Is TikTok a National Security Risk? | Hacker News Reader

Is TikTok a National Security Risk?

wsj.com

16 pointsgmays12 comments

I wonder if the realization that control over the media is a non-benign power will remain limited to TikTok/China. Are people willing to admit that the media they were immersed in could also not have had their best interests in mind?

Psyops

all one has to do is peer into the app's security settings that are pre-announced at App Stores (you do do study those before downloading an app, do you) to realize that you would be giving away (what is pretty much) essentially the entire storage of your mobile phone to TikTok servers (if running TikTok app).

Caveat: Google Play (App) Store manually accepts an app's security settings from its app developer, whereas Apple App Store automates and extracts the security settings a whole lot better than its developer inputs them.

It is not that hard to pre-review these apps' security settings.

I'm not sure I understand what you're saying. On iOS there's an Info.plist file that the developer had to fill out in order to get access to, eg Bluetooth.

Yes, because what people watch influences their thinking.

Therefore if you can control what people watch then you can control their thinking.

You could promote videos that speak well of a regime, or a war, or an adversary.

You could hide videos showing people rising up against a regime , or a war, or an adversary.

Just wait until they figure this applies to writing and reading too or the big elephant in the room - human discourse itself. Any exchange of ideas involves influencing another's state of mind. That's how language and communication work.

Banning TikTok does exactly one thing: it shows us how far hegemony will go to maintain itself.

android/ios duopoly is the risk, don't hate the player hate the game.

Yes. Without question.

There already been an investigation and review on this years ago [0] [1] and fast forward today, all we got was TikTok getting caught planning to track specific individual US citizens [2] another investigation into users being shown a distorted reality of two countries at war due to its 'magical' and 'amazing' recommendation algorithm [3], then collecting highly sensitive biometric, face and voice prints of US users; essentially identifying them which aids [2] and finally TikTok admitting that they DID access US user data from China after denying that they didn't.

So it is quite easily and irrefutably clear that TikTok is another worse version of Facebook riddled with privacy issues to the point that it is beyond a surveillance app. Some may say that it is "The best thing to have happened to the Internet" [6] which all of this shows that it absolutely is not the case.

Since Facebook got a $5BN fine for violating the privacy of its users, then it makes perfect sense that the same should apply to TikTok and must be fined in the billions of dollars if it wants to continue operating in the US and respect the privacy of its users.

[0] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-tiktok-cfius-exclusive-id...

[1] https://www.cotton.senate.gov/news/press-releases/cotton-sch...

[2] https://futurism.com/tiktok-spy-locations-specific-americans

[3] https://www.nrk.no/osloogviken/xl/tiktok-doesn_t-show-the-wa...

[4] https://techcrunch.com/2021/06/03/tiktok-just-gave-itself-pe...

[5] https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/emilybakerwhite/tiktok-...

[6] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28135484

TikTok (like all social media platforms) are a boon to national intelligence services. It's just which ones are getting the data, and how they use it. Seems every generation learns this their own way, which is why I never believed the "Generation <name> are Digital Natives!" type stories.

Is the WSJ a national security risk? Isn't all just free speech?

offtopic, but I'll bite.

Wall Street Journal is a press also bestowed by US Constitution with freedom of press (falls under First Amendment).

National security risk is that foreign state doing surveillances on US citizens.

The press is doing their patriotic job protecting United States government and US citizenry dutifully through its thorough reporting as given by the 1A.

>The press is doing their patriotic job protecting United States government and US citizenry dutifully through its thorough reporting as given by the 1A.

Now I'll wait for someone else to bite on this.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com