TikTok banned on government devices under spending bill passed by Congress | Hacker News Reader

TikTok banned on government devices under spending bill passed by Congress

cnbc.com

381 pointsmfiguiere253 comments

I get that this is a thing - isolating one specific app for very specific reasons. I am honestly surprised it's a thing though - shouldn't all unapproved apps be disallowed from government devices? Whether Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, Pornhub or whatever - unless you have specific reasons such as e.g. PR position, shouldn't all these be relegated to your private device?

Yes. I’ve been surprised that this is getting so much attention since every federal organization has a “no unapproved software” policy.

It is bizarre that this required a law when as a private sector employee I can't even use Apple Notes on my work computer.

This doesn't require a law. Government agencies already can manage which applications are used on their devices.

Yeah agreed - why does a government issued phone or device need anything more than what is necessary to perform their job? They are compensated enough to have a separate non-work phone.

Perhaps it is not known ahead of time what software is needed to complete a job. Who decides what is necessary anyway?

I would imagine that a recon-related use case for having TikTok installed will be excluded from this bill.

What about webmarketers in government? And doesn’t the government have covert influence operations?

"And doesn’t the government have covert influence operations?"

I would assume that shady illegal operations are not really affected by regular laws.

My work provides my phone and pays for the data plan. But I am allowed to put anything I want on it.

This is part of the new Cold War and you can expect this kind of Red Scare thinking shaping US policy in the decades to come.

I think about the time tiktok was instrumental of making a joke out of president Trump's rally.

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/after-trump-ra...

Facebook emotion experiment on users. It was facebook but it can easily be tiktok.

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-28051930

TikTok admitting to finding and firing employee that spied on reporters

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/dec/22/tiktok-by...

And I can go on and on.

The banning of tik tok as a social network is not unwarranted. It can be used to influence users and gather data. It makes sense to keep it under some control since we can never know how much influence foreign government agencies have over it.

It should be and needs to be a thing.

Hang on, your second example of why TikTok should be banned is because Facebook did some bad things? And your third example is because TikTok fired people who abused their position?

Whereas Facebook actually *did* psychological experiments on users according to your link, and Facebook has inappropriately used user data. When is Facebook going to be banned?

That Facebook admitted it doesn’t mean TikTok isn’t doing it without admitting so.

Of course not.

The links just don't back up their position. I don't care about banning TikTok, it's more the unevenness because "China evil". As for admitting it, Facebook has required whistleblowers to expose the terrible things they have done.

TikTok has not done anywhere near as much damage to the US as meth and guns individually, but you just don't see the same effort put into solving either of those two problems.

Agree with the fb one but not this one.

> because TikTok fired people who abused their position

Or tiktok decided doing it and when found out they throw some low-rank employees. Same as setting some impossible targets and then firing employes for bribery and other illegal behaviour.

I suspect that the role of the CCP in TikTok's management plays a significant role.

The CCP is less directly involved with Facebook.

(Though I'd be more than happy to see Facebook destroyed entirely.)

You have to expand your imagination to how many millions of us government employees there are and hiw many separate IT departments and government devices there are (and expanded to what private employees actually count as using government devices)

It’s crazy complicated and while you could expect, say, FBI employees or those with security clearances to have already strict controls on their devices… there are lots of others out there, hundreds or thousands of separate entities controlling the rules on devices.

Making it a law puts the role have one source everywhere, not subject to the judgement of an enormous number of organizations.

Phones are managed by an employer. Government phones are managed by the agency that issues them. What the law does is ensure that all agencies do not have tiktok. Pornhub will also likely appear on banned app lists, but they didn't feel it necessary to make a law.

One interesting side effect, is that tiktok might now be bereft of government content, which sounds dry, but includes a lot of NASA's work.

I know it's not the point, but Pornhub doesn't really have apps that could be banned. All they have is an apk for Android, no iOS at all. It's probably due to porn apps having been banned on the app stores since forever.

most apps are just UI's for websites anyways

Yes, but with the difference, that this website will be now always open and able to track and send data wherever, even when you don't use it.

To your second point -- I assumed that there would be an exception for government content, but my cursory reading of the bill (as a non-lawyer) suggests that... maybe there isn't. The only exceptions are for "law enforcement activities, national security interests and activities, and security researchers."

I suspect that many government agencies with a presence on TikTok don't use TT directly but rather are using some PR/communications service or another to connect with it. In that case, I guess this wouldn't inhibit those agencies' ability to put content on the platform.

(For the curious, page 2001 - https://www.appropriations.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/JRQ12192...)

they will just contact it out

Where does one get this hub app? What about browsers? Most social media apps could very easily be used via mobile web browsers. If I had a company, I would not block Ticktok but would judge those who put that shit on a company device.

This is in practice how it works, you're debating semantics.

I thought the US Constitution prohibits laws that target only one person or corporation:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_of_attainder

https://www.heritage.org/the-constitution/report/can-congres...

If Congress bans TikTok they have to ban all apps like TikTok. Maybe they claim it is for national defense? But what business does not have some relation to national defense? Are they going to ban all engineering that originates in China? Passing a more general privacy law and providing funds for enforcement of it would have been a better way to address this.

I haven't been able to find the actual text of this law, but if it's written like the other 'TikTok ban' legislation I've seen -- they don't technically ban TikTok by name. The ones I have read are actually a ban on "social media services of that are based in or have a controlling parent company located in one of [x] countries" or something to that degree.

Although headline writers have boiled that down to "TikTok ban".

It was part of a (very big) amendment [1] ("NO TIKTOK ON GOVERNMENT DEVICES") to H.R. 2617 [2]

I really enjoy the transparency our government has but it could still be a lot better. Finding the final text of bills, especially before a bill is passed and when our voices might still matter, can be more difficult than it should be.

[1] https://www.congress.gov/congressional-record/volume-168/iss...

[2] https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/house-bill/2617

How is Congress choosing not to allow a free app on devices they purchase even remotely a punishment?

What's the actual harm to TikTok beyond the fact that they cannot monetize government employees?

This is simply wrong from every angle. The government isn't stopping anyone from using TikTok, they're stopping people from using it on devices the government has purchased and maintains. You're free to have your own device and watch whatever you want with whatever app you want.

But moreover, the constitution has exactly zero language that says "you can't pass a law to block apps on government owned devices for legitimate security concerns unless you block every other app that might also be a security concern so that it's fair." in the same way that the first amendment doesn't say the government can't pass a law blocking pornhub on government issued laptops.

Hell, the government could simply say "too many federal employees are wasting time on TikTok" or "this is fucking with our VPN" or any number of other things and pass a law to block it. You have no right, as a government employee, to use your business device for whatever purpose you want. That's never been the case.

Until 2020 TikTok was accessing device clipboards even when the app was running in the background [1].

Assuming the average user doesn't really ever 'close' apps, it means TikTok had access to everything a user copied/pasted on that device.

Assuming the CCP can access data on Chinese company servers, then it's fair to assume the CPP is in possession of all of the clipboard contents.

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2020/6/26/21304228/tiktok-security-...

How is that not an Apple/Google problem? In what world should that functionality be on by default without explicit user permission?

Better late than never - Google and Apple have since added OS level clipboard protection and notifications.

There can be more than one problem at a time.

* Companies do this kind of data collection

* users don’t take the time to make themselves aware of earth their devices and software does

* this kind of data collection isn’t illegal

* OS providers allow this data collection without appropriate controls or use notification

* and others

Some of these problems have been improved upon, but it’s definitely not just one groups fault.

“this kind of data collection isn’t illegal“

And where it is, there's so much more that's also illegal that just about any nasty thing can be hidden between the trivialities of the resulting consent banner dance.

OS level protections are truly the least bad thing because they can also set arbitrary thresholds that would be impossible to define in law.

It is, and the iOS 14 changes fixed and highlighted the issue.

Perhaps naively, but I give all the apps (even Tiktok) benefit of the doubt here. It was a fairly common practice for podcast apps (for example), to check the clipboard for an RSS feed and prompt to subscribe to it when adding a podcast. iOS 14 gave new APIs to do that in a more privacy preserving way.

I don't think anyone was busted for anything nefarious, but it just reavealed a lack of suitable APIs on the platform.

> It was a fairly common practice for podcast apps (for example), to check the clipboard for an RSS feed and prompt to subscribe to it when adding a podcast.

How annoying! It would be better to register an rss:// handler and let the OS notify the user that a new RSS url has been found {on the clipboard, in html, text file, url, whatever} and ask what to do (perhaps with some automatic permission to send it to your app).

On Android this was "fixed" in newer versions. One of my apps used to use the clip board but it is no longer possible to listen for the content unless your app is in the foreground.

Ah yes, our annual budget. The perfect place to decide if TikTok can be on government phones, and what online sellers should do to police counterfeit goods.

The absurdity of these people passing bills they have never read will never disappoint. You don’t even need to pay off congresspeople anymore, because they don’t know or care what they’re voting on.

I’m surprised more people aren’t hung on this. The fact that legislation can sneak into unrelated bills is infuriating and a danger to an increasingly vote avoidant society (at least in the U.S. where voter participation can’t even reach 70% for the presidential election).

> increasingly vote avoidant society

Turnout for presidential elections has been increasing in the US in the last decades. Also 70 percent is great turnout when compared with other countries.

Main point was that "people passing bills they have never read"

It ain't called an omnibus bill because things are 'sneaking' in.

Voter apathy is an issue, but I suspect the structural design of our representation has a bigger effect. Most seats in the Senate, and especially the House, are completely safe for the incumbent. Both parties’ primary systems heavily favor the incumbent, so actually voting out a particular politician in a deep red or blue state is almost impossible.

I'm blown away that we would name an app or company in a law. It should have been written generically.

I think we could replace Congress with a simple program that just votes Yay on whatever donates it the most money. It might be more efficient, at the very least.

When are we technologically ready to have the real democracy where people can vote on every single bill instead of having their representatives to do so?

I understand why they banned it. However, I also know western apps are closed to work in the Chinese market. So I get privacy and security are reasons to ban the TikTok app at the school or government level. However, I would like to see the same tight control for every app that invades privacy regardless if it was made in the EU, USA, China, etc. Is that too much to ask? Or is lobbying so intense from Google, Amazon, Meta, Apple (who is now getting into the Ads business too), and co that it is next to impossible to have tight privacy control with these apps?

At the moment at least it’s hard to make a similar argument for any of those companies posing a US national security threat.

How you can't put Meta in that same group astounds me considering that they have a significant history of this.

It's more that China represents a national security threat and it's OK to special case logic for hostile foreign entities. Notably China isn't the only entity called out in this bill, also North Korea, Russia, & Iran.

The privacy conversation IMO is a separate conversation entirely. If consumers want privacy, they have options (like, don't use apps which track you). Banning the collection of data on government employees to be consumed by hostile foreign entities is more about the USA Federal government not being OK with hostile foreign government's abilities to track its employees. And not all foreign governments - only the ones named in the bill.

Couple of linkedin data breaches should definitely put them on the nope list for government devices.

It's Microsoft, so never going to happen.

Personally I don't want US companies to have power over me any more than I want Chinese companies to have it.

Also China can and will just make shell companies in the USA with apps that track people. Tiktok is a breakout success but it seems plausible that they have the resources to make other popular apps. Going forward they will launch them through US firms to evade bans like this. The only long term solution is to implement real privacy, and face the fact that US companies built their businesses on surveillance and must change.

We've already seen how US companies like Facebook will let any foreign entities with money use this data however they see fit.

It makes no sense to single out TikTok or China. Pass stiff data hygiene regulations that make this sort of abuse impossible to begin with, rather than playing whack-a-mole with individual actors.

Like the GDPR? “Process the data at home, allow backup, non-assisted export, and delete within reasonable time without the user asking”?

You should care at least a little bit. I know it's not super popular but there's a wild difference between Google, a private company operating under US Law, accountable to the people (and in aggregate, you) by way of democratic rule and a foreign government that has openly attempted to interfere with strategic deterrence of your country, presumably to gain an advantage in a future nuclear exchange with the country you live in.

This is not to excuse Google, but suggesting in any way that they are the same as the CCP is a bit of a bruh moment.

A couple of things. I am not suggesting they are the same. I am saying that regardless of their differences I do not want either of them to have control over me.

> Google, a private company operating under US Law, accountable to the people

My understanding of the FISA Court, warrantless wiretapping, and NSA mass surveillance is that the data these companies collect may not all be used in accordance with US law in a way that involves accountability to the people. And that is precisely the reason why I do not want them to be able to collect it. Google does not have to be the same as China for me to want neither of them to surveil me. And it is still the case that these big US companies are very likely doing shady things with our data with no accountability. As someone born and raised in the USA and shocked by the Snowden revelations, I no longer trust that the deep and secretive parts of our government have any sort of the moral compass we are raised to believe they have.

Don’t often hear Snowden mentioned these days. https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2022/12/18/the-trouble-wi...

He is fully in the hands of the Russian government because he had to flee to a US-hostile nation. I don't think anyone can blame him for not putting his life at risk a second time.

I think his choices are not quite aligning with a hero and a martyr he made himself out to be.

He had risked freedom and possibly his life for a cause. Having accomplished the goal his next most important task would be to save himself. That is what he did and I do not think he should have a slightest concern whether you or anyone else like it or not. Playing martyr would be foolish and I do not think he does that.

I don’t know what you’d expect him to do, he’s literally trapped in Russia and speaking out against Putin would almost certainly mean prison if not death. None of this changes the facts he revealed.

Just to be clear, whatever I said here - I have not said anything in defense of the information he made public and my issue is not with that.

This is a pretty terrible take when you literally had Facebook attempting to interfere with elections.

Technically, there’s a difference. Practically, as a consumer / that difference doesn’t matter to me.

Only one of those two countries has used their espionage agencies to perform a soft coup where I live, so I'm not really seeing the difference.

I would say the power Google welds is an order of magnitude more dangerous to Western society and values than CCP. Unelected billionaire oligarchs and executives with a clear and legal obligation to maximise profits and market power is just as big a national security threat.

You’re taking about unelected billionaire oligarchs as it’s a bad thing and saying Google is more of a threat than the CCP? That’s interesting.

As someone who lives in neither China or the US. I'm much more concerned about US companies and the data they collect.

China isn't much of a personal threat to me. The US on the other hand has a fondness for extraditing foreign nationals. Last I heard you still have a really nice Cuban resort for some of them.

Yeah, I agree with you actually. I’ve learned that people here are so unable to hear that message I have to tone it down a bit, but you’re right that the US aggressively pursues surveillance, and covert and overt military action against everyone on Earth.

TikTok is also a private company operating under US law.

We should ban TikTok outright from American app stores, until the CCP allows American social media apps. It’s insane we don’t reciprocate.

Why is freedom of speech suddenly not worth preserving when it comes from somewhere we don’t like?

I truly see it as a Chinese campaign to dumbify our society.

We are swallowing it hook, line and sinker.

So you’re saying freedom of speech is dangerous and should be curtailed? The same thing is happening locally.

"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."

You're reeking of good faith /s

Your argument is like saying that jailing fraudsters is anti-freedom-of-speech.

I keep hearing this and have been unable to find a shred of data to support it. Is this just a meme?

Well there are studies about the effects of TikTok. On sone level, it’s just common see sense. Whether it is a true campaign as such is questionable but it is clear the CCP tries to prevent its population being “dumbed down” from social media and other forms of entertainment and they are probably not unhappy to see the kind of content and its effects that TikTok has on the US population.

On the contrary, what I've seen of Douyin is no more substantive than what is on TikTok, it's just more compliant with CCP censorship. It is an entertainment medium first and has no pretensions about being anything else. This "common sense" you reference sounds like the same kind of "technology rots your brain" Luddite-ism that welled up for a while and then faded back into well deserved obscurity when radio and then television and then the Internet first proliferated.

I want to see the studies or even any kind of actual data substantiating this "dumbing down" or even "harm" that doesn't reduce down to teenagers saying and doing stupid shit, as has been done for a good chunk of our species' time on this rock.

You think recognizing the ill-effects of TikTok is just Luddite-ism? How nice for you. I mean, the evidence is on the Internet; here is one study[1]. I also think it is pretty clear that consuming TikTok regularly by children has a direct consequence on attention span, I don’t require the Cleveland Clinic to tell me that. I think there is a difference from mindlessly consuming TikTok than programming a C64 or playing an MMORPG with complex leveling/crafting/etc systems. Realizing that fact is not anti-technology.

1. https://movementdisorders.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/1...

It is a parents responsibility to control and monitor what apps go on their child’s phone.

What a garbage study! n=28? Self reporting? Uncritical acceptance of user profile info and video content with no verification? No mechanism of causation?

Salient quote: "64.3% of subjects cited were selling merchandise on their TikTok account related to their TikTok tics or could be contacted for paid appearances."

It's trash. It's not science. In fact, it's offensively not science. What's next, reporting on the supernatural stuff that we see on video sites? By this standard, I find the top 20 or so people on TikTok that report ghost encounters and can get a paper published about how ghosts are real.

Snark aside, if this is the quality of material you are basing your assumption of "ill effects" on, I feel more comfortable in both calling TikTok no different from any other media sharing platform, and characterizing this handwringing about it as tired Luddite-ism, than I did before reading your link.

You think it is equivalent to supernatural mumbo jumbo? It’s pretty early days for the research of this but there is also common sense. If you really think there is no difference between TikTok and other media platform then I am happy for you.

Agree. Content on Chinese tik Tok is very different.

If you want this, pass laws to force that kind of content.

Opium wars: revenge?

It's unfair trade practice that Chinese developers have direct access to Western consumers while Western developers access to Chinese consumers is severely limited by the Chinese regime.

It's unfair to ourselves we let foreign companies prone to be used as government spionage tools to be in American app markets.

It’s unfair that we can’t have an honest conversation about tic Tok because people chalk it up to free speech. The Chinese Government and its subsidiaries do not have first amendment rights, but there’s a handful of passages in the constitution about dealing with foreign adversaries: which China is.

Because the somewhere we don't like is one of the most censorious regimes on the planet. Free Speech needs to defend itself.

Isn’t the point of free speech that it can defend itself? Why do we need to police the content our citizens consume if that’s the case?

The banning of speech will continue until free speech is defended, or something

Freedoms can't defend themselves, because they're abstract and subjective. Human beings decide what freedoms other human beings have, collectively and by various means with varying efficacy, such as use of force, tacit agreement, etc.

People in China are certainly free to speak whatever they like. But if they say the wrong thing their genocidal dictatorship will stomp on them hard. Here in America we have means to defend free speech through the use of force, e.g., the courts, and a generally accepted social contract that some (many? I hope) are loath to break: and that freedom doesn't mean other individuals can't or won't react negatively (cf: Musk and Twitter).

Freedom of speech is not freedom of international trade.

100%. The lengths people will go to defend social media companies is ridiculous. Let alone a Chinese botnet.

Because TikTok the app is not speech. The content hosted on TikTok is speech. The speech could move somewhere else.

But every platform is editorialized by algorithm. Speech moving elsewhere means editing speech.

We shouldn't parent our citizens. If it's important to them, they're free to choose another social media platform or make their own. When we decide we know how to run people's lives better than them, we run head first into authoritarianism. If the US goes down that path then the CCP has already won.

The reply you are replying to isn't making an argument regarding government paternalism, but regarding economic protectionism. You aren't addressing that. An analogy: embargos against countries that do not adhere to international IP treaties.

It's not really a matter of "international IP treaties", Tiktok's app is spyware that collects extensive data about users and includes remote command and control capabilities that have no excuse or reason for existing in a social media app.

https://penetrum.com/tiktok/Penetrum_TikTok_Security_Analysi...

Yes, the reason the government gives isn't about economic protectionism either, but that's the argument the person was making.

American social media apps do the same yet for some reason we are OK with them doing it.

Honestly, I think the content on TikTok is doing more harm than anything else.

It isn't clear that the argument is either which way. If we interpret it economically, the argument is a variant of "we should cut off our own nose to spite our face". Why should the American consumer be hampered because the Chinese consumer is hampered? That isn't clever.

But there is a pretty good military argument. Giving the Chinese government an easy way in to most mobile devices seems like a rookie mistake.

Ideally, the US should legislate that all code is covered by the GPLv2 or v3 so we can monitor what is going on and be positioned to exercise freedom from Chinese spying. That's be the best of most worlds. The real issue here is, as usual, that we can't see the source code so we don't know what it does.

Economically it’s more like if Chinese companies are helped by the government, why can’t West do the same?

Same as anti-dumping import taxes.

The question isn't one of "can" and "can't". The west is empowered to make its own people worse off. The politicians do so all the time.

The issue is we've got a situation with a high quality Chinese option and lower quality western one. Obviously Westerners will be worse off if the high quality option is banned. They all wanted to use that one (otherwise it wouldn't be necessary to ban it). It is obviously making them pick an option they'd rather not.

There is no economic reason to voluntarily make people worse off. It is pure downside.

> Same as anti-dumping import taxes.

They're also on shaky footing and probably make people worse off for little gain. Wikipedia humorously notes that in the EU 98% of the time anti dumping laws are being used to target things other than dumping.

Academics have to be pretty wild-eyed to argue that people need to be protected from large amounts of cheap stuff. I personally can't even imagine their horror. If someone sells you stuff for cheap, buy it for cheap. The market will work it out.

In anti-dumping, it’s protecting not the people. It’s protecting local market.

Goods at dumped prices will disrupt local markets and bankrupt local competitors. Then dumpers can raise prices way beyond initial prices to win jackpot. That when „the people“ loose. Local know-how is destroyed, industry ruined… and you end up paying a ton for imported goods.

Personally I don’t think TikTok is „better“. It’s more addictive and has a ton of marketing moneys pushing it forward. Should we not ban cocaine because the masses think it’s a great entertainment?

This isn't about parenting our citizens, it's about forcing China to pass laws Americans want. If you want American market access you give Americans access to the Chinese market.

This isn't about parenting our citizens, it's about protecting America business from unfair foreign competition. China is a massive market they get exclusive access to that gives them a huge advantage. For example, they can afford to not run as many ads as American companies. Our free market is only available to other free markets.

Banning products always distorts markets. If the US decides to distort markets for ideological reasons the CCP has already won.

Distorting a market isn’t always a bad thing.

> Banning products always distorts markets.

This truism doesn't really say anything. Things can distort more than one way. If China has distorted markets in its favor, you would certainly want to distort them back toward neutral or to your favor.

> If the US decides to distort markets for ideological reasons the CCP has already won.

Won what?

The US already distorts markets for ideological reasons. Also, you're characterizing ideology as the only space of conflict, and since ideologies are necessarily abstractions you can just go into endless recursion saying 'if X does Y then Z has already won' without it being measurable in any meaningful way. That kind of argument is its own thought terminating cliche.

Markets are just a tool.

They are not a god that we have to grovel to, and when markets start to allow things that are detrimental to the health and security of a country and her citizens then the government is absolutely in the right to step in as Sovereign and stop it.

Geopolitically, this is a naive position to take.

Why would you let an adversary have an intrusive app that can collect infinite data on your citizens and look into your citizens intimate moments and candid conversations?

There's a reason why China doesn't allow American social media in their market. They know how easily it is to spy on citizens.

Under this reasoning, American apps and websites should be banned in other countries as well.

Europe has threatened to do just that several times to get the social media giants to respect their privacy laws.

Most other places are too small of a market to exert that kind of influence and would indeed just be dropped if they tried the same.

tragedy of the commons…

> When we decide we know how to run people's lives better than them, we run head first into authoritarianism.

This kind of shortsighted thinking has created a world of corporations that relentlessly exploit consumers, often with ruinous effects on wellbeing.

This really does not follow, please explain.

Let me counter with a couple of questions for you.

Do you believe the point of government is to protect people from harm? And, do you believe that, for example, making someone addicted to junk food and obese or addicted to their phone for 20+ hours out of their waking time per week are examples of harm?

Not everyone would answer yes to both questions. Some, like the original commenter I was replying to, believe that people should be free to destroy themselves, helped along by the external forces acting upon them.

Like seat belts, prescription medication, drugs, background checks on firearms. Taxes

The government purpose is to make the citizens life better throw away unqualified statements of “nanny state” is just close to barbarism

This is what I mean by “insanity”. We have an adversary that’s punching us in the face and rather than defend ourselves or fight back we lean into the punch because “the free market”.

The market is already unfree. We’re banned from the entire Chinese market. And it will remain asymmetrical until we decide to pick up and walk away.

So what? It's chinese consumers that lose by keeping American companies out.

I don't understand the reasoning on wanting to punish American consumers until Chinese consumers get a better deal

You’re missing half the equation. It’s Americans that lose out by not being able to sell into the Chinese market.

Banning TikTok doesn’t hurt American consumers in any real sense. They can amuse themselves with short form video from any number of providers. Social media is a zero sum battle for your non-sleeping hours at this point.

No it isn’t it’s American citizens who are feeding the Chinese intelligence apparatus directly about their entire lives. This is not a personal preference but a giant information gathering net. Hence why China bans ours because they know this is a ridiculous thing to allow

This is wrong. It should be up to individual to decide what they should watch and what they shouldn't. There is difference between US government and CCP.

With your logic, EU and all other government should ban facebook, twitter as there is high probability that US companies supplies data to 3 letter companies.

What is need is good rules and regulations that applies to all companies equally. We live in globalized world.

I’m not convinced that every American who wants to should be permitted to stream their location to a Chinese company. I can see arguments either way, but the national security consideration seems to be quite real.

Location? Oh sweet summer child.

Tiktok's Android app has been disassembled enough to tell that the built-in browser likely contains a keylogger, but also contains the ability to receive plaintext commands and execute them in the Java VM.

Now realize that tiktok likely has location, camera, photo, and microphone permissions.

Oh yeah, and they've been spending lots of effort on anti-virtual-machine and obfuscation techniques.

A data leak at Alibaba revealed they're collecting: GPS locations, full lists of mobile contacts, SMS logs, IMSI numbers, IMEI numbers, device models and versions, stored app data from previous installations, and memory data.

https://penetrum.com/tiktok/Penetrum_TikTok_Security_Analysi...

I can't speak for Android, but on iOS it is trivial to prevent apps from getting any of this data. Remote code execution like you describe would directly violate Apple's rules. You can't gather GPS, SMS logs, or most of the other data you mention without explicit permission from the user.

> Remote code execution like you describe would directly violate Apple's rules.

That doesn't mean much, given that total malware sneaks through Apple's review process a lot.

I dunno if there's actually a constitutional way for the US to stop it. They can probably make it hard/impossible for TikTok/Bytedance to make money in the US, but banning the app itself is out of the question, unless Apple/Google decide to remove it of their own volition

What are the national security considerations that override an American’s god given right to broadcast their location?

Since when does an American have a god-given (or constitution-given) right to broadcast their location to a foreign intelligence agency? And since when does the constitution allow an espionage device to collect location information in exchange for silly videos?

I don’t really understand this. So, are you saying Twitch should not allow IRL streams to go to China?

> With your logic, EU and all other government should ban facebook, twitter as there is high probability that US companies supplies data to 3 letter companies.

As a EU citizen: Just have a very close look at Facebook and TikTok and determine if they really follow our laws. If not, fine them into the ground.

> With your logic, EU and all other government should ban facebook, twitter as there is high probability that US companies supplies data to 3 letter companies

if they're consistently not operating within EU law, then yes. Did you expect the opposite?

We should treat the banning of our internet companies by foreign nations that same as banning imports of goods.

We aren't China. If we became like China, it would be very sad.

China does a lot more to it’s citizens than curate their app stores.

So until we do 100% of what China does, it's fine. Got it.

No, we shouldn’t.

China allowed US social media as long as they allowed China to supervise content including censorships

No, that is assumed, but China never extended that offer. Censorship in China is itself censored, so they don't technically admit to banning any US social media, it simply doesn't work for reasons.

Twitter, Quora, Facebook was not blocked for some times. Few apps like LinkedIn complied with Chinese govt.

They weren't blocked and then they were, but there was no law to do it, there was no published official action to do it, it was just not working one day for reasons. There are no formal instructions to "comply", you have to rely solely on your guanxi to do it, and then the work needed to stay in good graces with government basically amounts to "don't make us mad" (like, no stories about Xi's family wealth, no embarrassing the government, everything else might get you a hand wringing but can be forgiven).

They have to work like this because freedom of speech is guaranteed in the Chinese constitution. But since China isn’t really a rule of law country, the Chinese government works through it informally, which isn’t very compatible in how western companies can work.

Facebook was blocked after the 2009 Xinjiang terrorist attacks.

ETIM was using it to coordinate their attacks and Facebook didn't work with the government.

It was actually blocked during/after the riots. The terrorist attack, if you mean kunming, happened a few years later.

Frankly, it would have happened earlier if it wasn’t for the 2008 Olympics, a lot of face was riding on not blocking western internet services until after the Olympics were completed.

When you put it that way, it sounds like China and the USA have a lot in common, given the cozy relations between tech companies and politicians.

We are arguing about a law that was passed in public with text anyone can read. That could never happen in China.

On paper, sure. A long series of companies has given up at this point. Even LinkedIn, which should be far easier to manage given the content, eventually stripped out all social features.

Google claimed China was actively targeting them with cyberattacks, breaking into the gmail inboxes of activists, and other severe problems, despite trying to follow local law.

Tiktok will still work in a browser, and will work on PCs and laptops. So I'm okay with this. Go ahead, try to keep me off of tiktok, mom and dad.

the fact is that American social media apps are allowed when they comply with Chinese laws (censorships). And Chinese apps are allowed in the US because they comply with US laws.

Does anyone have a link to the actual bill that includes the TikTok reference? I’d love to see the exact phrasing used. Also it’s interesting that they singled out TikTok instead of a more general ban on Chinese or any non-US owned and operated services.

edit: Found it here: https://thehill.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2022/12/JRQ12...

The TikTok section starts on page 2001. The actual content is a bit longwinded. The only mention of "TikTok" is in the title and in the definition of the term "covered application". The key phrase from the title: "DIVISION R — NO TIKTOK ON GOVERNMENT DEVICES"

It seems the to leave the door open for other federal offices to expand the the list of banned apps: "...shall develop standards and guidelines for executive agencies requiring the removal of any covered application from information technology."

It looks like the federal government has banned software from federal devices via a mix of executive orders, Federal Acquisition Regulation, defense appropriations and other laws passed by Congress [0](non-exhaustive list). Many of these prohibitions target specific platforms, companies, and hardware so actions like this are not unprecedented.

That being said - one of the reactions I've noticed to the "we need to ban TikTok" movement is that we should target behavior instead of specific companies. The issue with that is many companies and platforms owned by "friendly" companies would also be impacted by increased security and privacy protections provided to all US residents - not just those employed by the federal government.

[0] https://cmmcinfo.org/2021/01/20/list-of-hardware-software-an...

> The issue with that is many companies and platforms owned by "friendly" companies would also be impacted by increased security and privacy protections provided to all US residents

Doesn’t sound like an issue to me. Anyone tracking or profiling is inherently unfriendly, regardless of national origin. Ban the lot.

> Doesn’t sound like an issue to me. Anyone tracking or profiling is inherently unfriendly, regardless of national origin. Ban the lot.

I think that's somewhat strained. "Tracking or profiling" for the purpose of advertising when applied generically to all users in a reasonably anonymized way is... simply not in the same class as "tracking or profiling"[1] applied to target specific journalists in order to suppress coverage of inconvenient newsworthy facts. It's just not. Not remotely.

TikTok got caught doing something way beyond the pale. And at this point[2] I think it's very reasonable for people to view their future behavior as inherently suspect. As a large actor, I can have very little trust in ByteDance's future behavior. But Facebook and Google and Amazon... quite frankly they've proven pretty trustworthy with the same kind of data so far. I think continued trust isn't unwarranted.

[1] The more common term of art in this context is generally "espionage"

[2] Until last week, I was absolutely in the "let them sell their app, they have the same rights anyone does" camp. But now? Sorry, they burned the bridge. You don't get three strikes once you're caught spying.

It doesn’t have to be equivalently bad, just bad.

Similarly to how murder and assault are different, but both still illegal.

"Ban the lot" certainly seemed to trying to equate them.

Spying on journalists is bad in ways that selling me tailored junk is not. You don't ban companies for selling somewhat embarassingly appropriate junk. You do ban them for spying. What you absolutely don't do is ban the junk selling because someone else spied.

It doesn’t equate them. It establishes a threshold that both exceed by different margins. For clarity, Tik Tok is worse than Facebook, but Facebook itself is sufficiently bad to merit banning even absent the existence of Tik Tok.

Again, ban the lot.

"Target behavior instead of apps" seems like such a massive regulatory hurdle that it's meaningless. How would you even write such a sweeping law and get it passed? How long would it take?

I think this crowd knows it's impossible so they get to sound smart while nothing changes the status quo and TikTok still avoids a ban.

Having an ocean of interpretation in between reality<->process won’t necessarily stop a proposed set of laws from becoming policy. Unless, you know, there’s time to consider such factors.

When it fails you just say it wasn’t interpreted properly and what’s important is that it was well intentioned. “There was [bad guy] or [bad thing] so we didn’t have time to figure out the details” (repackage and repeat x1000).

4K page mega bills have zero incentives not to do this as often as possible. And you can be sure Reddit/Twitter/media will be full of cheerleaders in the early days defending it and those challenging it can be called out as mere supporters of [bad guy/bad thing] acting in bad faith. It’s almost a perfect recipe.

So you're saying it's impossible to define what TikTok is doing wrong? Why does TikTok deserve a ban but not other major suppliers of short-form video that are tracking their users, etc.

It sounds like you want to do away with rule of law and just have politicians ban apps they don't like?

It seems either it is too hard to differentiate what TikTok are doing wrong from what the other companies are doing wrong, or it's inconsistent treatment?

ISPs already gather a ton of information it would be nice if they used it to help us (would require legislation). For example it should be easy to get a report from my ISP "top ten entities to which I uploaded data this month". I should be able to clock through and see how much data, what days and times, the company who control the domains in use -- for example from pihole use I know MS get a deluge of data from my home.

With that information a user should then be able to privately compare it with a log from their phone and, 'hey look, whenever I have GPS on Facebook receives data' or 'whenever I use $app my uploads go up, but it doesn't need any uploads to work'. That data then socials be used to prosecute GDPR breaches (it seems it could almost be entirely automated).

Negative.

The common refrain is to ban all data collection through regulation. TikToks differentiator is they are an extension of the Chinese Communist Party.

Banning all data collection would devastate multiple US megacorps. I wish that were possible but it's not practical.

Are they an extension of the CCP in a different way to Microsoft, or Facebook, or whoever, being an extension of the USA government (eg under national security letters)?

It's unclear to me based on the wording in the bill whether this only applies to government devices. IANAL but sounds like it would also extend to devices with government profiles installed, i.e. any contractor that has USG MDM on their phone or laptop. Also wondering if this applies to defense or just civil-side?

People forget that a gigantic portion of the government is made up of federal contractors, some agencies are almost entirely made up of contractors. Depending on how this bill is interpreted this could lead to govt banning certain social media from the personal devices of FTEs/contractors with MDM enabled.

>this could lead to govt banning certain social media from the personal devices of FTEs/contractors with MDM enabled.

So what? The PRC run concentration camps.

I don’t understand why we bend over backwards to cater to them, maybe that’s why I’ve never been a contractor despite multiple long periods of employment after years of focusing on censorship circumvention, an alleged hot topic.

>So what? The PRC run concentration camps.

Yeah the US is not that different, however in much smaller quantity:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guantanamo_Bay_detention_camp

The "Reason" is the same, keep terrorists in a minimal law protected environment, and as we all know a declared terrorist has no human rights, also the laws of the country who detains him is not in effect, for whatever reason.

This is already happening at a state level, and with some not-unconcerning implications: https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/22/tech/tiktok-universities/inde...

For those two schools, students are completely blocked from accessing TikTok on school networks.

I wonder what school boards and the different levels of government will think about a sudden increase in students using VPNs and Tor.

They’ve likely blocked tor already

Will students even bother? They mostly have cell phones with data, they might not even notice unless they are connecting their phones to university wifi for some reason.

I don't think that would bother me with my kids. Is TikTok a necessity for school related activity?

When I went to school, I couldn't access the internet. I had to wait until I got home.

University isn't the same as grade school. It is absurd a public University would do any sort of filtering or censorship on their networks.

>any sort of filtering

This is a rather absurd position if you consider it. To take the absolute simplest example, you really think a school should not be allowed to filter traffic from students specifically launching purposeful attacks on school network infrastructure?

Attacks are a bit different than someone trying to access information, though. Much like it is illegal to punch someone in the face, unless they try to punch you first.

Maybe I should have been more specific. In my mind there is a difference between stopping outgoing ddos attack and blocking/censoring websites.

Now define "outgoing attack". You're trying to keep it defined to "ddos" only but surely you would agree that the school filtering a student actively attempting to hijack school infrastructure to send active shooter threats to the student population should also be filtered yes?

Keep going a few steps and you'll realize that's exactly the problem, there's no level of specificity you can define here that works without some level of subjectivity. Try and see. Good luck.

Universities also employ academics (some of whom are outspoken toward CCP).

Possibly Universities are doing this for more than one reason?

For example to protect their staff given the recent articles about tiktok tracking of journalists

Really? Many universities do DNS filtering so I'm not sure where that idea comes from

I guess what concerns me is that in some schools, students are required to live in dorms. So to me, it feels like an encroachment on what I would consider the students' personal, private home, where I suppose they should be allowed to access whatever content they like (minus, of course, the content I deem objectionable, like child exploitation, but thats much easier for us all to agree on I think).

Only the apps for TikTok, WeChat, and Telegram are being blocked and removed, not the websites, and only from state property.

There's a privacy and security (read: espionage) concern with the apps right now.

According to TFA they're blocked from being accessed from school wi-fi, not only from state property.

Not accurate in Georgia. I can VPN into two institutions and access those domains, and so far one of the Networking teams says they've been given no order to block by DNS or IP. They also have no separate VLAN for student wifi.

The two schools are University of Oklahoma and Auburn University.

The article explicitly mentions the University System of Georgia.

What security/espionage concerns does Telegram have?

My assumption is because it was developed by a Russian, and someone in the US government is worried that the communications or e2ee could be compromised by another nation.

https://www.wired.co.uk/article/telegram-encryption-end-to-e...

> e2ee could be compromised by another nation Which is not even enabled on regular conversations.. only on specifically created secret chats

It also looks like not long ago apps were able to collect and transmit the contents of clipboards on iOS and Android.

You don’t want exploitation but you want them to have access to TikTok? I think you should find out about what is on the platform and I think you will be surprised.

The platform contains the same content as every other social media platform but with less nudity.

No, that’s definitely wrong. You haven’t researched this but you are making an assumption. Does FB have a rampant system by which children are being watched and paid for, it even being common that children use filters to appear as different fevered to collect more money?

Are you stating there are nude children on tiktok? I am stating that TikTok has less nudity than other platforms. Maybe you are arguing that tiktok has more sexual charged content? I’d be pretty comfortable arguing that Instagram and Twitter are above tiktok in that as well.

So, I’m saying children do live strip teases for money and are pain through the platform in real time.

Incorrect. You must be 18 or older to get tips from TikTok live or enroll in the creators fund.

As a somewhat responsible parent I see TikTok as intellectual poison, or attention pornography at best.

It is banned in my house.

(I grew up on the Vic20/C64/Amiga etc; am not a Luddite).

> As a somewhat responsible parent I see TikTok as intellectual poison, or attention pornography at best.

It is.

> It is banned in my house.

Good. Don't let weird internet techbros namecalling or "expert advice" influence how you raise your children, or apologize for it.

I imagine the most difficult problem with banning anything would be to make sure they don't feel or become isolated from their peers because of it. Must be tough.

It is not up to you or me to decide what is necessary or not for school related activity. Who even decides what is necessary or unnecessary. University shouldn't censor Tiktok and allow facebook, insta . We don't live in China where government passes draconian measures.

It will most probably teach them very fast how to install a VPN on their phones.

Sounds great to me. TikTok is pretty, I don’t see a benefit for kids to use it. The type of content it has is hyper optimized for stunting development, in my opinion, I’m a way not found in most other social media. Also, it is rife with pretty illegal content. I would just say it doesn’t seem like a big loss.

Oklahoma and Alabama doesn't really surprise me. However, kids are going to use tiktok via their phones and phone data plans anyways, it doesn't sound very effective.

Good. Tik Tok is bad for children, regardless of who owns it.

Most schools ban social media websites on school Wifi (Instagram, Discord, etc.)

I should have been more precise with my words, I'm talking about universities where adults are attending. I don't think that's true for most universities? At least it wasn't 10 years ago. Back then we all used Facebook quite a bit!

Can someone confirm for me how the banning of an app makes it in to an annual spending bill?

The two don't seem remotely related from an outsiders perspective.

Congress is totally broken, large bills like this are consistently shoved through and members of congress aren't given the opportunity to even read them before it's voted on. What's worse is they vote to pass them not even knowing what's inside, and what's even worse than that is that most of them couldn't care less about what's inside. They get told by the party leaders to vote for it and then they'll be taken care of, given party funding when reelection comes around, etc.

I highly recommend following Justin Amash if you want to hear all about how it's broken, his twitter is quite informative, he also has a podcast although many of the episodes are not related directly to politics. Even if you disagree with some of his political stances, it's astounding to hear straight from a former house member just how bad it is right now. No time to read bills, no floor amendments allowed by the speaker, if you don't vote how the leaders want you to then you're never given any committee assignments (especially bad given there's no opportunity to offer amendments on the floor), etc. And it's not just one party, Ryan may have officially killed the floor amendments but Pelosi has done a stellar job keeping them dead.

Why wasn't it banned already? Government phones should be locked down and only used for work. They can TikTok on their personal devices

Deployed service members often (usually?) can’t connect to the internet using their personal devices. They use public government computers connected to govt networks.

I didn't know that. Thank you for the info

Is there any infrastructure out there to limit or securely monitor what apps or features are enabled on company/institution mobile devices? Or are we for the most part in a "we expect you not to do this or that" era?

I used to work for a small institution a while back (not USA), they used a Word file of approved apps, authored by a non-IT employee. Their whole idea of InfoSec was equivalent to taping a water balloon to a steering wheel and calling it an airbag. Can't imagine the situation is much better in most other places. Scary really.

Any serious corp will have some kind of MDM deployed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_device_management This can be used for various purposes - making a list of allowed apps, restricting internet / configuring VPN, enforcing auth methods, remote wiping the device, etc.

Pretty dumb not to include WeChat since it's the greater threat.

I wonder if it’s because US government employees do need to chat with their Chinese counterparts sometimes. For example, when the Economist produced “The Prince” podcast, the journalists chatted with some of their Chinese interviewees via WeChat — despite having an episode on Chinese government monitoring and censorship. They really don’t have a better choice if they want to chat with someone in China.

How does the government... ban something... in a budget bill?

On government devices. These are their devices. I’m surprised it was allowed.

Well, it probably just wasn't explicitly banned. Though like you say, I wonder why they don't have a whitelist instead?

Kind of funny, but the last guy who looked at me like I was an idiot for asking for a detailed list of what actions should be performed to "whitelist" something had never had to implement one himself.

Each agency, bureau, department, school, and institution would not just have to have IT people to implement the whitelists (eg- in mdm or by policy, which they may not already use), but get people to serve on committees to approve, build, and maintain the whitelists, create the processes to field and test all whitelisting requests, create a process exception request process, and coordinate with whatever external governing or regulatory bodies' lists to ensure compliance.

It wouldn't take long before the employees would just start using their personal devices and hotspots for everything to avoid the hassle, which would be so much worse.

Tangentially related, the Helms Amendment is but one example of leveraging the dispersal of funds.

I've not looked into the specifics here but it wouldn't be out of place to tie aspects of budget funding to the existence of a questionable security risk being present in a government assisted environment.

If you throw the lever, the trolley won’t run over the livelihoods of thousands of federal employees, but all kinds of sneaky unfavorable things may happen.

The US congress is so broken that it seems like a majority of laws are railroaded into bills that absolutely need to pass rather than seperate bills themselves.

Both parties say "we'll pass this spending bill if you let x, y, and z completely unrelated bills be attached to it." Then both sides can say "we got this bill you wanted passed" and "I didn't want to vote for X but I had to support the budget bill."

It's a ridiculous system.

It's surprising what apps are allowed on government devices.

Why aren't they using MDM on all devices and only allowing business-necessary apps?

TikTok is banned because USA companies lost to its competition it has nothing to do with security or privacy. YouTube and others tried copying TikTok and failed, and now they are trying to remove the competion. But as we all know, this will not work! Cat is out of the bag, and there is no stopping it online.

Really really sad. I hope the US stays open to competition. Otherwise we will go the way of Soviet Russia.

We will. What the US is doing here is the same thing it has always done. This is just current and an app so people think it’s something new.

I have the feeling that we will eventually have two internets, a Chinese one and an American one.

Eventually? The Great Firewall was first called that in 1997.

what's curious is why any social media would be allowed on government devices.

How else would the folks at Eglin AFB get their Reddit fix? ;)

The Q's must drop . . .

( apologies, that was hard to resist )

A lot of government agencies maintain social media presences.

The White House has a Twitter account, for example. So there are presumably federal employees with Twitter installed on their work phones for the purpose of operating that account.

They represent minority of workers. So, it should be allowlist approach where only few people can access Twitter, Tiktok, Facebook etc.. All other employee app installation must be disabled, if it is really privacy and "national security concern".

sure, but why would all government employees need access to social media by default?

Social media is today's media and the first job of government is to control the media (with exclusivity) for propaganda. Why are you surprised any government not only wants to be on social media but also to ban ones it can't control?

Even The Democrat as a party has Tiktok account.

Wonder if this is why Musk ran the Twitter poll against it. Xi leant on him?

Excellent. Good decision.

Ban Facebook too.

Does that mean Windows is banned?

That is a good start and it needs to go further.

It is also now time to fine TikTok in the billions of dollars for not only privacy violations like this [0], but for also lying [1] about accessing US data from overseas after admitting they have done so. [2]

No surprise on that as I have always expected them to screw over their users.

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

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

[2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/emilybaker-white/2022/12/22/tik...

A bit hypocritical since that's a tacit purpose for the existence of Facebook/Whatsapp, Google's... everything, and as we've come to discover, Twitter.

I still remember when the CIA's Total Information Awareness team was rebranded in the early 2000s and some of the members hired into Facebook, which coincided with the opening and expansion of Facebook as a global "social media" site.

It's wild that the news ever used to report on things like that. I suppose it did take a little longer to get rid of the journalists following 9/11.

Except that Facebook has paid a massive fine after they repeatedly violated the privacy of its users; and that was in the billions of dollars.

What TikTok has done is much worse that Facebook and it only makes total sense for the US regulators to give out a multi-billion dollar fine to TikTok, if it wants to continue to operate in the US.

There are no exceptions for large social networks with billions of users to get away with repeated privacy violations which TikTok has done.

Another interpretation is that Facebook purchased permission from the government to violate the rights and privacy of millions of people. It even spawned the creation of international policies like the GDPR.

They weren't told to dismantle the services they used that data to build, including their ad tech, so what really did they lose except time?

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