TikTok collected US user views on issues like abortion and gun control | Hacker News Reader

TikTok collected US user views on issues like abortion and gun control

apnews.com

28 pointscwwc19 comments

Just like every other social media site, but to the DOJ this one is bad because it's directly Chinese and not merely heavily invested in by the Chinese.

I'd love to hear more about Facebook and Twitter collecting data about people's specific politics and opinions and sharing them directly with the Chinese!

I have no data but I speculate that since US companies sell surveillance for money, foreign governments just set up shell companies and buy everything they can. We constantly hear about controversies of these companies selling huge swaths of our data. It would be absurd for foreign governments to ignore this!

Basically our downfall is our unending need for profit which will see us selling ourselves down the river.

EDIT: Fine here is some data. "Each Facebook User Is Monitored by Thousands of Companies" You're telling me not any one of those companies is likely to be a foreign intelligence agency's shell company?

https://www.consumerreports.org/electronics/privacy/each-fac...

I'll go a step further and remove the word "speculate." It's such an obvious thing to do that I'd just expect it to happen.

Yeah certainly.

No, they just share that data with the US government and anyone else who can pay.

As a Canadian, I fail to see why I should be more worried about "the Chinese" than the Americans.

Speaking of foreign investment I believe the Saudis own a large portion of Twitter (or its debt) which is no less comforting.

You state this like it's not a problem.

Chinese companies are totally beholden to their government.

Well... American governments are totally beholden to their companies ;)

And their citizens, because that's the point of democracy ;)

There's really no excuse for this level of naivete anymore.

When you read shit this blatent, it all snaps into place so clearly. You can just twist anything to mean anything for each political cycle.

Where are the headlines: Meta collected Department of justice romantic and pornography habits. Google collected exact location down to the minute of all FBI agent locations for their entire careers. Microsoft has Recall database of every single government employee, able to download with 1 bit flip in a mandatory update.

> ... concerns that Chinese authorities could force ByteDance to hand over U.S. user data or sway public opinion ... the potential for what it called “covert content manipulation” by the Chinese government ... China could for example further its existing malign influence operations

So many hypotheticals! The only concrete "manipulation" is the "heating", which boils down to TikTok inorganically showing you a video they want you to watch (e.g. I get spoonfed videos from the TikTok CEO), which isn't great but falls far short of the claims DoJ makes around manipulation.

Sending sensitive (or any) user data back to Beijing is awful, but the fact that they have to pile speculation into every one of these stories shows that there's really not a lot there.

https://networkcontagion.us/wp-content/uploads/A-Tik-Tok-ing...

> TikTok and its Beijing-based parent company ByteDance used an internal web-suite system called Lark to enable TikTok employees to speak directly with ByteDance engineers in China.

What do you hope I infer by reading this snippet?

I interpret this as a benign / dual-purpose comms channel between a subsidiary (who runs an app) and the parent company (who likely made a platform/shared components that the subsidiary uses).

Edit: I re-read the article. Your snippet isn’t useful to understand the suit, but the 2 paragraphs are very relevant.

Well the company constantly cries that there is no connection to Beijing

Directly! Soooo they have a Chinese version of slack? I wonder about their reactj game.

I’m pretty sure every single social network that ever existed collects such statistics and much more

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