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There is a legitimate problem with mass siphoning of location data by mobile applications. Provided with that information you can identify clusters of activity aligned with identified military activity and infer what is going on, building a model that can then process the location data to predict military activity. Even deliberately choosing to not be trackable is itself an interesting data point.

Strava managed to do most of this entirely by accident.

The big problem is that once you accept you want to control location data why can you justify the ongoing use of it by existing systems? (Google and FB, mainly, though far from exclusively). I once audited an SDK from a YC startup many moons ago that went as far as collecting the altitude and bearing of the user when viewing an advertisement - this stuff is incredibly widespread.

My personal view is a law is needed that bans central collection of location data. (Even anonymised would not be sufficient). It's fair game for a user (and their apps) to have access to encrypted logs of the location of their devices, but that should not be remotely accessible by anyone.

>mass siphoning of location data

The issue is indeed legitimate, but it would be a systematic issue with all non-western/non-US apps, not just TikTok which is being singled out in an ad hoc manner. And it has as much to do with Google's store/android location data policies as it is with the apps.

>My personal view is a law is needed that bans central collection of location data.

Agreed.

...

UPD: I also suspect that preserving location data from state actors is a lost battle and modern SIGINT satellite constellations are already capable of pinpointing location of phones en masse, or will be capable of doing it in the coming years.

"Anomaly Six — also called A6 — claims it can track billions of devices in near real time. And Zignal Labs leverages its access to Twitter data streams to sift through hundreds of millions of Tweets per day, without restriction. The two combined would be an even more powerful surveillance tool.

During the presentation, A6 tracked the movements of the Russian army along the Ukrainian border, Chinese submarine positions, and even the American intelligence community. This was a bold idea: To demonstrate just how powerful its phone tracking capabilities are, A6 showed Zignal that they could spy on American spies.

On a satellite map of the U.S., A6 sales rep Brendon Clark drew digital boundaries around CIA and NSA headquarters. This is a technique known as geofencing. Within these boundaries, 183 dots appeared, representing GPS pings from phones that had visited both locations.

Lines radiated from each dot, showing where the phones had traveled. As Clark noted: “So, if I’m a foreign intel officer, that’s 183 start points for me now.”

Zeroing in on one dot, A6 showed how its software could reveal this individual’s movements as they traveled throughout the U.S. using the location data pulled from apps on their phone. In their demo, the person they were tracking traveled to a U.S. army base in Fort Bliss, Texas, an airfield in Jordan, and their likely home in suburban Maryland, close to NSA headquarters. The demo concluded with a Google Street View of the person’s house."

https://theintercept.com/2022/05/04/surveillance-anomaly-six...

> So it's tremendously hypocritical for the US to rile up paranoia about "personal data" and "national security" especially considering the Snowden revelations. (Draconian)rules are for thee but not for me.

China does limit what US companies can do there in far more draconian ways than the US does for any country, and the EU absolutely does have the power to force FAANG companies to comply with their data protection laws.

Like, do you not want countries to have spies or try to defend themselves from foreign spies? I don't really get the complaint here.

>China does limit what US companies can do there

But the narrative is "we are not like them", "we are about freedom, free trade, respecting private property and rights". But the moment "national security" gets even tangentially involved a lot of of this goes out of the window I guess.

>the EU absolutely does have the power

As I said their regulation of US companies is not as extensive, and if judged by how ineffectual the cookie law is in the presence of omnipresent browser fingerprinting and actual GDPR practices by the US companies that I know of the compliance is perfunctory at best.

>Like, do you not want countries to have spies or try to defend themselves from foreign spies?

The position where a cross border internet company automatically a spy questions the legitimacy of internet as a communication medium. From that point of view the Chinese have been doing the right thing isolating their citizens from the foreign internet.

Nothing important submitted to the app except for a full psych profile of every user updated in real time. I’m not a very creative person, and I can immediately see how this could be used to identify and recruit potential assets or improve psyops.

And there’s nothing hypocritical about both using and blocking an exploit, although I disagree with the reductive view that US companies are as aligned with US policy as Chinese companies are with China’s policy.

>there’s nothing hypocritical about both using and blocking an exploit

If by exploit you meant the general capabilities granted such app's popularity, then in my opinion it is at least somewhat hypocritical for a nation who's motto partly is basically(or was, I'm not sure as of right now) "free trade and free speech"

>and I can immediately see how this could be used to identify and recruit potential assets or improve psyops.

So should all cross border internet companies be banned by all the countries since cross border activity inevitably "exfiltrates" some data on the populace across the border, which could be used adversarially?

This isn’t a free speech debate. This isn’t a Chinese newspaper being banned. This isn’t a US citizen being blocked from expressing themselves. This is a software product. The US also regulates products like arms and drug shipments without being labeled hypocritical. Free trade doesn’t mean all or nothing.

As a member of this community, you should already know that mobile apps generate certain types of data that distinguish them from “all cross border internet companies,” and whether or not you’re willing to acknowledge the unique geopolitical context of this particular app, neither of the above can be ignored in any productive, nuanced discussion about TikTok.

>This isn’t a Chinese newspaper being banned. >This isn’t a US citizen being blocked from expressing themselves.

ACLU and EFF consider the Montana ban unconstitutional. So it's about free speech, at least partly.

>This is a software product.

Code == speech argument has been used many times. No settled case law so far as far as I know.

>mobile apps generate certain types of data that distinguish them from

Then make a law that regulates the exchange of this kind of data for all foreign companies. Instead we have the CFIUS commission being used to arbitrarily regulate a particular foreign company, which theoretically doesn't even need to have US presence to function, and it looks very close to the Chinese-style protectionism.

>unique geopolitical context of this particular app

The unique geopolitical situation is that US companies influence (and siphon data) the entire world(the degree of US government's influence on that influence is beside the point, and is a very complex issue), but the US refuses to be influenced(and have data siphoned) by a potential adversary even at the "app where teens dance" level.

> What's the real threat of TikTok to the US?

It's the same threat that Hollywood and Jazz music had to the USSR and the same threat that Facebook and Reddit has to the CCP.

Theoretically the first amendment forbids to go after this kind of "threat" then, since it would be like forbidding a citizen to read a foreign book.

This argument would be more relevant if the concern was "chinese cultural influence", but in tiktok, the algorithm is intentionally different for those in china vs those in the west, with drastic differences in what gets recommended.

Ain't it funny how for themselves, the CCP wants tiktok users to see inspirational content and science and happy stuff, while the west gets whatever addicting smut we can manage to produce. The CCP also says kids in China shouldn't see gay stuff, and a certain 1980s chinese social movement.

TikTok is literally the CCP attempting to influence americans. It's not okay when facebook does it, and should 100% be illegal, but american politicians DGAF about that, but it sure as hell shouldn't be okay for the CCP to do that either. Just because the american government is unwilling to reign in local corporations doesn't mean they should also abstain from doing their job with foreign threats.

>the CCP wants tiktok users to see inspirational content and science and happy stuff, while the west gets whatever addicting smut we can manage to produce.

If TikTok was a US based company I bet the content would be about the same. It's in the very American capitalism-influenced cultural tradition to have business practices that skirt the edge of the legal/acceptable to maximize profits, and patronizing speech regulations (recommending science instead of "addicting smut") are as un-American as it gets.

s/patronizing/paternalistic/

> TikTok is literally the CCP attempting to influence americans.

With lots and lots of gay/queer/trans content and cooking/baking on my FYP it seems to be doing an awfully good job at making me want to spend time away from the computer and back in the kitchen making delicious food and putting on makeup.

What do you mean by "trans content"?

If it's trans people talking about their transition, it seems to be an interest category that would only be offered by TikTok if you're actively interesting in it and engaging with that type of content.

If you mean "generic content made by people who just happen to be trans", that's pretty normal. In the real world you also can't go around asking a street performer to get out of your face because they happen to be trans.

The same with content creators making funny videos and showing a rainbow flag. Why would that be filtered out?

I mean trans creators that are talking about their transition, their struggles, and anything else they want to talk about.

I know I am getting exactly what I am interested in/engaging in... I was simply pointing out that the OP's choice of words stating that TikTok is trying to manipulate users with their FYP seems off-base.

I don't want them to get out of my face. I am not complaining about the content and the selection, I am ecstatic, but its a far cry from media that is meant to make me angry.

Ah thanks. I thought you were one of those who say content is being too 'woke' every time they even see a rainbow flag even though it's nothing to do with LGBTI+ topics at all. I got a bit triggered by that, I'm sorry.

The Netherlands used to be very gay-friendly but there is a large movement which is trying to reverse that (I think spurred on by Trump as American politics still has a lot of influence on the Netherlands). Which bothers me a lot and I rail against it.

And I understand your point, I don't think TikTok are doing so either.

FYI, both Russia and China believe that "woke" stuff is corrosive to society, which is why they are fine displaying it to western audiences but not for their own people. They genuinely believe that pushing MORE LGBTQ style stuff will destroy western society. It's a common authoritarian pastime to point and scream at the "different" people for all of society's problems. I think they're wrong.

But what kind of content do you get about china? What about Taiwan, or hong kong? What kind of content do you get about the US as a country? How do you know that the CCP isn't influencing you through subtle recommendation changes?

“ What the US establishment actually doesn't like is that TikTok wields a capability to influence the American public by amplifying certain topics and deranking others, also with their content policy.”

Ding Ding Ding. Agree the issue is the ability to control the national narrative. Too many US users on TikTok means that US powers may not be able to control all the topics and discourse like they want .

This is the best summary as to what's going on.

Psyops? They can tweak the algorithm to try to push for certain topics. Not shove them down user throats, but rank them a bit higher a few times and see if it catches on.

tiktok has very very deep influence in american culture especially amongst the younger audience. a well deployed psyop would be bad

> It should have nothing to do with spying since there isn't anything important that's submitted to the app

How can anyone say that's not true today? I thought we all had the same wake-up call that metadata is as important as the data itself a few years ago already.

Quantity being a quality all of its own, who can even say what it's possible to infer if you had the ability to data mine Tiktok? I mean, supposedly it was possible at one point to tell when shit's doing down in DC just because there was a spike in late night pizza delivery.

It's basically a global training program to teach youth to constantly be making and posting videos online in inappropriate places.

you can probably datamine TikTok without being Bytedance, simply by data scraping using fake accounts, going through profiles etc. In that sense it's as much of a threat to the US as Youtube, since people are making all kinds of videos in all kinds of places, and the videos are easily scrapable as of right now

Sure, maybe you can just scrape. Was the CCP supposed to sit around and wait for someone else to do Tiktok, so they could just scrape that instead?

Whatever obnoxious crap is on Youtube nowdays, the content's notably different and unlikely to be timely. And that's if it even leaks the same sort of metadata.