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India bans TikTok, WeChat, and dozens of other Chinese apps

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Re: India bans TikTok, WeChat, and dozens of other Chinese apps

#441
post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quite the opposite. China (the country, not China the economy) is investing billions into developing tech companies to surveil their citizens. Those apps are all centrally controlled by the Chinese government. They can freely suppress discussions without you ever knowing. Hell, they don't even need to censor it but only need to make it less discoverable. As soon as those apps reach the western hemisphere (or just any…

I know something similar: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In-Q-Tel

In-Q-Tel is well known here. Do we know enough about Chinese investment? Are Huawei and ZTE private companies, private with state's investment, co-owned by the state, or owned by the states to further Chinese's causes with a private facade? There should be more discussion about them here.

Re: India bans TikTok, WeChat, and dozens of other Chinese apps

#442

India is absolutely right in banning TikTok as it is a significant national securities threat. As long as the platforms recommendation and ranking algos are a black box, there is no guarantee that China isn’t conducting misinformation campaigns via the platform. At the very least, the government should audit the algos and make sure China can’t arbitrarily alter ranking results.

What I fear is whether this data could be incorporated into the state facial recognition systems already well deployed throughout China. You're potentially helping the CCP in training a tool to aid in the violent suppression of ethnic minorities.

Re: India bans TikTok, WeChat, and dozens of other Chinese apps

#443
post #427
post #413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> > If there is an API to get information on you, your contacts, or your device... well, they're using it. For what it's worth I've reversed the Instagram, Facebook, Reddit, and Twitter apps. They don't collect anywhere near the same amount of data that TikTok does, and they sure as hell aren't outright trying to hide exactly whats being sent like TikTok is. I find this unconvincing and reddit comments are not trustw…

> I find this unconvincing and reddit comments are not trustworthy at all. You should probably read the original comment on reddit, not just my summary of it. I found it to be extremely detailed and technically convincing, even though it's still hard to determine the level of its trustworthiness.

The fact that his computer conveniently crashed and cannot backup his claims is pretty convincing?

Re: India bans TikTok, WeChat, and dozens of other Chinese apps

#444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Coca cola sent death squads into South America. That's an argument against Coca Cola doing business in South America, not against banning an advertising platform in South America.

No, it's actually pointing out the statement I quoted is fundamentally wrong. Private corporations can and have done the same things you accused state actors of doing

>Private corporations can and have done the same things you accused state actors of doing

I mean yeah, since those corporations were acting like a quasi-nation state. If you're willing to go back far enough, you could also point to the East India company as evidence of corporate power, although in those cases they pretty much were the state in the areas that they operated. I'm not sure whether you could say the same about corporations today.

Re: India bans TikTok, WeChat, and dozens of other Chinese apps

#445

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good point. But YouTube is not controlled by an authoritarian fascist-like government which has a world view in direct opposition to what you could refer handwaveingly as "western" and is currently pushing to become the dominant power in the world. If you furthermore consider how bad the "western world" (mainly Britten and the East India Company) had treated it in the past, some aspects of the Chinese culture and the…

YouTube isn't controlled by an authoritarian fascist-like government - it is run by the fascist-lite corporate oligarchy which runs the US. The US may not be as bad as china in some ways but that doesn't absolve them from responsibility.

I'm from a western country and I know for a fact that homicide rate in US is 6 times worse than China

(6/100,000 in US VS Maybe US has some problems on its own...

Re: India bans TikTok, WeChat, and dozens of other Chinese apps

#446

I'm seeing lots of comments about national security-style concerns, and framing this in terms of the recent India-China skirmishes. That all makes sense. Where I think a lot of folks are missing the point is that this is also a tremendous boost to local Indian entrepreneurship. One of the really clever aspects of China's Great Firewall is that it keeps out international competition, which would crush local startups.…

- Banning TikTok would move traffic to Instagram, not a “local Indian entrepreneur”

- the Indian startup ecosystem is dependent on external capital, a lot of which comes from China. This protectionist attitude will lead to a overall negative sentiment about investing in Indian tech.

Re: India bans TikTok, WeChat, and dozens of other Chinese apps

#447

I'm seeing lots of comments about national security-style concerns, and framing this in terms of the recent India-China skirmishes. That all makes sense. Where I think a lot of folks are missing the point is that this is also a tremendous boost to local Indian entrepreneurship. One of the really clever aspects of China's Great Firewall is that it keeps out international competition, which would crush local startups.…

> Where I think a lot of folks are missing the point is that this is also a tremendous boost to local Indian entrepreneurship.

Last I looked, a good portion of the funding for Indian startups is from China.

Re: India bans TikTok, WeChat, and dozens of other Chinese apps

#448
post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand that argument. It sounds like you're saying that the way to get freer trade is for all parties to restrict trade, since "free trade has to work both ways."

I'm saying free trade ought to be reciprocal. If one side is gaming the system by blocking foreign competitors while competing in those foreign markets, then that side should in turn be blocked until they're willing to change their tune. China can be allowed to compete in other markets when they allow others to compete in their market.

Then the outcome is that a country can claim to support free trade while deliberately not supporting free trade, since "it's the other countries' fault."

Re: India bans TikTok, WeChat, and dozens of other Chinese apps

#449
post #360

A reddit user, who claims to have reverse-engineered the TikTok app[1], concluded: > TikTok is a data collection service that is thinly-veiled as a social network. If there is an API to get information on you, your contacts, or your device... well, they're using it. > For what it's worth I've reversed the Instagram, Facebook, Reddit, and Twitter apps. They don't collect anywhere near the same amount of data that TikT…

I didn't realize Zoom was mostly developed in China! That seems bad. > “Our product development team is largely based in China, where personnel costs are less expensive than in many other jurisdictions,” Zoom wrote in a regulatory filing. https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/26/zoom-key-profit-driver-ahead...

Why?

Re: India bans TikTok, WeChat, and dozens of other Chinese apps

#450

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The concern is the coordination between Chinese foreign affairs/security services and the commercial sector. For US-based firms, that’s simply not the case. Yes, YouTube needs to make sure Nike is happy. But Nike didn’t just kill two dozen Indian soldiers. Certainly there’s privacy related concerns with US companies - as with Chinese companies. But nobody had accused the DoD of manipulating YouTube search rankings. I…

I don't know, I still remember how, in a poll before the invasion of Iraq, a majority of Americans though that Saddam Hussein was connected to the 11S attacks.

What are you trying to say here? That the DoD somehow was able to pressure the US media into supporting the Iraq war? Funny how they were able to do that, but wasn't able to get the "MSM" to get off Trump's back during his term.
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