Amazon says email banning TikTok from employee phones was ‘sent in error’

Assuming good intentions from TikTok is pretty ignorant. ByteDance's other app, DouYin, is unambiguously a CCP controlled tool that censors dissent and their CEO ingratiatingly and apologetically dedicated the company to "Strengthening the work of Party construction, carrying out education among our entire staff on the “four consciousnesses,” socialist core values, guidance of public opinion" in a public statement [1].

Suggesting that TikTok is leaving MAU on the table to keep users' data safe is laughable when ByteDance's other Party-controlled app, DouYin, is remaining in Hong Kong with a captive audience (as helpfully confirmed by Global Times [2], a well-known mouthpiece of the Party). To even suggest that it's a sign of good intentions would ignore extremely important current events and ByteDance's self-proclaimed devotion to the Party. As we speak, the Party is aggressively assimilating Hong Kong into the mainland by banning public expressions of dissent, controlling educational curriculum, and yes, good old censorship. Forcing HK residents to use only Party-controlled tools that the rest of the mainland uses, like DouYin made by ByteDance, only serves to further the "work of Party construction".

TikTok is political because it is wholly owned by a self-proclaimed political entity: ByteDance. It's disingenuous to suggest there is no reason to assume malintent when ByteDance has a history of censorship and propaganda in its flagship app: DouYin. Your glib dismissal of "China bad" has no substance behind it, while China's ample human rights and totalitarian abuses speak for themselves. Putting the actions of independent private corporations in a free-speech democracy on the same level as the actions of a publicly-proclaimed ally of an authoritarian human rights abuser is plain nonsense. Context matters.

[1] https://chinamediaproject.org/2018/04/11/tech-shame-in-the-n...

[2] https://twitter.com/globaltimesnews/status/12803650546557911...

Ok, I guess we'll change the title to that since the submitted title ("The TikTok app is no longer permitted on mobile devices that access Amazon email") has become misleading.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

You can always show up next day with a dumbphone or without phone at all if you are feeling risk-taking.

I personally just bought the cheapest $60-80 Android phone from a random Amazon seller.

In work profile mode this is absolutely correct.

In other modes (COBO, COPE) it's not but those are much more difficult to enrol, as you have to do it from the setup wizard on a new phone or after a factory reset. So you don't happen to get into this mode by accident. They're only used for company owned phones (this is what the CO part stands for).

I think it might have been canned due to revenue implications more than employee revolt. Google doesn't want to end up in a situation where dragonfly doesn't earn much money, causes constant headache from the Chinese government, and gives ammunition to both left and right wing politicians to use it as an argument against Google on everything.

I think enough money can buy silence from a lot of people, plus it's clear google already has the tech, as they show a banner on every thing relating to covid (search results, YouTube) and do a quite impressive job at that. So I guess they can just tweak it for dragonfly, or even get their Chinese employees to do the tweak, since they already hire in China.

Once the growth slows, companies look for alternative revenue sources, like Apple is doing with services. The problem is that google has shown itself to be wildly incompetent at non engineering parts of their businesses other than search. e.g, Google cloud might be the only cloud to raise prices for anything so far(Google Kubernetes Engine price update)

It will be interesting to see what they choose. I don't think dragonfly can make them much money anyways, since Baidu too isn't making a lot of money in China.(When compared to how much Google makes in the US). I guess mostly due to closed mini app ecosystem on wechat, and probably a smaller internet eco system outside wechat.