All the anti-tiktok takes seem to be rooted in sinophobia and nationalist sour grapes. I don't like megacorps slurping my info up, but these conversations seem to have huge blinders around what has become standard practice for American web companies - especially when handling the data of foreign users.
And merely pointing a fact that China is an authoritarian state is NOT sinophobia, and please don't use arguments like that to try to shutdown discussion.
I've also seen myself few big-tech companies throwing literally hundreds of millions of dollars at ways to protect their infrastructure from USA government eavesdropping on their infrastructure. That's just not a possibility in an authoritarian state.
And if you don't see reasons why giving very powerful, authoritarian regime full access to huge amount data about people is a problem - well, history books can show you some.
When this happens in an authoritarian state, it is business as usual, the scope of collection is not considered, and dissenting opinions quickly disappear.
That’s the difference.
The most notable and relevant to this discussion is FISA which has been amended by Congress at least a dozen times. This is certainly not a topic that doesn’t come up in Congress.
[1] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/05/foriegn-intelligence-s...
[2] https://www.npr.org/2013/06/13/191226106/fisa-court-appears-...
[A] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2014/01/27...
Lots of slang terms get used, and the discussion continues.
Mark Klein told the world about Room 641A on freekin PBS.
At any major tech company, not even internal networks are considered to be safe, and things are encrypted to sometimes paranoid levels, that's costing A LOT (not only in processing power, that's nowadays less of an concern, but with a much increased complexity of their infrastructure).
And before you ask - major threat model they target is governments sponsored hacking.
A few big tech companies have spent hundreds of millions keeping the state out of their databases, which probably gets billed to their PR budgets. Most tech companies do not put up such a big fight. Some court the state to get sweetheart deals, and the public has no basis for feeling confident that covert access wasn't an unpublicized provision of those deals.
The US federal government can quite easily throw me in prison or destroy my livelihood if the right person/corporation with enough institutional clout had a grudge against me (see Steven Donziger, US lawyer who has been imprisoned for trying to hold Chevron accountable for illegally polluting in ecuador).
Why should I, a US citizen who has no business need to travel to China currently, worry about the CCP's authoritarianism more than the US govts?
It's the long cultural game that is probably being played that might or should have you worried. It's been happening for 10-15 years to US social media companies by outside and inside forces and it seems to have become a detriment to society in certain ways. Now think of a Facebook or Instagram that's directed by a (more) authoritative government against a culture that it's in opposition to. What does that look like in 20 years?
One is used to hearing these types of nonsense points being made in high school by kids trying to be provocative and contrarian but it getting to a supposedly "rational" community makes me think the community has been infiltrated by Chinese agents or other special interest groups astroturfing.
Also, please don't break the site guideline which asks you "Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, bots, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data."
I've posted about this elsewhere in the thread if anyone wants more explanation: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32904632.
If you are of the opinion that the US government’s past behaviour has been a bad thing then you should be absolutely horrified by the CCP’s track record.
Laziest logical fallacy accusation IMO.
No you have that backwards, you’re the one dismissing the original argument by attempting to replace it with a different, inverse one.
Are you going to respond the the original points or just complain about me calling you out for using a conversation tactic favoured by Russian propaganda?
If you ever run for office or hold a position of national security interest, your personal data will be a great source for blackmail or honeypot operations.
And obviously no US company would release such information to your political opponents, their ethics are pure. It takes a dastardly CCP plot.
I'd never heard of him so I did.
>In 2014, Kaplan ruled that the judgment in Ecuador was invalid because Donziger had achieved it through offenses against legal ethics, including racketeering, extortion, wire fraud, money laundering, obstruction of justice, judicial bribery, coercion, witness tampering, and arranging for expert's reports to be ghostwritten.
Your statement is correct but you left out that he tried to hold the accountable by many, many illegal means.
To compare him to a dissident in China who simply dissapears ome day with no explanation is beyond disengeneuos.
If the BLM protests happened in China, those protesters would all be in jail.
Kaplan is a very pro-corporate judge and the appeals court has ruled against his overreach already. I'd take his analysis with a large grain of salt, but there is certainly a lot of fog of war in this case.
I think Chevron paying their witness (Guerra) $12k/mo is quite suspicious and Kaplan did not object to that witness' testimony. Certainly encourage more people to follow this case - it's pretty interesting (and a bit scary IMO) to see how it is playing out.
It's not like there's never been an individual activist who's prevailed over a large corporation. It happens often enough that the "fog of war" is not the normal. He also was jailed for refusing to provide the other side access to evidence through the process of discovery. In this case, the unedited footage from the film he produced which already had evidence of questionable behavior edited out after it's debut.
The "fog of war" you're citing seems a lot to me like a guy who may be right but has used dishonest means to "prove" his case.
As I see it, in the U.S. the corporations have completely subverted the government whereas in China the corporations are afraid of the government.
I am not sure why private interests controlling governments is less scary than governments controlling private interests?
The U.S. lays claim to all data say Google stores about me, even the ones stored outside the U.S. As an European, the U.S. is much more likely to reach me if they wanted than China.
I am not sure why the U.S. model is better than China's. Perhaps we in the West would do better to admit it's two sides of the same coin.
One is used to hearing these types of nonsense points being made in high school by kids trying to be proactive and contrarian but it getting to a supposedly "rational" community makes me think the community has been infiltrated by Chinese agents or other special interest groups astroturfing.
Astroturfing accusations are intellectually lazy and against the community guidelines of this site.
The US is not perfect, but multi-party democratic states have mechanisms for checking and balancing misuse.
The reality in authoritarian states is that misuse is done quietly and without dissent.
Curious, are you referencing IBM and The Holocaust?
If you're okay with FB/Google/Twitter sharing all of the data they have on you with the CCP, there's not a big difference.
"Lawful", sure, in the sense that the secret FISA court approved it, and while that's blatantly unconstitutional the supreme court decided that no-one has standing to bring that case unless they can prove that they were themselves being secretly surveilled. I bet everything that TikTok does is lawfully compelled as well.
> Goog/FB don't really have a choice in complying if they want to continue to exist and do business in the USA.
Sure, but again, how's that any different from TikTok's situation?
China is magnificent at long term thinking.
And yes, maybe everyone is lying to you, and the NSA is doing it already. Maybe they already have radios in your microwave building a database of your breakfasts. We just don't know.
But at the end of the day I know a lot of people at Google and 100% of them would push back on governments requests as hard as humanly possible, and there would absolutely be whistleblowers if this was happening. I'm just not going to equate the two.
I do think they are obeying the letter of the legal mandates and have a social graph of all non citizens who have ever been to the US, or interacted with anyone from the US. But not US citizens, no.
I presume you aren’t part of the crowd on HN/Reddit who are (still) upset that Russia used social media to “influence” the 2016 election? Imagine if say, a certain Asian country had detailed information about the habits and desires of millions of Americans, do you think they could do something similar in a future election?
Make your own conclusions who is the scariest here.
> ...I don't like megacorps slurping my info up, but these conversations seem to have huge blinders around what has become standard practice for American web companies - especially when handling the data of foreign users.
That's the wrong question for the context. This is a question about "nation-X national security," not personal tech privacy that's generically concerned with data collection and ads.
"So? Our country also has such agents on our streets. Worrying about these others is xenophobic. Besides, our country is just as corrupt, we are in no position to judge."
But what should we non-Americans make of this? Depends on your relationship with China vs. US. Personally, I view FB/Google/Twitter with less, but still plenty, of mistrust. US govt influence is a big factor, but not the only one.
If you imagine that the CEO of Binance has any ability to prevent the CCP from weaponizing TikTok, then I have a bridge to sell to you
The same way we figure out anything else - learning and experience. Ultimately, there have been a bunch of cases of people like us having their lives ruined by the USG, and not so many cases of the CCP doing the same (and none for people who didn't go to China or have family ties there, AFAIK).
> There is evidence of foreign governments meddling with US civilian affairs. It seems like this is exactly the attitude they would try to cultivate.
There is also evidence of the US government meddling with US civilian affairs, and I suspect they deploy a lot more and a lot more effective propaganda to cultivate the attitudes that they want to see.
If the data is dangerous, no one should be allowed to collect, store and sell it. It shouldn't be allowed for only those in the favor of the US federal govt.
If Tetris was one app that reported data directly to Putin, I'd be uncomfortable with that too.
The rest are sending all your data to the US.
Thats the difference.