Where are the people now who were saying in previous threads things like "tick tock is safe, there is no way they abuse their users, invade privacy, or log devices on the users local wifi"?
ByteDance confirmed it used TikTok to monitor journalists’ physical location
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Re: ByteDance confirmed it used TikTok to monitor journalists’ physical location
#32Where are the people now who were saying in previous threads things like "tick tock is safe, there is no way they abuse their users, invade privacy, or log devices on the users local wifi"?
They're busy shifting the goal posts
Re: ByteDance confirmed it used TikTok to monitor journalists’ physical location
#33Yeah. Ban TikTok, have an American company make a clone. Why is this insanity allowed ? China doesn’t allow Western social networks. Why do we allow our strategic enemy to have software on our phones? End this madness. Stop the sale of Chinese tech in the West, period. It’s all backdoored. (if you think they are interested in “co-living” go talk to the Kremlin on how that went. China is bidding its time but their int…
I mean there are already two american tiktok clones: insta reels and YouTube shorts
Re: ByteDance confirmed it used TikTok to monitor journalists’ physical location
#34I feel like this is talking out of both sides of the mouth. If the issue is that corporations aren't following data privacy laws, build the privacy into the tool at the software/ecosystem level (e.g make signup without true name / phone number / IMEI a legal requirement, signup without location sharing a legal requirement) then it'll be impossible to track journalists for both Chinese and American companies.
If they won't follow one set of laws, how will another set of laws reliably solve the problem? They can just disobey those laws, too. Anonymous login credentials can be de-anonymized in all kinds of ways.
Re: ByteDance confirmed it used TikTok to monitor journalists’ physical location
#35[flagged]
Let's not fool ourselves. US companies have been doing the same thing, and they will continue to.
Re: ByteDance confirmed it used TikTok to monitor journalists’ physical location
#36I feel like this is talking out of both sides of the mouth. If the issue is that corporations aren't following data privacy laws, build the privacy into the tool at the software/ecosystem level (e.g make signup without true name / phone number / IMEI a legal requirement, signup without location sharing a legal requirement) then it'll be impossible to track journalists for both Chinese and American companies.
That's often antithetical to the point of using social media. The data that most people share on social media are either inherently identifying, or easy to deanonymize.
Re: ByteDance confirmed it used TikTok to monitor journalists’ physical location
#37Yeah. Ban TikTok, have an American company make a clone. Why is this insanity allowed ? China doesn’t allow Western social networks. Why do we allow our strategic enemy to have software on our phones? End this madness. Stop the sale of Chinese tech in the West, period. It’s all backdoored. (if you think they are interested in “co-living” go talk to the Kremlin on how that went. China is bidding its time but their int…
I mean there are already two american tiktok clones: insta reels and YouTube shorts
Great. Then kill it, then kill any company with Chinese origin that won’t open source it’s hardware and software to the US Government.
Re: ByteDance confirmed it used TikTok to monitor journalists’ physical location
#38Were the journalists foolish enough to install the app (not victim blaming but come on) or does the TikTok app scan for other wifi signatures in the vicinity and that’s how they correlated the locations?
I was wondering this myself. Tiktok surely needs location data permitted to track, no? I'm sure there are some heuristics it can use, perhaps pinging servers or image matching pictures but surely this could all be solved by putting TikTok in a container with specifically limited permissions.
Re: ByteDance confirmed it used TikTok to monitor journalists’ physical location
#39Yeah. Ban TikTok, have an American company make a clone. Why is this insanity allowed ? China doesn’t allow Western social networks. Why do we allow our strategic enemy to have software on our phones? End this madness. Stop the sale of Chinese tech in the West, period. It’s all backdoored. (if you think they are interested in “co-living” go talk to the Kremlin on how that went. China is bidding its time but their int…
Agreed...I don't understand why this isn't an obvious thing all of congress would get behind. Change the law if necessary.
Because the statutory (not to mention constitutional) implications are staggering: what about our government's structure do you think gives it the authority to outright ban social media companies? Do you want it to have that power, or do you just want to government to casuistically ban the things you think should be banned?
Note: this is entirely independent from whether TikTok is bad, which I'm more confident than not it is. But contorting our already contorted national security laws around it is not a tenable solution.
Re: ByteDance confirmed it used TikTok to monitor journalists’ physical location
#40Yeah. Ban TikTok, have an American company make a clone. Why is this insanity allowed ? China doesn’t allow Western social networks. Why do we allow our strategic enemy to have software on our phones? End this madness. Stop the sale of Chinese tech in the West, period. It’s all backdoored. (if you think they are interested in “co-living” go talk to the Kremlin on how that went. China is bidding its time but their int…
When US bans something to protect itself, that’s OK, but when another country does it, it’s a suppression of free speech and freedoms and whatnot. Doesn’t this sound a bit off ?
If China decided to ban a US company for using its app to locate Chinese citizens, I'd say that is totally fair.