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Comment by Whatarethese | Hacker News Reader

Thankfully all of this bad press is starting to turn law makers minds. How it's turning out right now there is no shot TikTok will be banned. What we really need is privacy laws like almost every European country. But will currently lobbying laws I don't see that happening.

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> What we really need is privacy laws like almost every European country

Not gonna say we _don't_ need that... but it's not clear that there's any relevance to tiktok. Given the track record of Chinese companies and IP law they don't agree with, do you really expect them to honor privacy laws?

That's not the point.

The reason the US judicial system isn't cracking down on TikTok is because there's no law preventing what they are doing. If the US passed a comprehensive data privacy & anti-surveillance law, US courts could sue TikTok into oblivion and even potentially levy criminal charges if they continued to refuse to comply.

But they aren't doing that. Instead they are trying to ban TikTok so that the other social media companies (which are all US companies) can continue doing largely the same shit without getting in trouble.

This bill is US economic & political protectionism. It's about banning software, services, and products from other countries without holding domestic companies to the same standard.

There is no such thing as a bill comprehensive and deep enough to ensure that a tool like tiktok not be abused by the Chinese government.

Imagine for a moment you went back into the 1950s and told everyone "hey, let's have all of our television run by the Soviet Union! It's okay though, it's not actually the Soviet Union, it's just a company in the Soviet Union. And we passed a regulation, the regulation says they aren't allowed to use the TV show to do anything bad"

They would think you're out of your mind, and the situation is similar today with TikTok. It doesn't matter how many regulations you put on it.

We should pass such laws regardless, but we also need these bans as well.

> There is no such thing as a bill comprehensive and deep enough to ensure that a tool like tiktok not be abused by the Chinese government.

This is Cold War 2.0 boogeymanism. It's "the state of exception" [0]: the idea that normal laws aren't sufficient because the enemy is too clever and too powerful so instead we need exceptional laws. (And afterwards more exceptional laws, because they haven't been defeated yet.)

You bring up what would happen in the 1950s if we hadn't been more careful, but look at the actual 1950s: a time full of paranoid McCarthyism, innocent people being defamed and branded as Soviet sympathizers, the FBI framing people, the CIA testing drugs on unwitting citizens, and almost a nuclear first strike. "National security" logic rarely invites a nuanced and balanced assessment of the threat and possible remedies; rather, it's a kind of dogma that takes for granted that the threat is exceptional and requires an exceptional answer.

The discilpined alternative is to make good laws that enshrine a principle rather than attack an enemy (e.g. data protection, public opinion manipulation). This deals with the problem and also preserves the civil institutions and trust in the rule of law. If the problem morphs, then pass new laws. That's how legislating is supposed to work and how it works for every other problem.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_of_exception

China threatens to invade one of our allies every week, this isn't a false monster, it's an obvious truth.

And it's barely cold anymore, trying to actively supplying Russia who is at war with Ukraine today.

And I think you should take a closer look at what happened in the 1950s. If you read your history the Soviets were slightly more than an imaginary threat.

What's the problem with McCarthyism the fact that the Soviet Union was a wonderful great place? No.

None of this applies to something where China literally owns the company. The reason half of Eastern Europe is free today is the fact that we were able to successfully cut the Soviets off of much of global trade. Do the same for China.

Tiktok made the offer to have all their data and compute be hosted by a trusted US third party (Oracle), as well as to let itself be subject to US government oversight.

And none of that would have helped resolve the issues with the fact that they are still under the control of the Chinese government.

It doesn't matter where the data is if China controls the code. It doesn't matter where the servers are, if China controls the code.

Government oversight doesn't help, because you can't provide the level of depth and insight requires to actually make sure that everything is being done properly.

To exert the proper amount of control and security over a company like this you basically have to nationalize it.

Why does having control over the code matters when you can review the code? The argument you make is like Microsoft during the 90s when supposedly anybody can sneak malware into an open source codebase, which just isn't true because of reviews.

> There is no such thing as a bill comprehensive and deep enough to ensure that a tool like tiktok not be abused by the Chinese government.

Sure there is. An comprehensive data privacy bill would render it impossible to legally collect the data that is necessary for the abuse in the first place.

But that won't happen, because that would kneecap the US companies that these senators have stock in.

No there isn't, unless you want to regulate down to the specific details of what it's promoted or suppressed in their algorithm, who gets banned, who gets compensated for their videos, and so on

You'd have to regulate so harshly that you may as well just nationalize the company

I’ll be frank, Palantir and their customers and their suppliers scare the bejesus out of me. Chinese spy apps and balloons and what not, not so much.

I can be convinced though. The trouble is I’ve not heard a coherent explanation what China is going to do with a bunch of videos of people doing stupid stuff that could remotely impact my life or national security. If I were China I’d just use my overwhelming dominance in all manufacturing to make Trojan horses in basically everything then back door the world. Seems like they would be capable and it would be a lot more effective than knowing what every tween in America is interested in.

In my career I’ve seen what Palantir offers behind closed doors. I’ve seen what Google at least at one point was offering behind closed doors using their dominance in real time local data. Even if you trust Google, why on earth do you trust their data customers?

Have you seen bioemerl's comment about television? The one who controls the weights in TikTok's selection algorithm determines what people are going to believe.

Are you seriously suggesting that the Chinese government is actively adjusting the weighting of the TikTok algorithms to sway mass opinion on the TikTok app? It’s already a stretch saying that the Chinese government controls ByteDance because they clearly don’t.

If this is true, are you also concerned about the algorithms controlled by American billionaires? I think that's a national security risk as well.

I don’t believe that social media has nearly as much influence on most people as people seem to believe. I think it absolutely impacts some people, but most people have much stronger social influence from their local social sphere - family, friends, school.

But still some people are strongly influenced and that’s not good. But to what end? I think if it started pumping out Chinese communist party propaganda folks would notice. So, what’s left?

I’ve heard “dumbing people down” by pointing to the fact the Chinese version of TikTok shows more educational and improving content.

This isn’t because TikTok thinks Chinese people prefer educational content or that they get more revenue, it’s because the Chinese government requires them to show educational content. They show everyone else whatever garbage addicts them because, just like every other social media company, showing addictive garbage creates addicted customers and therefore dollars. If our government, say, instead of banning tiktok, did whah the Chinese government is doing - required social media to present more wholesome content to its users, guess what - tiktok would show more wholesome content to its users. As would Facebook, instagram, YouTube, and hacker news.

> Given the track record of Chinese companies and IP law they don't agree with, do you really expect them to honor privacy laws?

Since TikTok is storing the data on US soil (I believe that's something they've started), or if not, make them. Presumably they have or will have US presence in terms of personnel, money and so on.

If that is all true, which it should be, then it doesn't matter if you expect them to honor privacy laws. That's why laws have punishments. Apply fines, go arrest the people at their offices, confiscate their servers and so on.

It's so weird to me, that the logic is : They might not follow the law, let's not make it.

It's an example of the perfect solution fallacy[0], often heard when talking about laws or lifestyle changes (e.g. vegetarianism won't save all the animals, or going on a diet won't stop you dying et cetera).

I'm sure we can all think of ones in tech too.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nirvana_fallacy#Perfect_soluti...

There is relevance. You see now in Europe State Institutions and Coorporates are banning use of Tiktok on Official phones precisly because they can not guarantee the Respect of the privacy laws. Offcourse they are not banning private use of it but it beeing a social network, The Network effects will soon become apararent and tiktok will be used only for leisure but people will soon not bother havong another Social network that they cant use for a great part of the day. (Note that this attitute is not particular to China). On Corporate world we could not use a majority of US tech provided services also because by Euopean law we could not give guarantees that the US government would not access those data)

This better just result in a revision of the bill to remove some of the things people are complaining about and not shut the bill down entirely.

TikTok very badly needs to be banned.

Laws like cash transaction tracking and other egregious violations of financial privacy under the guise of transparency? No thanks, keep that in the EU. Just further proof that it really is the people that voted for the patriot act, because so many supposed privacy supporters are willing to defend state surveillance where it benefits them.

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