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The FBI alleges TikTok poses national security concerns

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Re: The FBI alleges TikTok poses national security concerns

#231

Post by spacemadness »

pjc50 wrote: post #187
solardev wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

China isn't going to listen to your rules. Ban whatever you want, Chinese companies don't have to comply, and don't have to tell you when they're not complying... Unless you audit every foreign app's source code and sign its binaries, those laws are meaningless. And if you do that you're really just swapping foreign advertising for domestic wiretapping. shrug Lose-lose.

> Unless you audit every app's source code and sign its binaries Isn't that called "an app store"? Good luck getting non-signed binaries on an iPhone. My point is that if TikTok is somehow able to escape its sandbox and perform surveillance, that's a fault in the sandbox, and there should be a general process for handling this otherwise you just have to deal with the next week's app "TokTik".

The actual media is not stored in the app. The only thing you’re countering is tracking user behavior outside the app sandbox.

Re: The FBI alleges TikTok poses national security concerns

#232

Post by tenpies »

aeze wrote: post #228

I have a couple questions: 1) How is TikTok worse than other social media apps? Both in terms of privacy and "the algorithm". 2) What another country's government does with my data is far less important to me than what my government is doing with my data. Am I wrong for thinking that?

Exactly. The scariest part to me is that an unelected, partisan, US intelligence agency literally moderates the content on social media through their own purpose-made moderation portals[1], than anything China is doing.

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[1] https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/23129270-fb-portal

Re: The FBI alleges TikTok poses national security concerns

#233

Post by uniqueuid »

mountainb wrote: post #220
uniqueuid wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That argument makes no sense, because we do not want to mirror other countries. Instead, there are substantial arguments about freedom of speech and accountability. Even though they are messy, they are what we need to apply here because they are a legally binding framework that we built over decades. By the way, I found Levitski and Ziblatt's book "How Democracies Die" [1] a pretty good treatment of these issues of b…

Not really... you are out in left field here. The fundamental rule of international trade regulation is reciprocity within classes of goods and services. It flies in the face of basic WTO principles to allow one partner to ban a whole host of services without reciprocal penalties. In practice, this sort of reciprocity gets broken all the time, but it doesn't make sense to say "we don't want to mirror other countries"…

Sorry but you're ignoring media regulation here, which is a completely domestic playbook and for the most part explicitly carved out of trade agreements.

For protection of domestic civic society, culture and public opinion, trade agreements are irrelevant. That's how the french got to keep their quota for french-language music in broadcasting, for example.

Re: The FBI alleges TikTok poses national security concerns

#234

Post by shkkmo »

solardev wrote: post #139
jasonlotito wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> China isn't going to listen to your rules And then they are banned. Not because they are China or TikTok, but because they break specific rules we hold everyone to.

You won't be able to tell when they're not following the rules.

We regulate foreign companies that do business in the US in other markets, what makes this one special?

If we actually care about surveillance by App, we have to make rules that can prevent that including requiring levels of access and transparency to enforce those rules.

Of course, there is little appetite for making those rules... But that doesn't mean that such rules are impossible.

Re: The FBI alleges TikTok poses national security concerns

#236

Post by krolden »

vorpalhex wrote: post #172
pbhjpbhj wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You need to specify who "our" is there. USA's upper echelons, presumably? The risks are existential to ...? Again presumably you mean those who thrive under USA-centric capitalism? You think the CCP are planning a forced takeover of Western democracy?

I think the genocide of a people concerns us all.

You mean like the native Americans? Pretty sure that's still the largest scale, most drawn out genocide in the entire history of our species.

Re: The FBI alleges TikTok poses national security concerns

#237

Post by teh64 »

solardev wrote: post #139
jasonlotito wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> China isn't going to listen to your rules And then they are banned. Not because they are China or TikTok, but because they break specific rules we hold everyone to.

You won't be able to tell when they're not following the rules.

Well the FBI seems able to tell, or else why are they alleging it poses a national security concern?

Re: The FBI alleges TikTok poses national security concerns

#238

Post by sharperguy »

dahfizz wrote: post #29
weego wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US is a surveillance pseudo-democracy. The problem here being this time they can't insert themselves into the surveillance pipeline. They're not better or worse (unless you're fine with your own Govt surveilling you but not another state), just not the status quo.

This is absurd, frankly. "The US government collects taxes on US citizens, why not let China collect taxes on US citizens? Its the same." "The US government throws US citizens in jail, why not let Chine throw US citizens in jail? Its the same." Yeah, it would be great if the Federal government turned down their surveillance. That doesn't make it okay for China to run psy-ops against us.

Isn't the logic reversed in this case? Spying on US citizens is fine as long as you aren't the US government. Hence 5 eyes and so on.

Re: The FBI alleges TikTok poses national security concerns

#239

Post by allisdust »

Workaccount2 wrote: post #182

God the whataboutism that pops up everytime tiktok is discussed is suffocating. Some people are just so desperately trying to divert attention away from it and others are trying to hijack the movement to make it into some kind of constitutional level privacy reform. Tiktok can die, everything will be fine, and then we can focus on our own issues here.

I just don't understand how people can't see the threat. All you have to do is keep showing bad news videos about inflation, crime rate, illegal immigration to turn population against the government subtly mixed with normal videos. They can also pacify people by subtly mixing good news videos. And anyone who thinks people aren't so easily gamed don't understand people. This is like cnn and fox news on steroids. One continuous drip of emotions fed by a foreign adversary.

Re: The FBI alleges TikTok poses national security concerns

#240

Post by shkkmo »

computerfriend wrote: post #175
CyanBird wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But lets start by simply banning the most criminal organizations first NSA and cghq have tapped onto the global fiber optic systems on a global scale and see spying on every single person on the planet with dragnet systems alongside as you say biometrics, and that includes US citizen data. Where does that fall into?

Lots of things can be bad at the same time. What NSA and GCHQ do is worth discussing, for sure. But it has nothing to do with this.

The NSA and GCHQ can literally and legally do the exact same things. In what possible what does it have "nothing to do with this"? If you are making a list of the worst actors in terms of global surveillance, they have to be at the top...

The only reasons not to include them are purely nationalistic.

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