TikTok Owner Had 'Backdoor' for CCP Access to US Data, Lawsuit Alleges | Hacker News Reader

TikTok Owner Had 'Backdoor' for CCP Access to US Data, Lawsuit Alleges

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Social media access to user data (whether foreign or domestic) is bad, but it is a distraction from the real evil: behavioral management at scale. When you can target specific demographics and control what they see 8-10 hours of the day, you can change what they think, say, do, and most importantly, how they vote. People are literally being programmed (euphemistically, "conditioned") by the specific triggers and stimuli with almost surgical precision, and completely unbeknownst to them. This is uncomfortable to recognize and discuss, so the conversation is sadly reduced to "China/AI is bad/evil" to further foment hate and division.

Regarding your comment about behavioral management at scale. Carl Sagan once said: "If we've been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We're no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It's simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we've been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back."

It would be interesting to know if this were true in that case.

Or, as a recent politician evocatively put it: "“I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and wouldn't lose any voters, okay?"

There really is pain associated with acknowledging reality sometimes. I certainly know that from my personal life.

Wisdom comes from willingness to go through pain. Something our general culture ain't great at.

> Something our general culture ain't great at.

What culture is good at it? People in general try to avoid pain. This tendency is not unique to our culture, is it?

The US is uniquely oriented around pain elimination. For example, the opioid epidemic ravaging the US after the overprescription of painkillers is absent in most European and Asian countries, because they were not optimizing patient outcomes for pain elimination.

Stoicism.

98% of the population gets its reality from authority (the opinions of the hive being #1). Independent thought is unimaginable. Not even on the table. May as well ask a grain of sand lodged in a eastgoing glacier to consider heading south.

This is pretty much Plato’s cave. But yeah, it seems to be absolutely true.

Not sure Plato’s cave applies here.

Upvotes and disagreeing comments.. hard to parse. Anyway, my understanding is that Plato’s cave refers to being bamboozled a core lie about the world, and then when someone tells you how you’re wrong they will reject it because they lack the ability or language to process the alternative view, or it conflicts with their identity that they’d rather stay in the world they know. In Plato’s cave, it’s iirc a former prisoner who tells the other prisoners, ie someone they previously trusted. Yet, they are still upset and violently reject his message.

Is that the same statement as Carl Sagan’s? No. I’m just casually associating. To me they both seem to cover the same aspect of human psychology, our core beliefs that basically cannot be altered later in life.

Moreover, it’s really interesting that people only seem to agree about this observation when it comes to other people–they are stuck in their ways, they are beyond salvation. Very few accept that they themselves suffer from this.

Forgive my dusty memory but I think the relation is that most people stay in the cave, not because they enjoy the experience or they're completely ignorant of the sky, they stay because they are unprepared, incapable, or unwilling to leave.

I doubt most people believe that TikTok is valuable to them but I'm sure many find it irresistible once they are hooked.

You clearly skipped the footnotes.

Your understanding of the meaning of Plato's cave is questionable.

Hence all the addicts that are so quick to its defense.

In other words, cognitive dissonance.

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

Indeed. Like thinking Tiktok is "such a serious danger" while having apps such as Spotify, Snapchat, and Amazon or Meta < anything > installed on our phones, using Google < anything >, or using devices such as "smart-tvs" and computers with Windows OS. Let's not forget the mild tinge of prejudice/racism that colors the messaging.

Dissonance is just that.

> When you can target specific demographics

> control what they see

> People are literally being programmed [...] by the specific triggers

I hate marketing/PR as much as the next person, but have become part of daily life. How do we get rid of it? Outlaw the practice of trying to influence people by marketing?

Edit: Rereading your comment I realize you're talking about something else, but I guess the same applies nonetheless.

How do we get rid of it?

Can you get rid of it? No. Doing so would result in the loss of many important rights and have unintended consequences. Not even China can get rid of this. BUT that doesn't mean you can't put regulations and limitations on them.

As one example, we may want to make laws that ensure that ads are easily recognizable as ads. I'm referencing Native Advertising. I want to use an example from the NYT[0] that is marked, to give an example of how nefarious this can actually be. The article itself only mentions the show once, in the middle, and mostly discusses women's lives in prison. It would not be surprising to believe that this is not an ad but actually a news story. It is both, but that's why it is nefarious. Is this ad easily recognizable? Even with the notice?

We can talk about dark patterns (native advertising might be one), and prevent many of them. Not allowing for bait and switches. Ensuring that options are easily conveyed. I don't think it matters which side of the political spectrum you're on or many of your philosophical ideals, but tricking people into buying things they don't want or need is not ethical. We live in a specialized world and one person can't be an expert in everything. If the game is supercomputers and teams of psychologists and lawyers against individuals then I think we all know this is an unfair game. We have to talk about how to level this playing field if we want to preserve individual freedoms and safety.

So I know this doesn't really answer your question, and the truth is that I don't have a good answer. I think the topic itself is surprisingly complicated and we need to think carefully about it. The path we're going down clearly isn't acceptable to most people. But overreacting will also be similarly bad. We need to have a tough social conversation and figure out what we want together. We have to learn, a lot, because this is nuanced. We have to be open to being wrong, with a focus on learning and improving rather than asserting our positions (because they are all wrong in some form or another). Which that might be the hardest thing of all, but if we can do this then we can solve a lot more problems. Maybe this is the great filter?

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/paidpost/netflix/women-inmates-separ...

While i think these are ideas worth considering, what I think is the answer is perhaps staring us in the face: put regulatory limits on the amount and kind of data that apps and websites can collect.

The real problem with tiktok is not the CCP; it seems likely in my mind that our own government has equally nefarious techniques at play in other countries, and I think its unfair to single out a single company over this or any other behavior that is otherwise legal.

So cut them off at the knees—make the behavior of tiktok illegal, for them and for any other of the thousands of companies doing basically the same thing. Pointedly i mean the extra-application data collection, cross-checking with third-party data miners (which should be illegal already), and the sorts of things we've just become accustomed to being par for the course.

> put regulatory limits on the amount and kind of data that apps and websites can collect.

Yeah, I would be in full support of this. I think there's a double edged sword that people are playing with and don't see the other edge. Any data that you use to control your population can also be used by an adversary for the same purpose. The same is true about encryption. We have two competing forces in our own government. Blue team and red teams. But we know red team gets a lot more money and is a lot flashier. Focusing all on red team is fun and exciting but makes you a glass cannon.

You would have to make it illegal to show different content to different users. Get rid of "the algorithm" and every website becomes a simple catalog of content.

I also think if you do any moderation of content, you lose your "common carrier" status and become a publisher, responsible for any content you publish.

So distinguish between, you're seeing this content because a company paid us to show it to users like you, and because users like you watch similar things. what if someone pays to have similar users be shown things that give a certain impression? the advertiser didn't create the content or even choose what content, is it an ad?

how would you enforce that? without open sourcing it you'd have no way of knowing why a thing was recommended. giving access only to the government is not possible.

> Can you get rid of it? No

It's possible in some far future. Just rewire brains of people to ignore any kind of biases and susceptibility to manipulation. This new society would be 1000x times better than what we have now.

Not sure you can eliminate it, but you can certainly reduce the impact and scale by fighting anti-competitive behavior . A major reason this sort of mass manipulation is so lucrative and effective is because you only have operate on a couple of platforms to reach a majority of eyeballs.

A good approach is to teach something like this in public schools.

https://www.yourarticlelibrary.com/sociology/propaganda-7-mo...

It seems to have vanished from curricula and I wonder why. It's not as though anyone stands to benefit from an electorate that is less capable of identifying propaganda.

I feel like a large push from the AD council would be appropriate. (Not sure what the exact message would be) It feels like some of the largest industries rely on the masses being easily programmable. TV, Radio, Billboard, basically advertisements. Most are designed to make you give them your money.

It's easy to spot and ignore when you realize it's happening.

> How do we get rid of it?

Put down your phone.

Hold onto the phone and just don't use social media.

You get points for pithy snark, but given that the problem predates smartphones, this isn't likely to solve it.

No, it really is that simple.

Never before has a foreign entity been able to deliver personalized content at the individual level. Not at this scale. The only way a device could get any more embedded would be through rectal insertion.

Not every problem can be solved. Sometimes the best we can do is mitigate.

[Smart]phones are spyware in every pocket...by design.

The smartphone enables extreme personalization of the bamboozle. Maybe not that simple but would go a long way.

>How do we get rid of it?

Start by not letting it get its hooks in children and young adults.

> How do we get rid of it? Outlaw the practice of trying to influence people by marketing?

Perhaps the first step towards getting rid of it is realizing that it is not "we" who legislate things. That is, not a collective including yourself which has your best interest in mind to a significant extent. "We" have to face the reality in which "they" set up this system - legislatively and commercially.

And I don't mean some evil cabal; you (or me) sometimes participate in the activity of "them". It's just that "we" need to stop identifying "their" actions as what "we" decided to do.

> Outlaw the practice of trying to influence people by marketing?

If and when that is an option, yes definitely. What are we waiting for? And how is this even up for discussion?

We handle it through education. Informing people. Making them aware.

This is not something new. History shows that when the government controls the media, it can control people's opinions and beliefs. The only difference is that now the control over TikTok users' minds is not in the hands of US Government and that's why they are unhappy.

The Century of the Self by Adam Curtis is a great doc on how this took shape in the early 20th century; its primary focus was the double nephew of Sigmund Freud who invented public relations and was a powerful political consultant for many US administrations.

One of his main areas of research was using media as a tool for crowd control... he had a somewhat noble viewpoint about it, believing that large crowds by nature devolved into anarchy: "Intelligent men must realize that propaganda is the modern instrument by which they can fight for productive ends and help to bring order out of chaos".

This guy's a big part of the reason America is so deeply screwed. America's eating habits have been artfully manipulated to the point that dietary common sense in the US is likely among the lowest in the Western world.

> This time it'll be different, we're way better than the last bunch to do it, double-promise!

What do you mean devolved into anarchy?

That the larger the population got, the harder it would be to control, politically or otherwise. That there would be all sorts of competing factions for mindshare and ideology, radicalization, etc, in a fully free society.

He more or less viewed consumerism as a means pacify these tensions, to indirectly exert control... hence the development of closer ties between big business and the government.

Propaganda is such a destructive tool, it's a one way trip. Just being forced to pondering if you have been manipulated in some capacity, for example while working in the offices, is damaging to psyche and undermining someone's sense of the world and even sense of self, but now it's additionally done at literally global scale. We're kicking the ground out from our own feet and adamantly keep searching for a reason everything isn't right.

Is there a political party that the Chinese government considered less hostile than the other?

Correct. The other issue is to not develop pro-CCP rhetoric out of this false dichotomy too. It’s all just varying degrees of social pollution created by some propagandists.

In particular, the lawsuit alleges they are in compliance with a Chinese law that sounds identical to the US CLOUD Act.

Is that terrible? Of course. However, US law is as bad or worse.

how does this differ from newspapers, books and the spoken word?

Newspapers aren't nearly as effective at keeping attention indefinitely/at every opportunity, nor at controlling what you read next.

Fox news seems to have done a pretty good job of this in the US

Presumably most viewers have chosen that echo chamber, so it really isn’t the same to compare it.

Also Fox News has only a few million viewers each night e.g. “Fox News Channel coasted to an easy win in prime time Monday night, delivering an average total audience of 2.351 million viewers”.

Fox News isn’t a newspaper

Newspapers don’t modify what I see in the next 60 seconds based on my response to the previous paragraph.

Reach, cost and effectiveness. Newspapers can't follow you around like social networking sites do. A handful of Twitter/FB accounts can do an amount of damage that newspapers can only dream of.

None of which is to say newspapers are great. After all, Murdoch honed his skills in print media first. Just that they are nowhere near as effective as online

A newspaper owner, William Randolph Hearst, once started a war with Spain.

Yes I know, that’s why I mentioned Murdoch. He honed his villainy in print, before moving to TV and internet.

It doesn't. "Propaganda" is a western word for any argument coming from the eastern enemies of the state, and "Brainwashing" is a western word for being convinced by them.

The way we control behavior is by depriving people of unfiltered information, not showing them cat videos and remembering if they liked them.

The modern sense of the word "propaganda" emerged during the first World War to describe information deliberately disseminated to influence political opinion. I'm pretty sure that's still what people mean when they use the word.

Usage then and now also conveys a sense of purposeful distortion or fabrication.

Not everywhere, which is a good thing.

A year ago I saw (and thoroughly enjoyed) an exhibition of 80's arts posters in Spain. What struck me were the description labels, and especially the terminology used. Where the English part described something as "advertising", the Spanish descriptions unashamedly used the word "propaganda".

Let's not fool ourselves. The mechanisms of advertising have been lifted, adapted and further weaponised from war-time propaganda, or as we'd call them these days, influence operations.

...the Spanish descriptions unashamedly used the word "propaganda"

That's not what you think. At the time it was common to use that word instead of publicidad to mean advertising. A construction typical from Latin, propaganda just meant it's made to be propagated, similar to addenda, Amanda or Miranda.

Now it's limited to politics in Spanish too. People working with ads didn't like the connotations of the term, understandably :)

I was pretty amused when I first visited China and saw that the university communications/marketing department translated its name to "Propaganda Department".

In Brazilian Portuguese advertising is still most commonly called “propaganda”.

But it also has the bad connotation when it’s used in the context of politics.

You have to actively seek it out, or be told about it. Rather than it being presented in your face the moment you wake up out of bed. Referring to folks so addicted it's the first thing they grab, see all the notifications, and are back at it by morning time.

For newspapers, it was relatively easy to see and compare the content of the different papers side by side.

I am not sure how I would jump out of my social media news bubble.

They don't directly tickle the reward center of the brain like social media does, cf. e.g. "Brain anatomy alterations associated with Social Networking Site (SNS) addiction" [0].

This is by design, btw, cf. e.g. "Digital Madness: How Social Media Is Driving Our Mental Health Crisis--and How to Restore Our Sanity " [1]; not itself a primary source but it seems to be well received.

My point being, it's like cigarettes with a message. The message being divisive in all likelihood, in order to override rationality with emotion and increase engagement. [2]

[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5362930/

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Digital-Madness-Driving-Crisis-Restor...

[2] How social media shapes polarization: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1cHDXsRpzZ84svIv5L-7tfnOvJ-p...

Just look at how people were programmed into believing that masks were bad. At best they could save lives, at worst they were an inconvenience. But some people acted like you had just punched them in the face if you asked them to wear one

And why? Because certain politicians and media outlets decided to randomly make it a political issue, and then suddenly you have people angrily spouting all kinds of crap rather than be slightly inconvenienced and have to smell their own breath

Also on the front page:

TikTok Feeds Teens a Diet of Darkness

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35932387

I wonder if full homomorphic encryption plus ZKP are the way to go and if time will prove it in this decade.

Furthermore you can target specific persons : heads of states, gov personnel, parliament representatives,... and their families, friends. You can get them "conditioned", you can drive them to commit errors for the purpose of black mailing them, etc...

Brings to mind that old leaked Google internal 'thought experiment' video "The Selfish Ledger": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QDVVo14A_fo

I think this is always been the case with media going back as far as language existed. We are more aware of it now.

the big innovation recently has been the ability to manage content of peer to peer communication as well through social media.

Absolutely correct. Along with the usual reduction, there is also the, "Actually, it's too free speech that is bad we need censorship." Meanwhile, no issues with operant conditioning from the Skinner Box Phone.

This is frequently asserted as fact, and I don't disagree that it is possible. But do you have some specific evidence that you can provide?

8-10 hours a day? Basically nobody is using social media this much.

FOX news and CNN don’t change what people think/how they vote?

When you hear something outrageous on FOX or CNN, you yell "bullshit" at the TV. When you read the same thing on Facebook and see 20 of your friends positively interacting with the news story and showing their approval, you remain quiet at best, join the lunacy at worst. What you don't see is the three shadowbanned accounts explaining why it's lunacy.

If the last decade has taught us anything, it is that a lot of people will not "yell bullshit at the TV".

They obviously just change the news network until they get the bullshit they prefer.

Most people will read a room and refrain from sharing politically-unpopular opinions that invite public and private retribution from a deranged mob.

Silence is not implied agreement. What the internet masses say is popular and what people actually vote for are two very different things.

There is a famous psychological experiment done by Solomon Asch (Asch Conformity) that demonstrates this behavior.

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

One of many reasons why shadowbanning is bad and outdated practice.

How much traction could a lawsuit against Reddit, Twitter, etc. have against the practice of banning or shadowbanning?

If a user could show good faith participation, could they claim they've been prohibited from exercising freedom of expression in a public forum?

Suppose someone was banned from a subreddit for their particular hobby or, worse, city or region. This might be the single biggest forum for that person to address their neighbors and peers, and banning could prohibit their ability to find work, housing, opportunities, etc.

Moderators often ban users on a whim. Sometimes they ban users for merely commenting on other items or subreddits that they deem "wrong", and this practice is often automated.

If you can't sue Reddit, could you sue the moderators?

I'm interested in participating in a class action suit. They are a public forum.

Are you talking about the First Amendment?

> If Fox News had a DNA test, it would trace its origins to the Nixon administration. In 1970, political consultant Roger Ailes and other Nixon aides came up with a plan to create a new TV network that would circumvent existing media and provide "pro-administration" coverage to millions. "People are lazy," the aides explained in a memo. "With television you just sit — watch — listen. The thinking is done for you." Nixon embraced the idea, saying he and his supporters needed "our own news" from a network that would lead "a brutal, vicious attack on the opposition."

https://theweek.com/articles/880107/why-fox-news-created

As if that's relevant or excuses this behavior.

But they're domestic companies whose staff members, all the way up to the owners and CEOs, are not under threat of disappearance by the totalitarian regime of a hostile state...

Are you suggesting that FOX and CNN are good things? If it's possible, I'd say we should ban anything working in this way.

Yeah totally possible. We’re deciding this right here on this thread.

They're all doing it. Big tech, social media, left/right.

There is no left in the US

_rolling eyes emoji_

Yes, as has been pointed out countless times, the US left would be considered further right than the Nazi party to all you enlightened Europeans. We know, we get it. Doesn’t change the fact that there is something called left wing politics in the US, and it’s considerably different from right wing politics in the US.

FOX and CNN are at least held to a higher standard. We need to apply those same standards to the internet.

If they tell an outrageous lie on CNN they can be sued.

Whataboutism

It may be new to the extend it's hyper centralized indeed.

Memetic warfare I think they call it.

AKA advertising

Highly recommend reading The Age of Surveillance Capitalism on this topic

This is exactly what Russia did in the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign. The Trump campaign gave voter polling data to Konstatin Kilimnik. Russia then proceeded to exploit Facebook to target swing voters, and Trump won because of 80k voters across Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

Russia's reach on Facebook was minimal and likely did not meaningfully alter the outcome of the 2016 Presidential election.

See https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/publications/report-sele...

That is one of thousands of reasons, yes.

No they didn't. Source.

been saying this for years...

the response is always: "they didn't spend enough money to sway enough people"

but who did they target? which zipcodes or DMAs? specific UIDs? Trump won be 80k votes in the swing states.

This is literally just the anti-China "brainwashing" propaganda warmed up for a new paranoid generation. I used to collect John Birch and anti-communist publications from the 50s for their histrionic historical value, but now I'm thinking I should start reprinting them and changing the dates. Both Democrats and Republicans would eat it up.

edit: somehow Cambridge Analytica's bullshit marketing material combined with The Manchurian Candidate in the boomer mind.

-----

edit: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/true-story-brainwashi...

> “The basic problem that brainwashing is designed to address is the question ‘why would anybody become a Communist?’” says Timothy Melley, professor of English at Miami University and author of The Covert Sphere: Secrecy, Fiction, and the National Security State. “[Brainwashing] is a story that we tell to explain something we can’t otherwise explain.”

> The term had multiple definitions that changed depending on who used it. For Hunter—who turned out to be an agent in the CIA’s propaganda wing—it was a mystical, Oriental practice that couldn’t be understood or anticipated by the West, Melley says. But for scientists who actually studied the American POWs once they returned from Korea, brainwashing was altogether less mysterious than the readily apparent outcome: The men had been tortured.

> [...]

> Meanwhile, the American public was still wrapped up in fantasies of hypnotic brainwashing, in part due to the research of pop psychologists like Joost Meerloo and William Sargant. Unlike Lifton and the other researchers hired by the military, these two men portrayed themselves as public intellectuals and drew parallels between brainwashing and tactics used by both American marketers and Communist propagandists. Meerloo believes that “totalitarian societies like Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union or Communist China were in the past, and continue to be, quite successful in their thought-control programs… [and] the more recently available techniques of influence and thought control are more securely based on scientific fact, more potent and more subtle,” writes psychoanalyst Edgar Schein in a 1959 review of Meerloo’s book, The Rape of the Mind: The Psychology of Thought Control—Menticide and Brainwashing.

If your democracy can be thwarted by free speech from a bad actor, then your democracy is shit.

If you’re an adult watching TikTok 8-10 hours a day that’s on you to fix. When I was at my “peak”, I was watching 2-3 hours a day and that felt like a lot.

If a kid is watching TikTok 8-10 hours a day, that’s on the parents to fix.

This is like the hot dog man meme. “Who’s responsible for this?” Ultimately you are in control of your eyeballs and your time. Stop watching!

Or not. TikTok is awesome. Watch it 8-10 hours a day if you want.

> Ultimately you are in control of your eyeballs and your time. Stop watching!

There are people making hundreds of thousands of dollars whose sole job is to get you locked into a feedback loop in these apps. We are engineering addiction.

The addiction is a side effect of a society built on exploitation. In other words, capitalism is literally the problem.

Does addiction exist in non-capitalist countries? Could you expand because I'm not sure if I understood the point you're making.

Why would TikTok or FaceBook not engineer addiction? It generates more money for them. If they don't engineer addiction, another company will emerge and engineer addiction.

I think this type of problem has to be solved by the government.

My point was, my parent was in a sense blaming the victim for not peeling their eyes away from the screen when literally millions of dollars of thought and effort went into making sure that they don't.

I agree that in the absence of direct negative consequences it seems unlikely we will see a change in the status quo.

Should all addictive products be allowed? When does such a product deserve being regulated or outlawed?

Reminds me of the famous saying,

> I’m from the government and I’m here to help.

It's also OK to go after the shady character spending all its effort manipulating and spying. I get lots of things do their best to do this, but this is the CCP in your living room. There should be a line somewhere.

OK but if you don’t want the shady character in your living room, don’t let them in. Don’t complain when somebody else doesn’t close the door you left wide open.

To paraphrase the Buddha, you'll only give up your drug when you find a better drug.

TikTok is a heroin airplane with big brother in the pilot seat.

What we need is a better drug.

Half of the comments in this thread sound like they were written by CCP propaganda chatbots. A dead giveaway is the failure to address the topic at hand and immediately deflect to "but the USA does XYZ too!" No one is disputing such a claim, but that's also not what we're talking about here.

You have to be aware, that many people here are not from USA, and their/our first thought is, that facebook and many others do that too. So for many of us, a foreign entity already has access to our conversations, content, and all the same data now china has from tiktok. For americans it might be different, since until now, it was only their three-letter agencies checking up on them (which technically is even worse, since chinese have a lot less access to those people if they start causing trouble than the local US agencies), and now it's someone else too.. but for "the rest of the world", it's just another country doing the same as has been done before by americans.

If you're bothered by social networks having access to a lot of very personal data, you're late to the game... if you're bothered because it's a different country, then welcome to the club.

> if you're bothered because it's a different country, then welcome to the club.

The issue is which country has access to our very personal data, not simply a "different country". There are many countries whose citizens would trust a foreign government ahead of their own.

Let's say you're an american... and that you're plotting some anti-government movement at home. Which is more problematic... china knowing that, or your own government knowing that?

I live in a small eu country... and as in most other eu countries, any weird request from china (for extradition or whatever) would just get ignored... if US asked... well, just look at assange.

> Let's say you're an american... and that you're plotting some anti-government movement at home. Which is more problematic

Okay and for the hundreds of millions of us who are not, do we prefer our govt knowing about us or the CCP.

I’m not a fan of the USG by any means - I have many many criticisms of the govt and I’ve participated in protests. To put contemporary USG and CCP in the same league is crazy talk.

> and now it's someone else too.. but for "the rest of the world", it's just another country doing the same as has been done before by americans.

As someone from Europe, I strongly disagree. There's a HUGE fucking difference between China having our (western) data compared to the USA. Unsure why you'd even make such a silly argument.

Yes, because you live in the west. Again, that's not true for the rest of the world. I for sure would rather prefer China reading my stuff than the US if I was still living in the middle east, for example.

Why? If you say “fuck Biden” nothing is gonna happen to you. If you say “fuck Xi” then you better hope you never travel to China. There’s a massive difference between east and west and what you say on the internet.

Can you point to any articles or pet her sources of the three letter agencies getting backdoor access to social media sites?

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

Of course I am familiar with PRISM. It did not have backdoor access to social media. And that was sort of my my point. If you have a reliable source to the contrary, I would be happy to see it.

Be that as it may....

> Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I know this feeling. It probably just means that you live in different reality than half the people commenting here. Maybe half the people commenting here are not americans ? It's still interesting and on subject, because social networks are probably what is causing this divide, because bubbles are isolated by design

I'm one of those not-americans, and for me it's just another different country getting my data (well.. would-be, if I had tiktok installed... or if i had facebook... so for me personally, it's only google that's problematic right now).

Americans, welcome to the club of "the rest of the world"-ers, where foreign governments get access to our data :)

I'm not American, but even for people living in the US - China peering at your TikTok data is less threatening than the Feds peering at your Facebook posts.

One of those two groups is much more likely to cause trouble for US citizens. The Chinese won't have so many ex-lovers looking up their old flame for example, simply because there aren't so many cross-country relationships. And China is less likely to brand Americans as domestic terrorists. The Chinese won't tempted to use it to enforce laws retroactively or hunt down minorities as the US government would be if it goes rogue. There are just less opportunities overall to abuse the knowledge.

No, chat bots are a huge problem so are botfarms and sock puppets supported by huge bot farms.

They are everywhere and they are degrading content

And you are preemptively accusing without proof against users who are simply voicing their opinions like everyone is allowed to do here. Why are you attempting to act like an arbiter of legitimacy when you are clearly not one?

For reference: this specific fallacy being invoked by the CCP astroturfers is called “whataboutism”.

When faced with undeniable criticism: I believe China/CCP learned this "defense" tactic from the Soviet Union, who if, not inventing it, at the very least brought it to new standardized levels.

One example from the Soviets: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/And_you_are_lynching_Negroes

“Example from the Soviets”? Buddy that actually happened. You don’t get to deny the truth just because it is inconvenient or makes you look bad.

It's strange that old expressions like "the US is throwing stones from a glass house" or "the US is like a pot calling the kettle black" have existed for a long enough time to be idioms, but the term for decrying such expressions "whataboutism" is relatively much newer and more of a political term than a language idiom.

Well, being aware of and actively combating propaganda is a fairly recent social development.

Is there any value to this comment?

Lol. Dump all the US instances into the memory hole. Only bring it up when China does it. When you bring up how US does it too, it's "whataboutism".

Have to say it's a great strategy for maintaining a narrative.

Would China allow US to spy on hundreds of millions of its citizens everyday? Answer: no, reference the Great Firewall.

The Great Firewall is to prevent Chinese people from speaking freely or reading unapproved things. It is not to protect Chinese people.

Your misunderstanding of what the GFW is for perfectly demonstrates why people like you don't deserve to have your opinions on China taken seriously.

I mean... "the rest of the world" (except china, north korea and maybe some other country with a "great firewall") allows US to spy on millions and billions of it's citizens daily... all the android phones, facebook apps, instagrams, snapchats etc.

...sadly.

You don't actually believe that is what it is for right? This is sarcasm? I can not tell...

Based off your past comments, you have some pretty strong feelings about both China and the USA which might lead one to think you’re not really approaching this discussion in good faith.

Oh good, another thing is to accuse people who have different opinions of being propagandized drones. Pretty effective is controlling the narrative too.

I don't think you're a drone or that you're propagandized, I just that you have strong opinions. I'm admittedly flattered that you think my idle observations are part of some concentrated effort of 'controlling the narrative' though :)

> Dump all the US instances into the memory hole

Yes, it's called focusing on a particular subject, the topic at hand.

Do you go into Snowden threads and complain that people are dumping the routine monitoring of their populace by the Chinese in the memory hole?

> Yu is a former engineering lead for ByteDance in the US who worked at the company between 2017 and 2018.

This seems like an outrage bait lawsuit. The facts in the case are five years out of date, ByteDance has been through the wringer in the ensuing years and there’s no evidence that this backdoor exists in the current app.

There's a ton of evidence that the TikTok app is used for tracking and to assume the CCP doesnt have access to a huge trove of personal data from its primary geo-strategic competitor is ridiculouly naive.

The lawsuit isn’t about tracking users. Pretty much every social media app tracks users, that’s how surveillance capitalism works.

The lawsuit is also not about whether China has access to US citizens’ information. And even if it was, why should I, as a US citizen, worry about that? They can’t put me in jail or fire me. If you’re an American, you should be worried about what the US government knows about you.

Anyways, the lawsuit is about an alleged backdoor. I can’t see how the plaintiff could know what present day code they’re running, and I can’t see why they waited so long to report it.

The lawsuit isn’t really even about backdoors or tracking, it’s for wrongful termination. When I say it’s outrage bait, I mean it’s making explosive allegations that ByteDance would really prefer not to deal with right now. It feels like a legal move calculated to pressure the company into a quiet and generous settlement.

It's a former employee trying to extract a settlement from a company that is currently vulnerable these sorts of accusations.

The article is “business insider” I always suspect either another side of the story if not complete and outright propoganda.

Im more curious what tiktok data amouts to and how it could be used by CCP. I’ve heard of bans of Tiktok use by politicians and army bases and such. Without sensitive location data to some specific users but solely the young sharing memes, I wounder how CCP could use that data… Not a Tiktok user myself, if anyone could illuminate me on this it’s be great. For example does tiktok have direct messages from users to users that could be spied on? My naive assumption is that Tiktok is a meme sharing platform and timesink

> Im more curious what tiktok data amouts to and how it could be used by CCP

Let's pretend I hire two people: The first is a private detective, the other is an entertainer.

The private detective is able to follow you around and watch everything you do. They know when you eat, when you sleep, and even when you poop. They know who you talk to and for how long. They know everything that interests you and bores you, down to the microsecond (knowing what makes you pause). The PI gets to know you pretty well and honestly, probably better than many close friends.

The entertainer is your main source of entertainment. They offer a wide variety of things and they're highly addictive and prevent you from being bored. Since they are a major part of your day, they are a major influence of the information that you consume. Be this in comedy, politics, academic information, or whatever. That all depends on what interests you that day.

Now I've hired these two people and am able to direct them. The PI are my eyes and ears, the entertainer are my hands. If I want to make the most profit off of you I can make deals with McDonalds and get the entertainer to influence you that way (maybe do comedy bits about burgers) and the PI can track how interested and influential the entertainer is. Allowing us to refine our techniques on a personal level. On the other hand, if I am interested in politics I can do the same. I know what makes you afraid. I know what makes you sad. I know what makes you angry. I know what makes you feel good.

Now we're just looking at you, a single person here. But I have a billion PIs and entertainers. I know all your friends, family members, and even your crushes. I know how close all these bonds are because I'm doing to them what I am doing to you. Consider this and then tell me that I don't have influence over you. I am a significant part of your environment. You may have free will, but you are also a product of your environment.

> My naive assumption is that Tiktok is a meme sharing platform and timesink

And that's why I have influence over you. The less important you think it is, the more influence I have since your guard is down. Same way comedians crack people up.

But to do most of what you discussed, you don't need any "private" data. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Youtube, Reddit does and uses your browsing and posting data in the exact same way.

Imagine that a state actor would seek to flip a foreign National to their cause. You can do so with either a carrot or a stick or both. The carrot can be fancy dinners, free vacations, or access to what they want. The carrot can be threat of exposure of deep secrets, etc. Now imagine that there is an app that has the AMAZING ability to figure out EXACTLY what you like and don’t like. You haven’t used TikTok yourself so you don’t know it firsthand but this app is uncanny in its ability to feed you stuff that only you would find fascinating that you didn’t even know about yourself. In the wrong hands it can give incredible amounts of information on an individual’s interests at a level of detail that was previously impossible

And the 66% of US teens on TikTok are 66% of the next generation of US senators, presidents, cabinet members, military chiefs, etc. Imagine the competitive advantage of having a deep psychological profile for each of these personas of your geopolitical adversary.

And remember that political games do not have to be won in a generation, simply knowing the direction your opponent is going and bending them towards your preference is sufficient to be worthwhile.

Simply over subscribe the generations on antiwork and the cons (as opposed to pros) of (Democracy, America, Freedom, Modern thought, etc. whatever are the targets) and you can bend a generational trend.

Humans aren't particularly good at seeing evidence and realizing they're only seeing part of the whole picture.

>And the 66% of US teens on TikTok are 100% of the next generation of US senators,

FTFY

That's the threat.

Is American turnover in Congress actually that fast enough for this to happen? We have more people over 40 than younger people and the influx of youth is being floated by an immigration policy that favors middle- and upper-class, basically the brain drain, of the rest of the world (read: people interested in business-friendly policy, etc), and older people, say, everyone 40 - 60, will have even greater life expectancy, so those who are in power may be in power when current teens are adults, just as Nancy Pelosi has been a Congresswoman my entire life and a good chunk of my mother's.

I think it's about knowing what people are interested in and having an algorithm that can control what people see and to try to nudge them to be more/less interested in certain things.

Eugene Wei's article [0] helped me see how TikTok uses more of an interest graph, whereas many of the other platforms use more social graphs. By this, I think he means that TikTok cares much more about knowing what people are interested in than knowing to whom they're connected.

> But what if there was a way to build an interest graph for you without you having to follow anyone? What if you could skip the long and painstaking intermediate step of assembling a social graph and just jump directly to the interest graph? And what if that could be done really quickly and cheaply at scale, across millions of users? And what if the algorithm that pulled this off could also adjust to your evolving tastes in near real-time, without you having to actively tune it?

I think the fear is that the algorithm can be tweaked to nudge people towards things that the platform, or in this case, the CCP, want them to want.

For example, if I see you watching videos about the book 1984, and I want you to be less interested in things that promote fear of a totalitarian government, and I also know that you feel really afraid of your home getting robbed, I can have the algorithm show you more videos about homes getting robbed so that you boost your feelings of fear of neighbors and therefore you may even want to have a stronger government to protect you from your neighbors.

[0]: https://www.eugenewei.com/blog/2020/8/3/tiktok-and-the-sorti...

can control what people see and to try to nudge them to be more/less interested in certain things.

You mean like mainstream media has done for decades?

Sure, but it’s much more effective when the messaging is targeted to an individual (or, small cohort of similar individuals) based on their interests (known, at a granular level, because of what they watch for how long etc)

Mass media isn’t individualized in the same way

Is mainstream media designing a user-specific content feed that is adjusted to your specific preferences? Your argument sounds similar to the one used against arguments of an encroaching police state: sure it has been done before but not at this scale or with this level of sophistication.

Yes, now just imagine if mainstream media could create millions of TV channels specifically designed for each human being instead of broadcasting one channel to millions of human beings?

The memes you share are a representative of you...

Lets say you're sharing a bunch of memes about being a private in the army. What is the likelihood you are actually a private in the army? Can tiktok use that to propagandize you in any way? For example, by sending you a lot of what I would consider far right propaganda that the US military is weak because it believes in 'wokeness', could this cause you to be less effective in the military?

Also it's a place with many subjects for psychological experiments. What propaganda is best to fool someone like you? Or someone like person A, person B? And if "Program P" works best to convert people to whatever, hey hey, you still have the captive audience, just apply that program

Probably Cambridge Analytica has the best information on how such programming works. Or, Google/YouTube with their "What goes viral" algorithms.

Yes, there is a private/direct messaging feature in TikTok that should of course be considered accessible to ByteDance, and by extension the Chinese government.

However, that is not the only valuable information.

The user behavioral profiles (which users have viewed what videos when, what do they engage with, what do they re-share to others) are valuable, particularly if you can de-anonymize them against account registration data. Also, the social graph of a big service like TT is a goldmine.

Both types of information are useful whether you're doing traditional espionage, targeted influence operations, or mass-influence/propaganda.

For traditional espionage, knowing what sort of content someone watches could give you direct insight into non-public aspects of their life that could be leveraged. (I.e. mental or physical illness, sexual interests, relationship problems, fringe political leanings, etc. etc.) There's a fair amount of not-exactly-porn but porn-adjacent stuff (and lots of health/wellness/lifestyle content) on TT that could give you leverage or at least ideas on how to approach someone if you wanted to convince them to pass information to you, provide access to something, etc.

The real value is in targeted influence ops, though. Find someone you want to influence, or a small subset of the population you want to influence, and drill down to figure out who their 'thought leaders' / opinion-setters are within their social circle. Figure out what kind of media engages them. Go after them indirectly via their friends/colleagues/family. TT is demographically limited right now, so you're probably not changing many Senators' votes directly, but you might be able to get their kids, their kids' friends, their junior staffers, etc. thinking a particular way. Done the right way, the actual influence target might never even need to be messaged-to directly. They'd get the full social-media 'Inception' treatment and probably think they came up with their opinion organically or by being in touch with the culture.

And then of course for mass-messaging/propaganda, you use the information in aggregate just like any big advertising company does, but for political ends, and without having to engage an actual advertising company that's going to create a tangible trail.

in my rudimentary understanding, the knowledge would be useful more in an aggregate nature. finding effective ways to target include/exclude propaganda and gathering real-time data around memes/info sharing topics that relate to whatever information campaigns they are currently running. lies seem to spread faster than the truth, and very few places are as actively in use as tiktok.

The ccp pays visits to relatives who still reside in China - and sometimes those abroad - for behaviors of people who’ve emigrated out of China. Tiktok gives them easy insight on whose relatives need a visit.

Second, it’s easy to find secrets on important people or politicians through their online habits - it’s pretty easy to see how that can be used for influence.

The fact that many Westerners are still unsure about this and not aware that they're in the middle of an unconventional war¹ is fascinating. Xi does not care about memes of course. The app itself is the backdoor, Bytedance (which has the Communist Party right inside the company, like other Mainland corporations) controls what the users see. And what they're shown is completely different from Douyin, there is a reason Chinese residents aren't even permitted to download TikTok - the foreign propaganda version. No one will be able to tell you their strategy for certain but it's not hard to guess when you look at the content that gets boosted. It's like Twitter on steroids, it's designed to cause division and radicalize the users. The data harvesting is an added bonus and with more data they can be better manipulated.

Btw on a meta level this doesn't matter when the CCP has completely walled 1.4 billion people in. Every single American social media app is banned, the vast majority of foreign news sites is censored. It should not even be a question what the app is about, the regime is as obvious an enemy to free society as it gets and before they open up as was promised in the past in exchange for economic investment, no Chinese internet company should be permitted operating anywhere.

While the Chinese internet is so tightly controlled and the US & co are attacked in Chinese state media on a daily basis, foreign countries let them move in this Trojan horse. There's a book called Unrestricted Warfare where the authors describe just this sort of weakness of the US to political/information warfare 20 years ago. It turns out they were spot on.

¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_warfares

> Without sensitive location data to some specific users but solely the young sharing memes, I wounder how CCP could use that data…

Speculation about how adversaries might advantageously use data is meaningless unless coupled with policy that allows access to such data only with binding agreements about how that data can be used.

As a general principle, I believe adversaries should not have blanket access to data of US citizens.

My belief, however, is meaningless when US powers-that-be to date show little interest in regulating data policy with respect to any business, foreign or domestic.

Location data is the least interesting thing they're harvesting. Modern targeting models are able to understand the most intimate personality traits of their users, and manipulate users based on those traits. They're capable of weaponizong user's unique levels of skepticism, political leaning, depression, or dysmorphia, weaponizing them against entire cultures and society

It's a massive platform for propaganda and mass data collection entirely without the ability for us to regulate it in an effective way without entry cutting it out of China's control

Spread outrage, controversy and doubt.

Have a neutral mutually beneficial idea? Let’s contextualize it as a divisive political issue that is championed by the political leader you hate the most.

It's often more about what they can show you than what they can see, but what they fun see about you helps them decide how to nudge your beliefs

I will just tweak algorithm to show you more videos supporting a particular ideology which favors my motives. The rest your brain will do it yourself!

Most simple is to control algorithms pushing whatever agenda China wants America youth focused on.

It is a kompromat generator to blackmail the next Teixeira.

This seems sloppy. If I were to build an app that was popular in say Cuba or something I wouldn't leave myself technical gateways to access the data and manipulate things directly. That would leave a clear paper trail and open me up to some innocent engineer stumbling across what's happening.

Rather I would embed trusted people into the company at low to mid-level positions of power, like software engineers, content moderators, etc. where they could quietly use their influence on shape things in ways that are favorable to my goals. I would do this with every company I could get them hired at not just the one making my app.

If I really had a need to exert undue influence I would use a side-channel to communicate instructions to people at the company (potentially even the leadership) and rely on them to carry out the orders. Remoting in and changing things myself seems silly.

Sure, and that's probably happening as well.

But it shows a level of not-giving-a-fuck if they're just leaving not-even-well-hidden "backdoors" in, so people in China can get access.

It suggests to me that the software engineers writing this stuff don't really think of ByteDance US or the US version of TikTok as being any different from ByteDance China. Because of course they don't: I don't think ByteDance itself, or its leadership, does. The whole idea of separating the company internally is a sham, and it's almost always a sham when companies claim to do internal firewalling or controls like that. (See also: pre-2008 financial companies that did both consulting and accounting/audit, and claimed they never talked across that line. Of course they did!)

TikTok is a shining example of both China being China (no real private/public sector separation, lying as standard practice, economic policy is just war by other means) and the US being the US (everything is for sale, everyone's loyalty can be rented, all laws are negotiable, workers / average people exist to be exploited rather than protected, if it's profitable it can't be that wrong)... and we wonder why it's a trainwreck for average users.

From a Leninist bureaucratic perspective, a paper trail is exactly what someone wants as a mid-level official: if something goes wrong a paper trail transfers responsibility to her higher-ups, reducing the chance this person becoming a scapegoat. Especially useful if someone's caught in a intra-party power struggle, in an area dealing with foreign entities where waters are muddier. Trust is very rare in the Leninist party. Not sure if the same logic works in other governments though.

I would be extremely surprised if a state-actor like China couldn’t access most US company data at will. If you can invest several billions and have thousands of people working to create a breach, no company is safe, not even AWS or Microsoft.

In this case, that’s even way easier, the company is Chinese, the CCP can have this access lawfully, is this something unexpected?

I’m much more concerned by the laziness of most western governments in understanding if this was a threat or not.

The Chinese government, like the US government or any other large national government, is not monolithic.

Having information available for easy perusal via a commercial channel (which is potentially not even illegal) is very different from having information accessible via use of national-asset intelligence capabilities. Information which can only be obtained the second way is almost certainly going to receive different treatment than the first.

There is value in making information more difficult (and more illegal, and less socially and politically acceptable) to access, even if that control is not 100% effective or if there are still ways of getting around it.

Increasing the friction involved in accessing personal information is an imperfect win, but a win nonetheless.

For most users of commercial software, your system is penetrable and should be considered insecure against a nation-state level attacker willing to spend a 0-day on getting in. But that doesn't mean you should just leave everything hanging out in the open where any doofus can get to it, or voluntarily hand your information over to an unfriendly government's partner corporation. At least make them work for it.

The Chinese government, like the US government or any other large national government, is not monolithic.

In what meaningful way does one part of the Chinese government differ from another part of the Chinese government? Isn't Xi basically the supreme leader for life now?

I think their repeat public position was that the CCP could not have law access and did not have access. I don't think anyone believed it, but still

> the CCP can have this access lawfully, is this something unexpected

Oh it is completely expected.

People have been warning about TikTok for years, and yet those people get called crazy.

The US should have taken action against them years ago.

We can still fix the issue now though, by creating a targeted law against them.

> We can still fix the issue now though, by creating a targeted law against them.

That's not a great idea, since it will invite a lawsuit on the (potentially valid) grounds that it's a de facto bill of attainder. Which the US has traditionally taken a dim view on for very good reasons.

Better would be if it prompted a more general law about foreign ownership of corporations which have access to large amounts of information on US persons, regardless of how it is obtained or who they are.

As a US citizen, I don't want any government that I don't have input into -- even the relatively indirect and less-than-satisfying input of casting one vote among millions -- compiling a dossier on me, and I expect my government to do what it can to make that at least somewhat difficult. (And yes, I am aware there is no way to stop it completely. If the Chinese government wants to task its intelligence service to compile a dossier on me, there's nothing much that can be done about it. But let's at least try to raise the bar on the difficulty and effort involved. The more difficult and expensive, the more illegal, and the more internationally frowned-upon the task becomes, the harder it is to do at scale to millions or billions of people at once.)

> the laziness of most western governments in understanding if this was a threat or not

I think USA recognized the threat very early on. It's been a hot-button topic for several years. Remember when the Trump administration tried to force a sale of ByteDance's USA operations to Microsoft? And even now the apps and services are blocked on US government devices and networks. And even at a lot of public universities. The concern is there. I don't think it's laziness.

Even if the tech is secure there are still thousands of foreign employees working in those companies. It's not uncommon for people to be sympathisers of their homeland. And it's not symmetrical since very few westerners work for Alibaba, Huawei etc.

It doesn't even have to be a state actor but it isn't as simple as "at will" a compromise requires effort and resources and discovery would be attributed back to the actor. Willful access has none of that problem.

I would have been unsurprised if the US government hadn't already forced them to host with Oracle a year or two ago supposedly to prevent exactly this from happening.

Is Larry Ellison a Chinese spy? He would probably have to either be complicit or criminally negligent to allow this to happen given he was given the contract precisely for this reason.

I'm also reminded of that fake story from the WSJ about American chips being hacked that turned out to be entirely fabricated.

And US insistence that "dumb" 5g aerials already vetted by national security agencies had to be banned (along with kit that was absolutely a legitimate risk) because they could potentially possibly harbor listening devices maybe.

Hosting with oracle doesn’t change a thing. Just because the data would be on US servers don’t stop the data from being accessible from outside of the region.

And is it really that hard to imagine a world where a hostile and ambitious nation would seek to leverage a technology platform to listen to sensitive conversations? The US has done it in the past and you better believe China will be doing it too.

Forcing ByteDance to host the data in the US, on Oracle's servers or anyone else's, doesn't mean a lot if there are a bunch of people in China with the login to those servers. Who has access to the data and the various administrative controls over it are more important than where it physically resides.

ByteDance has claimed that their US operations were administratively firewalled from their Chinese ones, and then it's been repeatedly shown not to be the case. At this point they have lost all credibility about their ability to 'firewall' or internally control access to user data, probably because they (or certain parts of the company) don't really want to.

> I'm also reminded of that fake story from the WSJ about American chips being hacked that turned out to be entirely fabricated.

Bloomberg, not WSJ.

I would have been unsurprised if the US government hadn't already forced them to host with Oracle a year or two ago supposedly to prevent exactly this from happening.

The allegations are from 2017-18 when the guy was fired. The migration of user data was last year, but it is not like they are disconnected from China

I'm also reminded of that fake story from the WSJ about American chips being hacked that turned out to be entirely fabricated.

It was a 2018 Bloomberg story. Bloomberg still refuses to admit they were wrong, and doubled down in 2021. That no "tiny chips" have turned up yet should be near definitive proof that story was bogus.

The article is talking about the Chinese govt.

> I'm also reminded of that fake story from the WSJ about American chips being hacked

Unless there is hard proof of anything I always assume news like these is the usual suspects warmongering.

Imagine the worms put on phones of employees of various tech companies - specifically datacenter employees in various commerical and government agencies - recall the STRAVA scandal which revealed secret military bases...

The TikTok angle is like stuxnet for that type of corporate/gov espionage....

Its ludicris how poorly the USG has handled this.

But then again, you have so many people in congress with dual citizenship (which should be illegal and a capital crime IMO)

but then look at the spouses of lawmakers, their investments, their citizenship, their network ranking over the time their spouce was in congress, and their kids...

FFS we are still arguing over Biden's ties to money laundering in Ukraine and China, but we dont talk about the GOAT of grifters ; Mitch McConnell?

the CCP has more backdoors into the USG than they do with just TikTok ... and lets not even talk about Israel's backdoors which are actually a front-door-fire-hose.

The US government is and has always been reactive, not proactive.

About the most forward-thinking the US gets is writing the occasional contingency plan. Everything else is done in haste once a serious problem becomes plainly obvious to everyone, and people (deep-pocketed ones especially) start screaming to their elected representatives to fucking do something about it. Then and only then do the gears start to turn.

If you want dual citizens to be ineligible for congress then just do that, it doesn't have to be a crime...

Didn't that seem to be the purpose of tiktok to begin with?

TikTok is allegedly staffed with dozens of ex-FBI, CIA, and US State Department officials who moderate content[1].

Somehow PRISM and the closed-doors FISA court hearings, Lavabit, etc seem to be collectively memory-holed by USians. Nowadays their anxiety about state surveillance is reserved for the "CCP".

1. https://www.mintpressnews.com/tiktok-chinese-trojan-horse-ru...

The thing is, this is a pretty standard playbook for many intelligence-turned-civilian types. They become "consultants" for basically every industry. Not defending it, but it's not really unique to TikTok.

When did USian become a thing? Or rather, what's the etymological path into common use?

Fairly sure that's an online communication thing. Wider geographic reach of messages + it works a lot better written than spoken, and it's been used at least since the early 2000s?

A big push for it comes from the fact that many peoples, spread across two continents, identify as American. Our continents are the Americas.

Agreed. It's also evident in the types of propaganda that appear, at least on my FYP. I guess they are running out of fresh spins on the old psyops wheel of manipulation.

> In the summer of 2021, he went straight from his top State Department job to become product policy manager for trust and safety at TikTok, a position that, on paper, he appears completely unqualified for. Earlier this year, Cardona left the company.

Fascinating stuff in here. Wouldn't it be funny if the situation was any of these:

- TikTok is some revolving-door communications center for off-the-record relations between USG and PRC

- Your TikTok device is a node in a cluster that's being used for info-wars against some extraterrestrial threat as PRC and USG combine forces

- Nah, USG just uses TikTok as a way to backdoor PRC

> ...seem to be collectively memory-holed by USians

Because we dare have a thread where we talk about CCP surveillance?

How can we possibly memory hole anything when people like you are constantly reminding us of these off-topic issues?

First result for me is 2013.

https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Abusinessinsider.com+P...

The article is about TikTok.

When it comes to the CCP is it even a "backdoor"? They assert full LEGAL right to all data from companies in their jurisdiction. Everyone who operates in China, domestic or foreign, knows the costs of doing business.

> When it comes to the CCP is it even a "backdoor"?

In the US we would refer to it as a responsibility, or a duty to protect.

Meanwhile, the CCP can just open their huge wallets and pay US-based data-brokers for all the private information of US citizens that they ever dreamed of ...

Please don't use the fact that there are other imperfections in the system to prevent this one from getting fixed.

You mean please don't fix this gigantic gaping hole, so that this much smaller hole gets fixed first and people forget about the bigger problem?

Please don't use your naivety as a shield from recognizing a purposeful "gap" in implementation, across all social media we consume in the US (as well as technological devices), as dictated by the US government.

I think they are bringing awareness to an additional issue rather than dismissing this one

This is the original reporting that Business Insider rewrote:

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/12/technology/tiktok-bytedan...

https://archive.is/ap3on

Oh dear. I won't be surprised to see this being true since TikTok is just a worse version of Facebook/Instagram who has already admitted and shown evidence of them violating the privacy of its users [0] [1] [2] [3] [4] [5], and its defenders are just running out of excuses faster than a running tap at this point.

Before anyone says 'All social media companies do this', If large social networks like Facebook have been fined in the billions of dollars for such repeated privacy violations, then given the size of TikTok, you might as well agree that for TikTok to continue to operate in the US, it must to pay a multi-billion dollar fine for such repeat offenses and abuses of its user's privacy simply on the grounds of the size of the many users on the platform.

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

[1] https://www.scmagazine.com/news/privacy/uk-tiktok-16m-fine-c...

[2] https://fortune.com/2022/12/22/tiktok-data-privacy-blunder-c...

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

[4] https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-65126056

[5] https://www.thepinknews.com/2023/05/08/tiktok-lgbtq/

I know there's a legitimate, serious discussion to be had here, but anecdotally all of my TikTok stream is cooking and memes.

I'm pretty sure that's based on my viewing habits, because I love cooking and memes, but it does make these serious claims humorous at times.

I get the random insertion of AI-generated "Russian man" shouting hyper-conservative/far-right propaganda. I always leave a comment stating it is propaganda, and flag for removal.

I see you government, trying to infiltrate my wholesome FYP of booktok, math, and physics.

All i get is the meme of Biden and Trump making beats, I don’t hate it though

So, basically just the China version of the US Cloud Act?

But it's the US, it's the bastion of democracy. Govt here doesn't put backdoors, doesn't sponsor crypto companies, doesn't target individuals and ship them to overseas camps to avoid torture laws. Wage fake wars. Doesn't use it's intelligence agencies to interfere with other countries. Oh!

For all our faults, we're not the ccp. Bashing America doesn't undo the horrors committed by the ccp. We're talking about an authoritarian regime that is currently committing genocide. Should we really just roll over and give them unfettered access to our markets while they are incredibly hostile to our companies and where we only get access by giving away ip?

I'm starting to become fatigued by all this TikTok news. Either ban the app or don't. Causing anxiety over TikTok without any action is the worst of both worlds.

So rather than exposing the cost/benefits of an app, you just want the government to make a decision about what methods of communication are available to everyone? And instead of making a thorough case why a particular method has to be banned for good reasons tangential to the content, you want them to make that choice and announce it?

I think banning very invasive social media until it minimizes tracking is a reasonable option, but that's something that should be done by passing laws and public debate.

Banning TikTok until it minimizes tracking pushes the blame onto TikTok (unfairly IMHO). Apps all have the same Android/iOS permissions to work with, so if there's really a problem, the Govt should consult with OS vendors on tightening controls across the board.

Better they openly do that than this constant covert hysterical press releasing to whip up public support for it.

> I'm starting to become fatigued

> Causing anxiety

The news is literally designed to do that to you. Stop consuming so much of it for your own mental well-being, and that of everyone else you interact with.

Don't ban it, just force the sale of US/European or non-Chinese division to an outside party and that's that.

There's actually not that much economic downside. Having TT merged with Bytedance is not a big economic bonus.

I can't believe that this was not done ages ago.

There is hardly a loser here - it's just a 'required fork' of a business, everyone will be fine.

We do this all the time with 'important' things, for a social media app, nothing will skip a beat, the kids can keep their funny songs.

The type of banning of apps you propose is state-sponsored censorship. This is done in China as a routine matter, such as with protest or VPN apps.

It's an interesting problem to solve though.

For one thing, there are lots of US investors who will lose money. Should they be made whole?

That's not an interesting question. No, no they should not. And that would be true even if there were US investors. Just like we don't compensate AirBnB shareholders when cities outlaw short term rentals.

But, there are no non-Chinese investors in Bytedance. There are US investors in Hong Kong (?) companies that have exposure to Bytedance and move 1:1 with Bytedance, but explicitly included in their risk analysis is that government action may zero out that 1:1 nature at any time by political action.

They should not. They should have known the risk in advance.

Not an interesting question at all, IMO. The government is not required to protect you or make you whole, if you invest in an enterprise that the government later decides to prohibit, or makes illegal, or decides to regulate in some other manner.

I mean, think that through for a second: if the government had to compensate everyone for the negative impact of legislation, it would be almost impossible to pass laws. If my town says I can't burn tires in my back yard, do they need to pay me to shut down my tire-burning operation? What if I don't even have a tire-burning operation, but I could have started one, except now I'm prohibited from doing so... did they impair the value of my property by prohibiting a potential use? What about all the other things I could have done with my property, absent any pesky zoning restrictions, Clean Water Act rules, or just centuries of common law precedent? Do they have to pay me for the impairment of each of them, each time a law is passed that eliminates a hypothetical option?

No, of course not, because that would paralyze government and be ridiculous.

The government has no responsibility to make anyone whole if they decide someone's business model is counter to the public good and make it illegal. It's on my investors to take into account the risk of legislation that might impact the business and factor that into their investment decisions and subsequent valuation of the business. If they do that poorly, or fail to recognize a legal risk, that's on them.

This is literally why sovereign immunity is a thing.

They couldn't use it as a distraction if they did that.

It benefits TikTok competitors.

Even if they didn't have an official backdoor, they would have many backdoors by just placing people on staff (getting them hired in the normal way.) You can't stop state intelligence agencies from getting into any domestic data that they want, even with law (which they can just ignore.) Social media is full of 'ex-'state intelligence operatives, and objections to that situation are made out to be bizarre, or even banned from discussion on these same social networks.

As far as I can tell, what we're supposed to think is that managing a social network, or any communications service, is within the same field as covert intelligence and surveillance, so of course that would be the hiring pool.

Non-Chinese have little to fear from Chinese government monitoring of their activity on TikTok. Chinese people know their government (which openly censors, rather than laundering their censorship through covert means like the Five Eyes), and know how to act to keep safe.

People have plenty to fear from state surveillance regardless of their nationality. The Indian Army had their troop movements monitored by the PLA via TikTok data during a recent conflict, so please don’t pretend that this is merely an abstract fear.

If the Indian Army, in the midst of secret movements, is accessing social networks through their phones, everybody knows where they are and they are incompetent. Please don't pretend the problems of a military force playing on social networks are in any way related to normal people's problems. Ban TikTok from nuclear submarines, too, but I don't know why you would allow any other social network service on there either. I could be running it myself and sending all of your information to the Chinese government.

> Non-Chinese have little to fear from Chinese government monitoring of their activity on TikTok. Chinese people know their government (which openly censors, rather than laundering their censorship through covert means like the Five Eyes), and know how to act to keep safe.

This is so laughable that I don't even know where to start.

How many Chinese individuals got busted for "corruption" because the Chinese Communist Party told people down the line to "do something" and conspicuous social media posters were easy targets? How many Chinese got busted for posting something that happened to contradict the party narrative about Covid?

Even if a Chinese citizen understands how to act right now in the moment (and I don't even concede that), when Dear Leader decides to change the standards you can easily wind up on the wrong side of "proper and correct" with a nice big trail to justify shutting off your social credit.

Surveillance is bad and evil and a threat. Period. It doesn't matter which government is doing it.

There are two main problems with social media, as it exists today:

First, the company that operates the social media system, has access to data that exposes extremely personal information about the users, sometimes directly, and sometimes through inference based on user behavior. This naturally attracts parties that might benefit from this information, originally advertisers, but increasingly nation states. Personally, I think the solution to this involves both privacy legislation, and legislation that dramatically restricts what foreign entities can do in the United States, but I acknowledge this is very controversial.

Second, the algorithms that the social media site uses to decide what content to presented to users is extremely susceptible to manipulation and to causing undesirable side effects. Even if the site operator is benign, the algorithm might magnify, extreme or emotional content in order to maximize engagement. We have seen this for several years now. And, of course, the site operators may choose to amplify messaging that they like or suppress messaging that they don’t. This may seem great if your values align with the site operator, but remember that operators change, e.g., Twitter. And of course, the site operator might be hostile to your values, e.g., TikTok. I think that the solution to this problem is actually much easier than the solution to the first problem. The solution to algorithmic problems is to make the algorithm opt-in. For example, when you join a social media site, you initially might be presented with the option to use company, curated prioritization, or to use time and subscription-based prioritization. However, social media sites should be encouraged or perhaps forced to allow community curated, prioritization, and allow community members to opt into, a community feed versus the company curated feed. I think we would see a small number of users and communities who would quickly come up with their own curated feeds, that would be popular with like-minded individuals.

It’s widely known likely 99.9% chance they have access, but just the us law system needs good proof.

Of course the party committee can access data. That's how China works under Xi.[1][2] Party committees had less presence in private companies post-Mao and pre-2003, but now they're back. Most larger non-state owned companies now have one, so the party can keep an eye on the private sector from the inside. They have roughly board-level authority.

Nominally, the party committee represents the party members who work for the company. But they're not chosen by the employees; they're appointed by higher levels of the party.

[1] https://thediplomat.com/2019/12/politics-in-the-boardroom-th...

[2] https://www.seafarerfunds.com/prevailing-winds/party-committ...

The levels of naivety around this stuff in the aftermath of Assange and Snowden continue to astound me.

The conversation here dances around the topic, but nobody really talks about it. The same applies to almost every media outlet. Everyone is talking about something, but that is mostly irrelevant and doesn't give any insight. Interesting pattern.

In the old days, parents had an unwritten responsibility to steer their kids away from neighborhood kids who are a bad influence. Their kids aren’t running around in the neighborhood any more; the bad influences are social media algorithms.

1) My primary concern will always be tied to governments with the ability to arrest me.

2) Because our personal data is trivial for govs/corp/LEO to purchase, it isn't obvious how this risk budges the needle.

Will you install a secuirty camera in your daughters room, specifically when the the camera comes from country with most leaked cam footage!(where various reports argue that State is involved in such leaks)

Are there even IP cameras manufactured domestically to even choose? I have some inside my home (pointed at exterior doors; not inside bedrooms which seems borderline creepy and/or sadistic), but they're not connected to public networks and thus I don't consider them a risk.

Not at consumer price levels, no.

There are companies that make security hardware here in the US, but the market is mostly very high-end government and military customers. And TBH mostly they are still using Chinese components, just assembling stuff here in the US and marking the price up enough that they can justify calling it 'made in USA' by virtue of the value-add. Sometimes the software is coded or at least audited, though.

You can avoid the worst Chinese-made hardware if you look for "NDAA compliant" rather than US domestic manufacture. NDAA compliance means that a product isn't made by a number of prohibited Chinese suppliers who are known to be very thoroughly compromised (as opposed to the average level of compromise that you should assume most companies in China have... but China is a big place, so that difference isn't nothing).

Axis and Bosch both have NDAA-compliant product lines.

I was giving an analogy. You won't risk installing any camera near to your kids, so is similar is the risk of handing mobile phone with a camera, which is capable of spying them/software that modulate them all the time! Blue Whale was an example which forced people to commit suicide. In TikTok's case the probability of immoral use is the most. As its has a connection with CCP, or is obliged to co-operate if required with CCP. Not juts USA, many countries had its suspecision with this APP. Ignoring all that why would any one wanted to risk there kids with this one specific APP ?

I would never put a camera in my kids' rooms. We've learned to prioritize our security on measured (not bullhorned) risk factors.

Yes, it's not like their Macbook Pro was assembled in the same country ....

Tiktok doesn’t need a back door for CCP to have access. It’s Chinese law that requires bytedance to hand over any information requested without question.

No one can dispute this. It’s literally the law in China.

Anyone has working link? BI 404's if you don't live in USA.

https://archive.is/ap3on

archive.today either has it and/or will allow you to immediately request it

I don't have a Business Insider subscription and don't plan on getting one. Any important, linkable sources that I can read instead?

Good intuition.

Business Insider is almost entirely a propaganda outlet and not actually a business publication, insider or otherwise.

The claim comes from an ex-employee from 2018. Most people want it to be true, so it is. I have no idea.

My default for TikTok stories is that NOTHING they can do is not first made possible by Apple and Google who take zero blame in any of this. That right there tells me it’s all game. TikTok/China is being used to trick people into supporting more domestic spying.

> TikTok Owner Had 'Backdoor' for CCP Access to US Data, Lawsuit Alleges

I feel like "Had" should have been the word in quotes here.

It'd be extremely naive to assume that they didn't have a back door, didn't have the ability to 'direct' TikTok to do as they required for pretty much anything, and didn't use it to further whatever their agenda is.

The inverse problem is to think of TT as directly an agent of the CCP, which it is not. TT is a company that wants to make money, that exists in a regime where there is no effective rule of law, meaning the regime can do pretty much as it pleases, when it please, and they do do that, particularly for censorship, content control etc.. But otherwise, the company is left to it's own devices.

Much like if you use Google or FB, you can be assured that the US Gov. will leverage that within the normal constraints of the US, which is to say for local policing warrants and judges, and for narrow issues of national security, well, probably 'anything goes' with respect to non-US citizens, 'almost anything goes' with respect to US citizens, but that ultimately the scope of the more acute stuff will be narrow, and ultimately there will be leakers.

Aka Snowden and Assange sadly get a different form of justice, but at least it's a kind of justice and it's in the public domain. You can speak out against Biden all day long but if you leak sensitive docs, that's probably a line that will get you in trouble.

Finally, we need to start to account for corporate surveillance.

Of course they did!

The CCP requires a back door like this for all businesses operating in China.

I would point out that these claims have not been proven.

Who uses TikTok for sensitive information? Government access to TikTok user data is of limited additional value compared to whatever TikTok sells to large advertisers and analytics partners.

When you couple this with the fact that China had secret police stations in the US trying to capture Chinese dissidents, you could use such data to track those people to kidnap them, regardless of if the information was sensitive on the app or not.

This is like saying "When you couple 30 seconds of girls dancing with assault rifles, it could kill you."

China policing emigres in the US is way out of bounds and I dare you to find anyone who thinks otherwise. Whereas posting on any social media and expecting that post to not be seen by foreign adversaries is... what?

> China had secret police stations in the US trying to capture Chinese dissidents

What's the evidence for this?

us military uses tiktok for fun from what ive seen. https://www.tiktok.com/search?q=military&t=1683997954279

i know these probably just look like "fun videos" and most are likely of no consequence, but my guess is some of the military footage submitted on there is recent and potentially not in the interest of US national defense.

That's what goes into an honest appraisal of an attack surface: What's the value of gaining that data?

> "Mr. Yu observed a culture of lawlessness within the company," the suit says. "This ByteDance culture focused on growth at all costs. The attitude was to violate the law first, continue to grow, and pay fines later."

Damn these dirty communists! That's not how we do business in Silicon Valley!

I mean, what's the surprise here?

This should surpise no one.

And US has a whole agency (NSA) dedicated to getting access to foreign data.

Has anyone noticed that at least 99% of any "news", forum posts, etc. containing "CCP" are pure regurgitated political garbage? It cannot be just bots and psy ops. Real people do this sort of thing, too. Quite impressive how an entire population has been whipped into parroting this crap while pointing the finger. It wish it was funny but it isn't.

In what way is this article "political garbage"? Did you even read it?

> how an entire population has been whipped into parroting this crap

It's not organic. Fairly apolitical people are being tricked into passively supporting it by the media illusion that it's an overwhelming consensus.

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