Comment by krapp | Hacker News Reader

Comment by krapp | Hacker News Reader

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I don't see why we should trust them any less than our own government and its relationship with every domestic large social media platform.

I couldn't care less if China gets my TikTok browsing history or whatever, they can't touch me. I do care that my own government seems to be rapidly trying to censor and weaponize social media while telling me to stay scared of a nebulous foreign enemy they've been trotting out in the name of authoritarianism since the 1950s. All of our data is already being sent to the NSA and they probably already have root on every electronic device you use, and they still kill people over metadata. Meanwhile someone's Google search/maps history can land them behind bars in some states, just for reading the wrong books or searching for the wrong kinds of medicine, because it turns out inalienable rights are very much alienable.

So yeah. Tell me why I should be more concerned about what China might do, as opposed to what my own government is already doing?

One perhaps far fetched implication is that too many Americans could become unemployable by the US Govt. the chief concern of clearance interviews is eliminating risk that information about you can be used to gain leverage over you.

It’s easy to dream up scenarios from something as simple as the way that China treats GPS: in addition to the regular block-google-maps-from-showing-military-bases they also use an entirely different system whose purpose is only to occlude real locations (https://medium.com/@anastasia.bizyayeva/every-map-of-china-i...)

TikTok harvests the very thing china occludes.

I don't understand what the implied threat is supposed to be here. That TikTok harvests... American GPS data? That the CCP might use TikTok to find the real world locations of American military bases? How would that even work? Why would China need TikTok to accomplish this? They have spy satellites. If they want to send the ICBMs over they already know where Washington DC is.

This is comic book logic, this isn't rational.

Again, there must be value to China with regard to GPS data if they have spent so much effort in obscuring it for so long. Therefore it would make sense that there is an interest in harvesting it.

It shouldn’t be required of me to dream up scenarios that you may or may not agree with. You have no view into their government or our government either.

But to play the game, as you’ve already pointed out: anyone can determine military base locations without the thousands of social media accounts in TikTok that would dot those bases. So what could that give them? Correlation. I’m sure that there are plenty of different avenues they have to get intel on who works where, and as a government contractor we received plenty of training to avoid publishing it anywhere (e.g on LinkedIn or Facebook). Would a government, that harvests data for future use, limit itself to a few chosen avenues?

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