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Comment by skywal_l | Hacker News Reader

I don't know anything about this and on principle AOC is right in my optionion but Europe has the GDPR and other national legal privacy protection and Tik Tok is still being used in Europe. Do we know if Tik Tok[0] does anything different in Europe and the US?

[0]Tik Tok and any other social media spyware in general.

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Just do their best to comply the EU law so they can keep operating? https://www.reuters.com/technology/tiktok-ceo-eus-vestager-c...

TikTok passes the GDPR in Europe because they don't actually do anything bad with user data

If the US bans it on national security grounds, there is NO WAY that any of the NATO countries will not ban it immediately. So 60% of European population will lose access. Then, they will recommend it to any other country that still wants to be friendly with the US... which means all of Europe (and most of the rest of the world) will ban it very soon.

It's important to note that it's not the "spyware" that they are banning; it's a media that they don't have full control over that they are banning. Wikileaks, for example, will be banned as a part of this.

> If the US bans it on national security grounds, there is NO WAY that any of the NATO countries will not ban it immediately.

I'm sorry, but that's not how this works. These other NATO countries are independent countries with their own legislature and parliaments, many of them bound more by EU rules than by current US tendencies or laws. Sure, the US might try to pressure NATO countries to follow suit, and some of them might, but it's far from given.

For evidence of how this will go: look at Huawei.

Banned in the UK & Germany (but only for 5G infra I think[0]) rest of NATO didn't pay strong attention.

[0]: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/huawei-legal-notices-issu...

The US isn't even the leader in such blocks and bans in many cases either; Australia blocked Huawei and ZTE from providing equipment for its 5G network on security grounds back in August 2018 .. and various European countries were muttering about such concerns since that time at least.

https://techcrunch.com/2018/08/22/australia-bans-huawei-and-...

(laughs in Australian)

We're independent vassals

> there is NO WAY that any of the NATO countries will not ban it immediately

I don't think it's that straight forward. NATO countries, and especially European ones, have a legal system that doens't allow them to just ban a specific company.

MAYBE the NATO countries will start working towards legal amendments that will make it possible to ban it. It definitely won't be immediate.

The governments might ban TikTok's by their employees.

> a legal system that doesn't allow them to just ban a specific company.

Which can be overruled by national security issues, I suppose.

I assume that their notion of "national security" is not as broad as in the US. I doubt European countries would take "it's commercially competing with Facebook" as a national security threat.

NATO is not a political organization (I know Turkey didn't get the message, but still).

Yeah yeah. It just takes protection money to protect the people.

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