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Comment by blackbear_ | Hacker News Reader

> General counsel Erich Andersen wrote to staff that a “misguided plan was developed and carried out by a few individuals within the Internal Audit department this past summer”, adding that those involved “misused their authority to obtain access to TikTok user data” in violation of its code of conduct.

Ah yes, straight from the playbook: management gets caught being mischievous and throws a few underlings under the bus to save their own asses.

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GDPR (which is still in effect in the UK) doesn't really care about _who_ misuses the data.

I really hope that the information commission has the bollocks to nail tiktok for this

And the UK is welcome to try to enforce the GDPR against the PRC.

Last I checked TikTok has a huge office in London. They’re not invulnerable to penalties.

No, but UK enforcement is now quite vulnerable to, say, an HQ move to Paris.

Wouldn't want those jobs to go missing during a Brexit war deepfreeze winter.

A pity there wasn't some way of harmonizing laws and enforcement with other nearby nation-states. Some sort of "Union".

Thinking aloud

You could probably put a bunch of spin on it that "China has been committing human rights abuses right here in the UK", "threatening journalists", "accessing personal data to track them in their home life", and that "as the government of the people we say that this is not ok".

A move to Paris will both optically look, and could again be headlined as TikTok trying to skirt the rule of law to make sure they can keep stealing your data.

Announce some extra investment into tech industries using the fines collected from TikTok, using any assets you may have frozen and prevented from leaving the country if needs be, in order to bolster jobs.

I think the government of the day could spin it into a PR win.

This seems like a lot of typing for what, up until Brexit Got Done, could have been expressed with the two-character word "no", as in, "no, ByteDance, no."

Now it's 'optics' and geopolitics.

These two scenarios are not equivalent. One gives ByteDance vastly more leverage.

Agree, we should extend this as far as possible and harmonise everything globally via the UN. Right?

They could be agents for the communist party operating without the knowledge of the regular management.

The management in every Chinese company absolutely knows which employees are working primarily for the Party. They were not hired by accident.

They probably don't know all of them, if the Party knows what it's about.

In the old Soviet system, you had people who were openly members of the Party, political officers placed in your organization. But you also had KGB agents placed in your organization that you didn't know about, because their job was to keep an eye on you.

> They probably don't know all of them

That implies a culture of rebellion against overreach and abuse of power, which doesn't exist.

Definitely possible. But it's also possible that the executives are such agents themselves, and are simply lying.

> could be agents for the communist party operating without the knowledge of the regular management

Isn't that worse? Management being unable to make commitments, because they don't control their firms, the Party does, is the central problem with Chinese companies.

yeah you can bet those underlings were workign for someone else.

In which case, there would be evidence of that. Prosecutors are notorious for wanting the biggest fish out there. While their might be bigger players that are getting away with this, it's also not unreasonable to think that it happened as the evidence shows.

Basically, rather than make stuff up, I'd rather go with what the evidence shows and what can be proven. It's easy to hide in a big company, and it's at a bigger company where it's a lot easier to abuse your position without anyone else, including higher ups, knowing.

they just decided to track journalists for fun with no-one telling them to? seems pretty unlikely to me.

> they just decided to track journalists for fun with no-one telling them to?

That's not what I suggested in the slightest. Stop lying.

> seems pretty unlikely to me.

Sure, because I imagine they didn't just do it for fun. But that doesn't mean a more senior person has to be involved.

Back it up with evidence. Your feelings are worthless. I'm right, and you are wrong.

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