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

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

#451

Post by stjohnswarts »

dragonwriter wrote: post #121
dvt wrote: post #109

Looks like TikTok is slowly imploding. I know there's plenty of political implications and a lot of discussion here is on that (which is interesting in its own right), but I wonder if there's opportunity here for a potential competitor.

Isn't this a space (short social video sharing) that has been filled by a near infinite succession of short-lived dominant offerings and that's pretty much always ready for a new, slightly different flavor of season?

I think it might be a smart move by facebook to buy something similar and put it under their umbrella of companies while TikTok fades. Clearly it can be popular with the crowd that they're losing in droves.

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

#452

Post by stjohnswarts »

taurath wrote: post #281
dvt wrote: post #109

Looks like TikTok is slowly imploding. I know there's plenty of political implications and a lot of discussion here is on that (which is interesting in its own right), but I wonder if there's opportunity here for a potential competitor.

Tiktok isn't imploding, its broadly a bunch of old men (senators, CEOs) afraid of china. The userbase of tiktok is tweens and teens. The best thing those old men could do is legislate system level privacy protections onto IOS and Android so an app can never get the level of info they're worried about.

China has shown has had a track record of mining data and corporate espionage, so it's not just a "bunch of old men". It's a serious concern. There is no reason for them to be prying into citizens' information like they've been doing.

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

#453

Post by andrewxdiamond »

userbinator wrote: post #444
GekkePrutser wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I manage phones for a big corp. Just want to clarify what's possible. Google highly limits what you can do in Work Profile mode, you can't control much outside the work profile. We can't see the app list on the personal side in work profile mode, BUT we can specify some that are a no-go. I'll show up as a compliance violation. But we can't view the list anymore like we could do with the pre-work profile Android Devic…

and forbidding of sideloading and rooting. Good luck with that, if users have root they already have full control (and can thus tell whatever app exactly what it is expecting.)

But roots can be defected and labeled as a compliance violation. They could then revoke your accsess to emails or other network services, or issue you a warning or more

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

#454

Post by crazygringo »

che_shirecat wrote: post #382
_abox wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someone goes through all the trouble of typing that explicit email and it's a mistake? Sounds more like 'pulled after huge feedback'. Though personally I'd agree with this decision. TikTok seems to be a particularly bad apple: https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/fxgi06/not_new_news...

I keep seeing that Reddit thread linked (even the NYT is citing it now?) but still cannot for the life of me figure out what substantially TikTok does that is a concern compared to other popular apps? The guy has like 10 paragraphs of stories but no actual evidence? What is TikTok doing that somehow is flying under the app store guidelines of both Google and Apple but still a "national security concern"? Why is the o…

Honestly I can't figure it out either.

We found out other apps too (like LinkedIn) constantly check the clipboard, and one HN commenter here said it was due to a text editing library, nothing intentional.

Literally the only fact is that it's a Chinese company.

And it's not like there's even much it seems like they could do, with how sandboxed phone apps are. I'm not saying iOS or Android are perfectly secure, but it't totally different from installing something on your desktop with root permissions.

Either it's just generic hate for China that's bizarrely gone viral, or else it's a story intentionally being pushed by the US government for god-only-knows what political reason, like leverage in trade negotiations or something.

But it's completely weird, and nobody should be taking it at face value.

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

#456

Post by Barrin92 »

BookmarkSaver wrote: post #302
taurath wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tiktok isn't imploding, its broadly a bunch of old men (senators, CEOs) afraid of china. The userbase of tiktok is tweens and teens. The best thing those old men could do is legislate system level privacy protections onto IOS and Android so an app can never get the level of info they're worried about.

Ninja, the biggest (English-language) video game streamer in the world, just posted yesterday that he's deleting TikTok for these concerns. I'm not going to get into whether or not this actually makes sense, but he is a massive celebrity among young millennials/gen-z.

After going to mixer I'm not sure we ought to take Ninja as the authoritative voice on social media platforms

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

#457

Post by michaelmrose »

jml7c5 wrote: post #297
michaelmrose wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

China is building concentration camps that they use for slave labor, ripping organs out of the still living bodies of political prisonersto give to its rich class, creating an increasingly dystopian super surveillance state wherein you could be subtly punished for associating with the wrong people, has no means of redress or removal of the dictator for life, and treats all enterprises as organs of the state that are…

All that may be true, yet it still does not mean rationality should be thrown out the window when evaluating claims about TikTok.

Can you not flag people for criticism of China?

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

#459

Post by zvorygin »

scarface74 wrote: post #425
DaiPlusPlus wrote: post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For one, the clipboard snooping problem. If you’re using a password-manager (like we’re supposed to!) and use it to copy passwords (say, your Amazon employee internal credentials...) while you have TikTok open, the TikTok app would see it and could upload it somewhere. ...and we only know about this issue now because iOS 14 adds clipboard snooping notifications - and that was only a month ago! Think about the stuff t…

For one, the clipboard snooping problem. If you’re using a password-manager (like we’re supposed to!) and use it to copy passwords (say, your Amazon employee internal credentials...) while you have TikTok open, the TikTok app would see it and could upload it somewhere. Your password should never be in your clipboard at least with iOS. If you’re using either the native password manager or a third party password manage…

It works maybe 90% of the time for me. It seems like a lot of websites don't configure their forms correctly and neither apple password manager nor 1pass detect the field as a password field.

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

#460

Post by efreak »

scarface74 wrote: post #433
radlad wrote: post #430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Android does this too. On neither platform does it work 100% of the time, especially in browsers. That's why almost all clipboard managers also have a "copy to clipboard" feature from the autofill view.

I’ve never had it not work in the browser.

Several years ago I tried to register for a website that refused to accept a change of more than one character at a time, using onkeyup and other events to ensure you couldn't fill it in any way other than one letter at a time (fortunately this was only on the asking setup page; it works fine with logging in). After every change in value, it compared the current length to the previous length, and rejected it if the difference was more than one.
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