TikTok Spied on Me. Why?
ft.com
ft.com
And as you can imagine, the follow up questions by the author about the incident were not answered.
This is not the same as Google or Facebook, or any other giants spying on people.
If it was really merely some TikTok's employees' own decision, then just like it's working atmosphere, it's culture is toxic.
In short, profiling, and assuming they know all about you to promote, deny, or manipulate various product price points.
Products from the physical, to services, to bank and mortgage costs.
you keep using that word... whataboutism... I do not think it means what you think it means.
This is not what happened here - here, the issue was explained with an analagous, well-known issue. That issue was not being raised, it was used in an illustrative way.
The problem I have with this line of thinking is that clearly the context is not the same, and there is a meaningful difference between these actions taken by a geopolitical adversary and these actions taken by SV growth hacker culture.
Both issues need to be addressed, but the analogy stretches thin once you add more context, making it a not very informative line of inquiry, IMO.
It highlights a sickness that every social network has, and explains the title of the article well using real-world examples that folks are likely to understand. I see what you're getting at with getting too deep into all the nuance a subject has, but the nuance in this case just isn't very thick: "social media" makes it's profit by using you as a resource, which means spying. If you use anything in that space, it will spy on you. And it is all for the same reasons.
That said, it doesn't have to be repeatedly discussed. That's fair! But this article is high up and generating comments, so I feel other folks don't agree with you :)
> there is a meaningful difference between these actions taken by a geopolitical adversary and these actions taken by SV growth hacker culture.
Both countries are about equally likely to throw me in prison or harm me in some way. SV also exists to funnel data into the spy complex of the US (just as TikTok probably does for China). For someone outside of the US (and even inside...) the threat levels are the same.
There was a highly publicised case at Facebook some years ago with the same behaviour.
If you think that only TikTok does that, think again.
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/social-media/facebook-investiga...
I do remember this case when it happened. It was pretty major news. It is not isolated either. Here is an example of google doing it.
https://www.businessinsider.com/google-engineer-stalked-teen...
Oh and here is another good one where the Executives were involved:
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/investigation-ebay-employees-st...
Seems like the other poster is right... this is par for the course