, and will apparently make this the subject of his next book. I hope everyone reads it.
Like when Google refused to comply with censorship. They've got clipped almost immediately[0] and haven't recovered to this day. And no, there was no appeal, no political process or way to get around it.
If anything, America is lagging behind rest of the world in regulation, and is letting foreign companies get away with things that would get them banned in rest of the world. Another example would be ongoing EU crusade against media piracy.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_China#2010%E2%80%932016...