No shit. I don’t understand why people thought it would keep their data safe, even from China. China can just get your data from one of the thousands of legal data brokers in the US. The ban is fully political.
Or from your ISP. The Washington Post ran an article about that today, but links to them get blocked by some sort of filter on lemmy.world
Was it the news community or here? Pretty much all of my posts get filtered on news for some reason.
All of them. I can post other sites just fine; it’s only washingtonpost.com and wapo.st links that are blocked.
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).
I thought the concern was manipulating public perception.
Correct. This was the big reason. Data is only important for micro targeting your propaganda.
There can be more than one concern at once, propaganda is certainly a problem but there is a greater one on what kind of AIs china is training.
But of course lemmy only things AI is dangerous because some fucking furry deviantartist didn’t get paid for their cock-and-ball-torture scribbles were one of billions of images scraped.
When the reality is that services like tiktok, youtube, and any media aggregator can use AI to make deep inferences about people’s lives and build up a near complete profile of your personality, income, political leanings, mental illnesses, family relations, and physical location JUST from your watch history.
Most of you are sneering right now because you really have no clue how bad it is going to get.
15 years ago, Walgreens used a primitive AI to determine women who were pregnant from their purchasing patterns, and would send out coupon kits for baby things and a congratulations letter. It was so accurate it knew often before the women themselves.
So anyway, some 16 year old kid gets a prenatal package based on AI, outing their pregnancy to her parents. Things didn’t go well for anyone and Walgreens dropped the program.
THIS WAS FROM 15 YEAR OLD AI TECHNOLOGY!
Imagine what modern models can glean from you. Even after reading this most of you will be clueless and strangely arrogant in your ignorant positions about how none if this is really a big deal
It’s from 15 years ago because it’s super easy to track shopping for something like a pregnancy.
There’s zero “AI” needed, even if such a thing existed.
I don’t think you understand at all, not even a bit.
It wasn’t that the women were shopping for pregnancy items, its that they were shopping for other normal items just in the pattern that pregnant women tend to shop for early in the pregnancy.
Like I said, a ton of women getting the notice WERE NOT AWARE THEY WERE EVEN PREGNANT YET!
But you deliberately misunderstand to shift the focus away from the ACTUAL problem.
Also scams. They know you, your name, your contacts, dob, where you work, where you spend leisure time, your face, your house layout, and from your message details probably your darkest secrets and ssn.
Chinese online and over the phone scams have been surging massively in the past few years.
In that sense, TikTok is really their competition. They’re upset not because it steals your data, they’re upset because they’re not the ones getting your data.
Banning TikTok never had anything to do with “protecting your data”.
You are correct. TikTok uses Oracle servers in the USA with a backup server in Singapore. The FCC made sure data does not got to China.
You are incorrect. Id be the dumbest motherfucker to believe that China isn’t slurping that data up in tens of different ways. TikTok has the backing and approval of the CCP, so that to me is suspicion enough. Don’t try to obfuscate shit behind shell companies and undercover CCP operatives in advantageously-aligned countries.
But will it finally convince people that vertical videos are horrible and short form content obliterates your attention span?
I know the answer is no, but an old man can dream.
