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Comment by lukeschlather | Hacker News Reader

The thing is, TikTok is not accused of directly profiting off of this, they are accused of operating as part of the Chinese espionage apparatus. Assuming that this is the case, TikTok is going to be happy to continue paying fines as long as they break even worldwide. And the US is making no serious attempts to rein in this sort of behavior so they've got all that US profit to use.

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I've still yet to see any evidence that TikTok is anymore of a spying/espionage tool than your average app on any device. But I guess if people just keep repeating that It will make it true.

Never mind, I forgot, Western Intelligence orgs are trusted sources of truth and definitely wouldn't spy on me or lie to me. My Bad!

I don’t think anyone credible is taking the position that Meta and Google and Microsoft don’t spy for the US government but TikTok does spy for the Chinese government. This is simply a transparent double standard.

It's only a double standard if you consider the Chinese government to be functionallly identical to the US government, which I don't.

Famous last words. /s

They use spies, we use spies. Simultaneously, both sides try to stop the other.

Calling this "double standards" or hypocrisy isn't technically wrong but it's also very tedious. Of course countries have a different policy towards their own spies and foreign spies. Why should anybody ever expect otherwise?

I mean it in the “technically correct” usage, in reply to someone who seemed to expect a unified standard between China and the US. My point is to be clear that the US is also spying on US citizens, but the government and media only dislike it when other countries do it.

Personally I don’t like that the US government runs mass surveillance against US citizens.

Also mass surveillance and spies are related but have some differences. The US can run mass surveillance through US corporations without spies, though I’m sure they also have spies.

It's not a double standard. Meta is getting fines too, for similar offenses. Google actually seems to be compliant with the law.

Google was started on CIA MDDS grants.

One of the big pieces of Snowden's leaks is how the NSA has a backdoor into all of Google. Of course they're "compliant with the law". The law is to give the government a backdoor. This stuff is decided in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court and the cases and rulings are classified.

Indeed! Eric Schmidt was regularly meeting with pentagon officials. I think he had stepped down as CEO by the time of those reports, but he was obviously very friendly to US government interests. We really tend to assume that CEOs all want to protect their data from the government but if they don’t want to do that we really can’t know or defend against it while using those services.

We're talking about EU laws. The EU has inspectors, Google has EU datacenters which were built post-Snowden (and built due to the GDPR which was a response to PRISM.) I don't trust Google, but neither does the EU and if they're not fining Google I presume it's because they have more trust that Google is complying with their surveillance laws. Or possibly it's just because they are being strategic with when and how they engage. I do get a sense they have a list of concerns for each company and they are starting with fines for the largest concerns, and don't want to throw so much that the companies cannot respond.

In this case they are sending data to China. That's the evidence you were asking for. The average app isn't sending data to China. Thr faangs are collecting data and making money your government is using this data in police investigations but China is using it to undermine your government and way of life.

Pretty bad.

The average app also isn't made by a company that is headquartered in China.

> And the US is making no serious attempts to rein in this sort of behavior

You mean besides forced divestment under threat of an outright ban?

it’s legally banned and nothing has changed. so where is the serious attempt?

I'm curious. Do you want to elaborate on what would pass the bar for a "serious attempt" in your opinion?

Because I consider TikTok's situation in the US very seriously bad.

Trump just announced he is willing to give another extension.

https://www.axios.com/2025/05/04/trump-tiktok-ban-extension-...

So the thing about fines for non-compliance is that they only have one direction to go if you don't comply.

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