But then they have to pay, it’s not all free to them. And data brokers sell large data, whereas with TikTok they could just say “Give me everything that exists about @AmbiguousPoops” and know their whole life because they agreed to it in the terms of service.
“Device Information: We collect certain information about the device you use to access the Platform, such as your IP address, user agent, mobile carrier, time zone settings, identifiers for advertising purposes, model of your device, the device system, network type, device IDs, your screen resolution and operating system, app and file names and types, keystroke patterns or rhythms, battery state, audio settings and connected audio devices. Where you log-in from multiple devices, we will be able to use your profile information to identify your activity across devices. We may also associate you with information collected from devices other than those you use to log-in to the Platform.”
TikTok also uploads gigabytes of data from your phone. But yeah, it’s just political.
It quite literally is political. It’s not legal for them because China but Meta, X, Snap, etc can do the same thing (plus more, Cambridge Analytica, for example) and be fine.
That is the definition of political, and anyone that told you it was to protect your privacy was lying to you, just like this article explains.
Also, do you think China has to buy the data from these companies? And even if they do buy it, what makes you think they do it all above board? Do you think they won’t just bribe and steal their way to your data?
The problem was never TikTok alone. The problem is social media corps altogether, and the fact that the government doesn’t actually give a shit about our privacy (probably because of the lobbying that these companies do, also explained in the article). If the US government cared, we’d have laws preventing much of this data from being collected in the first place.
Did you read the article, which mostly talks about these companies as a whole and not just TikTok?
Facebook spent years in court just to get hit with the largest fine in the history of fines, 5,000,000,000.00 USD. They also payed another 725,000,000.00 in lawsuits.
All for selling to a British market research company that they had no idea was a Russian shell.
Idk how much you think they made off the deal, but probably nowhere close to as much as they lost.
It is political, because Meta does the exact same thing you have quoted, and they aren’t getting banned.
We need stronger data protection laws, period.
As we illustrated several times in this thread, for Americans an American Company collecting your data is a lower risk than an adversarial dictatorship’s military operation collecting your data for free (or even for profit as a cherry on top).
It clearly isn’t lower risk considering the state of polarized politics in America and other western powers after the advent of Cambridge Analytica (which Facebook barely faced any consequences for btw).
Tiktok is a boogeyman, and Meta, Twitter, Google, whatever other social FAANG-adjacent platform you use, wants you to focus on them so that they can keep milking you for your data, while simultaneously feeding you ads and radicalizing political content directly targeted to you.
So I reiterate, we need better data protection and regulation laws for ALL social media.
