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Comment by Zigurd | Hacker News Reader

US-made missiles are blowing stuff up inside Russia because Russia invaded a treaty partner who gave up their nukes in exchange for a security alliance with the US. And yet Russian apps are in our app stores. Nobody needs to imagine.

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> yet Russian apps are in our app stores

Major social media apps? Chinese apps are still in our app stores, just not TikTok (as of Sunday).

It took me less than 15 seconds to find that VK, which is a major social media app in Russia, is in the Google Play store.

Compared to Tiktok with ~100 million American users, VK is essentially irrelevant and not even worth wasting court time about.

The only Russian app I'm aware of is Telegram. What other Russian apps might people be unwittingly running?

No servers in Russia. Given Pavel's prior history it seems unlikely that he would cooperate with Russian government. Plenty of other criticism of telegram is warranted but it's probably not a tool of the Russian government.

Edit: related https://hate.tg/

I would argue that Telegram is a much, much larger security threat to the average individual American than Tiktok. Except they comply with government search warrants and don't enable E2E encryption by default so they are useful to the American National Security Establishment and get to stay.

>a treaty partner who gave up their nukes in exchange for a security alliance with the US

If it wasn't ratified by the senate then we didn't enter into a treaty, I really don't understand why this is so hard for people to understand.

And yet Russian apps are in our app stores.

There are no Russian apps that collect extensive data on hundreds of millions of Americans. (And if I'm wrong about that, the US should absolutely force divestiture of those apps or ban them).

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