TikTok accused of covert plot to track specific US citizens' every move
theregister.com
theregister.com
The US govt’s extensive monitoring and archiving of its own citizens + foreign citizens information is widely known at this point.
This is a source of wide consternation for other foreign governments because the monitoring is a tremendous asset for US domestic and foreign intelligence, defense, and cyber warfare which is of course why China has banned many of these US services.
Meanwhile TikTok has grown like a weed in the US and several times the so called “firewall” supposed to keep the US version of TikTok separate had been demonstrably proven to be effectively non existent.
And considering the scale of election meddling, astroturfing, and psy ops that take place on US platforms - that both private industry and govt have failed to contain - the US intelligence community and govt likely well understands the threat of their unofficial, global arch rival owning the fastest growing new social media platform.
I would love to know what the intelligence community is doing behind closed doors at this point but they must have balanced TikTok as an asset vs liability given the obvious threat it poses to the US’ near ubiquitous control of global social media.
At this point, letting in any software or hardware from China or Russia is beyond idiotic. We can all live just fine without Kaspersky spyware and TikTok videos sending home our locations.
We were able to negotiate the reduction of nuclear capabilities during the height of the cold war. I don't see why we couldn't negotiate the reduction of cyber capabilities now, were we to make it a priority. Certainly seems worth a try, if the alternative is destroying the internet as an international commons.
Yes, the Internet was supposed to be an international commons. It had only a brief window when it was actually anything like that. That window has been closed for over a decade now, and it is time to recognize the facts.
Considering the uncountable myriad of ways that such agreements could be evaded and subverted, and the fact that it is already rather uncool to be seen as spyware, yet the practice is so ubiquitous as to have a name of "surveillance capitalism", it seems like a fools errand.
Also, CCP has already effectively blocked Google Facebook, etc., there is no reason to allow them continued free access.
More broadly, the Grand Experiment has been fully and exhaustively tried, and it has colossally failed. The idea was that open trade and information exchange would inexorably lead to open markets and open democracies.
This beautiful idea turned out to be entirely false. The measures from open markets and information exchanges have in fact been perverted to strengthen autocracies, and used in hybrid warfare to threaten democracy itself around the globe.
It is past time to shut off access to those autocracies that wish us only harm. The days of the internet as an international commons are, sadly, long gone.
Nuclear treaties are difficult to enforce too. Their enforcement isn't an unqualified success. But I think the world much better for them.
I do agree that the strongest form of the liberalism thesis, where trade and cultural exchange make war impossible and such, is wrong, and was always farcical. That's not really what I'm advocating. I'm not a Liberal or Thatcherist or anything like that. I'm not saying that such exchange creates good as much as saying it reduces harm.
If we break off into little internet fiefdoms, we will have more surveillance (as total surveillance is required to enforce these boundaries), which will empower and normalize authoritarianism.
Down to the Internet, the results are very ambiguous. I've also enjoyed conversations across borders. Yet, I've also seen apparently innocuous conversations about industry techniques (I work in carbon fiber composites) turn out to be likely attempts from Iran to get info, likely literally to be used in the Shahed drones now used to attack Ukraine. That particular conversation got shut down politely, but I'm sure there were hundreds more.
Similarly, the western academic world is full of Chinese "students" working to both exfiltrate technology and to intimidate overseas Chinese into not opposing the CCP.
The CCP has broken into the US Govt computers and basically exfiltrated the entire employee database.
And this does not even begin to touch upon the threat of software and hardware spyware, which is the main focus.
I could go on endlessly, but the point is that closed societies are taking advantage of open societies to literally destroy them.
The benefit of our enjoyment of cross-border exchange is trivial compared to the national security situation. This is no longer a game or a 'let's all join hands' situation. It is literally a fight for the future of the free world.
If there is a way to ban CCP, RU, Iranian, NK, etc software an hardware and still allow conversations, then that's maybe allowable. But there's a really easy solution without any surveillance — just logically or physically cut the cord - no routing packets to or from those countries.
Except when the US gov or their agencies decide that the law does not apply anymore, to the company, data or individual. Because for example you are a suspect of being a terrorist
https://www.forbes.com/sites/emilybaker-white/2022/10/20/tik...
Personally I'm reserving judgement until this is confirmed by other news sources, because the details seem sparse, the motives unclear, and I don't hold Forbes in a high regard journalistically (though this is at least a staff writer, and not a contributor, so presumably there's more editorial oversight). My intuition is that there's a 55% chance this story is true, and a 45% chance it's incorrect or overstated.
I read through the article - but I couldn't find any details on the source this reporter is citing. Worryingly - the author "held policy positions at Facebook and Spotify." Instagram is a major competitor to TikTok - so conflict of interest is pretty strong.
As other posters pointed out - every major company tracks people. We've known about this type of behaviour for decades from big tech.
the headline says plot to track specific people, so that is alleging something different than "everybody does it"
The first is that there are many stories, interpretations or perhaps coherent models. Obviously some stories are inconsistent or falsifiable on their own terms. Then we walk up the pyramid - and stories exist like "stories for children". these are things like "love will always triumph, hospitals are where sick people go and doctors make them better again". These stories are true in some directional sense, and they are true in that there are many facts that will support them, but there are facts that falsify the stories.
And so we travel up the pyramid, and the stories become more complex and nuanced - failed prime ministers should not get 100K pa pensions, but if we don't give officials fat payouts they are at risk of bribery on the job which is more expensive. There are facts that support that argument but it seems less cut and dry - you need a model of bribery and human nature and revolving doors to match up.
As we go further up the pyramid more and more falsifiable stories don't just need the same facts as me to agree with me, but they need other mental models to agree with me. Deserving poor, mentally ill people need to buck up a bit, believe in yourself, etc
I think that surfacing mental models matters as much as surfacing facts. Debunking can only go so far and facts that might help cannot be used if the mental model is the wrong shape.
I just think that for a empirical outcome to falsify a theory we both need to agree on the same theory. If your theory is there is a shadowy cabal of pedophiles secretly controlling wokeness to hold down good old boys from decent jobs and my theory is that factory production in China is cheaper so why keep the factory in Detroit, exactly which facts are going to help us?
It took a lot to prove the Earth even spins, and orbits the sun. And yet if you had polled everyone in Europe or America from 1600 onwards, I am not sure when 50% of people would have said heliocentric, and do wonder when if ever the figure got above 95%.
Somehow the figure that Brexit and Trump votes split not on age but on further education seems relevant here - that university teaches new mental models. But somehow I am dubious that has explanatory power.
You may be thinking of Lundy et al v. Meta Platforms, in which they were not fined but agreed to a civil settlement and denied they were doing what was claimed. In that cases, it wasn't even alleged that they were trying to make the locations of specific individuals available for human analysis.
Meta was fined for violating consumer privacy for years, which TikTok has already been doing themselves; but as you can already see they have become even worse than Facebook.
> You may be thinking of Lundy et al v. Meta Platforms,
You see, even when Meta didn't get fined for that, perhaps it's about time for TikTok to get fined in the billions for violating consumer's privacy in the US and repeated offences should be in the tens of billions of dollars to discourage such activity in the US?
Tiktok and Facebook both should be fined for violating the law when there is sufficient evidence that the violation happened. We don't need to make up stories about Facebook to justify investigations into either.
[1]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM
[2]https://blog.cloudflare.com/how-the-nsa-may-have-put-a-backd...
More privacy w.r.t. those wouldn't hurt non-US countries, I would say.
Tik Tok exists as a corporation for people to "do business in China" AKA be paid vast sums of money for knowledge and skills that would be treason or whatever to otherwise transfer.
At least Facebook people keep up appearances -- pretend to be a capitalist, then shun any regulations or taxes that differentiate capitalism from oligarchy.
(And Federal Trade Commission is a joke, it's a known thing they can often do one test case when a behavior is being done in parallel across industry by many actors.)
An imperial, totalitarian regime which currently imprisons people for being of a specific ethnicity (or any arbitrary reason), and has no measure of a proper judicial system, tracking citizens of other nations for purposes of pursuing their power - is not the same thing as - Facebook making it possible for advertisers to target groups of people with 'interests'.
Meta can be fined for shenanigans (which FYI mostly do not cause direct harm), and of course - we need better regulations.
But the issue of TikTok is one of national (frankly international) security, and it's on an entirely different level.
we literally have american companies that have been caught doing this with impunity.
While I think the best reason to care is because of privacy and security, there's also a more concrete argument in favor of preventing theft. Every network call that is not in service to the user is theft of precious battery and bandwidth resources.
Right now it's not a free market because people just don't know the price they are paying. It would be great to surface that price and give alternative apps and services a chance to win based on substantive differences, and not just on superficial things. (The only app that has succeeded on this basis is, to my knowledge, Signal. But Google would immediately alter the entire marketplace for the better by building Android Snitch into the next version of Android).
If you want to discuss how western companies also collect the data, then go make a different post and discuss there? The false equivalence by comparing Tiktok to other tech companies ruins any discussions we could have here.
The term for people that defend authoritarians this way is "useful idiot".
Reminder: the US ran a global kidnapping and torture program for years. Innocent people were even kidnapped off the streets in Europe by American agents, and flown to third countries to be tortured.
We’re trying to do better than them, not follow their example!
Also, Douyin (owned by the same company as TikTok) focuses on education in China while TikTok promotes the dumbest videos in the states. As the article below so eloquently articulates, "TikTok is making you dumb."
https://www.opindia.com/2022/07/tiktok-china-engineering-oth...
In the end, governments just outsource their spying to advertisers (without even having to pay for the service) and can “ask nicely” for any data they need.
However, besides national security letters, I'm not even sure one would be needed when there's a healthy industry of data brokers happy to sell the data.
Put a stop to this - for everyone.
Your comment reminds me of critiques of Russophobia. Turns out in hindsight Russophobia was completely warranted.
The hypocrisy and the invasion of privacy is what upsets me, not which government has jurisdiction. The Chinese government almost certainly has access to Facebook and Google's data, too. I don't want ANYONE building a profile on me.
Even if it is "just" for ad targeting. It won't be just for ads in the future.
In terms of the sources, it is basically the job of any government to be concerned about such issues of how a foreign agent impacts things domestically, independent of any other job they may or you think they should have.
Ye, critized by the average HNer, yes. I agree with that.
Usually not on a "national security" basis though, which makes the concern about TikTok a trigger for me since I am not American. And usually countries that ban Facebook are mocked for being paranoid or against free speech.
I meant hypocrisy in the "mainstream establishment", not among privacy conscious tech people. HN has swung significantly on the matter in the last years.
They never care to elaborate as to why they think the other example you are bringing into the discussion is not comparable to what is currently on the table. Ironically, crying "whataboutism" is, in itself, a form of whataboutism.
Generally, when you bring up another similar example in an argument where someone appears to be applying a double standard, the idea is to start discussion about what the actual standard is. In this case, I would like to know why Facebook is not considered a security risk on this scale when they collect equal amounts of data, given the fact that Chinese and Indian agents are likely deeply embedded at Facebook (as they are at Twitter, per Mudge's disclosure) in positions that have access to the data. That means the standard is clearly not: "Companies who make troves of data about Americans available to the Chinese government are bad."
I would like to know what the standard is. I would also like it to be extended to cover Facebook, Google, Apple, Uber, and all the other American companies who surveil me too. While we're at it, I would like it to be extended to cover the NSA and the FBI, too, who wipe their ass with the 4th amendment.
The State of Democracy in the United States 2021-12-05 - Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the People's Republic of China https://www.fmprc.gov.cn/mfa_eng/zxxx_662805/202112/t2021120...
Well... potentially kidnap you and bring you to China, if you don't comply. They supposedly "convinced" 230,000 Chinese nationals from April 2021 to July 2022 to "voluntarily" return to China to face criminal charges, complete with over 54 "international police stations" and a new law, going into effect this December, claiming extraterritorial authority over their "citizens" for certain crimes.
This, along with other incidents, show that China is more than willing to harass people outside their country, at a minimum.
https://safeguarddefenders.com/en/blog/230000-policing-expan...
It’s not China doing this I am afraid of, as a citizen of a third party country.
China's alleged activities do not even talk or rely on authority from their own courts, let alone another country's.