TikTok being investigated in the U.K. for handling of children’s data and safety

I'm going to violate hacker news's regulations for substantial comments by just saying "what the actual fuck"

Idunno TikTok seems fun. I grew up looking at muuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuch worse (only being 22 now), and I can tell you that the wacky and horrible things I've seen on the internet are 0% of my problems as an adult.

If anything, exposure to terrorist beheadings, creepy pedos, ironic (and less ironic) naziposting, and the rest have made me a more resilient person, with no physical risk. Results may vary, but I'm not sure I would sequester the worst of the internet from kids older than 12 (or the individual kid's mental equivalent), personally.

In the early days after FB acquired WhatsApp, they'd filled entire India with advertisements about WhatsApp.

Advertising apps is not as uncommon as you think. It works, and it creates brand recognition.

The conceit is thinking it's possible to sequester. Ok if you're a totalitarian monster over your children and have complete control of their inputs (which extend far beyond the at home networked devices) then theoretically maybe. That's probably got disastrous lack of socialization written all over it though since you can't allow even the potential of interaction with a stranger at say a grocery store who might say or do something to influence them off the straight and narrow. Religions are amusingly realistic about this even when they preach a particular straight and narrow ideal, since it's basically a given some wandering will happen, so there's a whole multi-feedback system to help admit the error and return.

It's just the eternal struggle of order and chaos and finding the right balance for a situation and your level of control. I might put up some white fences (nothing as blatant as a 'no trespassing' sign which might as well be a 'cool stuff here' sign) for the kids but I've no expectation they won't be jumped if their curiosity takes them or some influence encourages them. And there are always areas I'm going to be ignorant of where I might have put up a fence if I knew about it.

I wish people retained better memories of their own childhoods and could easily share them in arbitrary detail to see common threads. What does "12" mean for you? When I was 10 I had a laugh at "pikachu must die" on a school machine some classmate showed me, when I was 6-7 I learned about 1-800 and 1-900 numbers and had fun trying random ones or numbers spelling naughty things. (And prank or joke calls in general lasted some years as a social activity with a couple friends -- we kept calling Nintendo's hotline asking when Mario Party N would come out, with N being anywhere from 3 to 17. These things extended into 90s/early 00s internet chatroom amusement; my best memory was when a friend and I (couldn't have been older than 11) pretended to be a woman on a chat site focused on dating.) When I turned 9 an older cousin gave me a cd-r copy of The Slim Shady LP. When I was 13-14 all I wanted to do was play video games (alone or with the few friends I still had) or hang out on a forum centered around a particular game and chat with other fans of the game, some of whom were younger, some of whom were much older. There's probably even a copy of a picture of me as a shirt ninja from around that time on someone else's computer when that was a thing, whatever. Sure the increasing use of the net made it easier to learn of some weird stuff, encouraged sharing things that have a higher likelihood of sticking around forever (unlike prank calls or mooning something) but a lot of that's hardly different than a group of ~7-10 year olds going to look at a dead animal body. I don't have any idea what it would mean for there to exist "mental ages" when any of that would be certified "appropriate" or "low risk", it just was.

Is this issue just with certain regions (US in particular)? I've watched people using TikTok in Asia and have never seen anything questionable