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Comment by 2OEH8eoCRo0 | Hacker News Reader

The way I see it is this: If war were to break out between the US and China right now, what could they do with tiktok?

I think they could censor victories and raise losses or fabricated stories, sow doubt at a minimum. Make dead american soldiers trend. Whether we like it or not, most teens get news from tiktok. At a maximum they could brick 150 million phones, use them to ddos, use them to hack/disrupt, etc. steal bank information that is also on your phone. In a war these things would not be off limits. If I were in their shoes that's what I'd do.

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> The way I see it is this: If war were to break out between the US and China right now, what could they do with tiktok?

If you're directing your peace-time policy based on a hypothetical worst that can be done in war-time, you're going to have really insane peace-time policies. If war were to break out tomorrow, we might want to institute a draft, I guess we should start drafting people now?

Nobody would blink twice if TikTok were turned off during a war so I'm not seeing how that hypothetical is relevant to anything.

I'd expect phone lines and internet cables to be turned off during a war too, but I'd be absolutely insane to demand that we cut them now, because of some hypothetical harm that might come if a very particular kind of shooting war between two nuclear powers (that somehow does not end in nuclear war) broke out.

There's never been a more ripe time for a third axis to open up stretching and bankrupting America. In America, and the west, we think often in terms of binary peace/war. This is not the same philosophy shared by those who wish to replace America as the world power.

It's good to have the frameworks in place to execute these things when we need them and it's my opinion that we will need them in the next five years.

America will be replaced as a unipolar world power, it's a question of simple mathematics and economics and time. You'll get over it, same as the Brits did last century.

Instead of doubling down on paranoia of the foreign 33-dimensional chess player[1], if you want the US to strengthen itself, look at dealing with its internal enemies and problems, as opposed to clutching pearls at external ones. All of our injuries are self-inflicted.

[1] I'll note that the Department of State isn't stupid, it plays similar, long-planning games that you ascribe to foreign powers.

All states play the same game. Of course it's math, economics, but it's also geography and demographics.

All of our injuries are self-inflicted. However, each state will attempt to act in a way to maximize power. In this inevitable confrontation that will set the next rules-based era of power, I want my side to come out on top.

> If you're directing your peace-time policy based on a hypothetical worst that can be done in war-time

Not necessarily. Relations with most countries are either stable, trending positive, or they are not a threat. China is big enough to be a threat with relations that are trending in the wrong direction. I think it's merely trying to make smart policy prediction.

Why is this a smart policy decision, but restarting a draft and cutting the phone and internet lines[1] isn't? You've put a five year timeframe on this! That's a 'we need to act yesterday' in political terms!

[1] After all, I can only imagine what will be done in war-time with a telephone connection - and it's not going to be good!

We can walk and chew gum, I'm sure all of those are on the table as well.

> I'm sure all of those are on the table as well.

They aren't 'on the table' in any sense of the word. I'm not opening the papers every other week, and seeing yet another take on 'Restart the draft', and 'Cut the phone lines' proposals getting kicked around Congress.

They are kept as options in the event of hostilities, but unlike this ban (Which you use the same justifications to support), nobody's shouting that they need to be done yesterday.

Because the public won't accept cutting internet lines or bringing back the draft, but enough of the voting public might accept a Tik Tok ban.

Seems pretty obvious?

On the longer horizon it's probably more useful: Rotting minds, sowing discord, making users depressed, addicted and stupid, derailing culture and public discourse.

Not unlike the companies who are in that game already (but for different reasons).

> Rotting minds, sowing discord, making users depressed,

Nothing that Hollywood and the Western music industry haven't already done to our young minds here Eastern European back in the '80s.

It's not Reagan's StarWars madness that made the communist governments fall, but Star Wars the movie itself, and Michael Jackson, and Madonna, and countless other such Western propaganda (because that's what it was, even though I personally was in love with much of said Western propaganda as a kid).

So i guess the question is, if you could stop it from happening via laws, would you?

Care to elaborate/give further pointers on this?

They could data-mine for the kids of generals and colonels, see when daddy (or mommy) wasn't home until 2am, and infer that something big's happening. They could see on some nobody's kid that lives one town over from the base that traffic has been heavier or lighter at a certain date, just from watching the kid dance down the sidewalk.

Tiktok's like having a spy camera that floats around randomly, taking pictures. 99% of the time those pictures are worthless... in the wrong place, at the wrong time, etc. But once in awhile they have gold.

I still freak out about the Japanese pop star whose stalker managed to see the reflection in her high-res eye photo that had a street sign, found her home address from it. In a war situation, would China ever allow anyone in the US to see a photo of anything inside their country? Would they even allow those to be taken for viewing by other Chinese (for fear it'd somehow leak out to us)?

Yep. Everything that is physically possible becomes a possibility, limited only by their creativity.

> Gather mac addresses that are nearby. Maybe your neighbor is a general and your phone can snoop when they are around.

Would this be possible from an app within either iOS or Android?

Sorry, I removed the quote because I thought my reply was getting too long.

To answer- It must be possible, for it to be impossible there would have to be no more vulnerabilities for both platforms and we know that's not the case.

>Gather mac addresses that are nearby.

If an app has "coarse location" permissions, I believe it can already do this, or at least could do this a few years ago. Phones give quick, inaccurate location data based on what WiFi SSIDs are around. Google started their database of those SSIDs by wardriving and logging everything. There was a court case about it.

App can't collect MAC addresses with those permissions on Android though. It can only ask for the location.

I guess the other side of the coin is asking if they even need TikTok to do that. Yes, TikTok incentivizes self-surveillance but if we weren’t using TikTok, there would be another competitor to fill that niche.

Just because the data isn’t housed within your jurisdiction, doesn’t mean it isn’t accessible to you given enough effort.

There’s entire companies who have products solely used to process data off public social media and create dossiers on people. [0] No row level access required.

[0] https://cellebrite.com/en/cellebrite-smart-search

Not to say it doesn’t obviously make things easier, but the issue is more complex than what some politicians seem to think it is. “Ban TikTok = stop china doing bad things with foreign data”

And all of a sudden privacy and data protection are important.

Maybe the USA and China should sign a data protection agreement and call it Safe Harbor or so.

The US government wanting privacy but only from foreign nations is a perfectly logical and consistent policy from a government that thinks it has a right to it's citizen's data but also understands that privacy is valuable. It's no different from a US court having a right to sign a warrant for your data while China has no right to obtain a US citizen's data through a chinese equivalent of a warrant.

That's not how they reacted when the EU asked about data protection for its citizens' data on European servers of US companies.

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