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TikTok Owner Had 'Backdoor' for CCP Access to US Data, Lawsuit Alleges

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Re: TikTok Owner Had 'Backdoor' for CCP Access to US Data, Lawsuit Alleges

#51

Post by mistermann »

bostonsre wrote: post #39
anaganisk wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But it's the US, it's the bastion of democracy. Govt here doesn't put backdoors, doesn't sponsor crypto companies, doesn't target individuals and ship them to overseas camps to avoid torture laws. Wage fake wars. Doesn't use it's intelligence agencies to interfere with other countries. Oh!

For all our faults, we're not the ccp. Bashing America doesn't undo the horrors committed by the ccp. We're talking about an authoritarian regime that is currently committing genocide. Should we really just roll over and give them unfettered access to our markets while they are incredibly hostile to our companies and where we only get access by giving away ip?

> We're talking about an authoritarian regime that is currently committing genocide.

Which country has a larger body count in the last few decades?

Re: TikTok Owner Had 'Backdoor' for CCP Access to US Data, Lawsuit Alleges

#52

Post by 1101010010 »

Social media access to user data (whether foreign or domestic) is bad, but it is a distraction from the real evil: behavioral management at scale. When you can target specific demographics and control what they see 8-10 hours of the day, you can change what they think, say, do, and most importantly, how they vote. People are literally being programmed (euphemistically, "conditioned") by the specific triggers and stimuli with almost surgical precision, and completely unbeknownst to them. This is uncomfortable to recognize and discuss, so the conversation is sadly reduced to "China/AI is bad/evil" to further foment hate and division.

Re: TikTok Owner Had 'Backdoor' for CCP Access to US Data, Lawsuit Alleges

#53

Post by [deleted] »

bostonsre wrote: post #39
anaganisk wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But it's the US, it's the bastion of democracy. Govt here doesn't put backdoors, doesn't sponsor crypto companies, doesn't target individuals and ship them to overseas camps to avoid torture laws. Wage fake wars. Doesn't use it's intelligence agencies to interfere with other countries. Oh!

For all our faults, we're not the ccp. Bashing America doesn't undo the horrors committed by the ccp. We're talking about an authoritarian regime that is currently committing genocide. Should we really just roll over and give them unfettered access to our markets while they are incredibly hostile to our companies and where we only get access by giving away ip?

[deleted]

Re: TikTok Owner Had 'Backdoor' for CCP Access to US Data, Lawsuit Alleges

#54

Post by xtian »

partiallypro wrote: post #46
Zigurd wrote: post #28

Who uses TikTok for sensitive information? Government access to TikTok user data is of limited additional value compared to whatever TikTok sells to large advertisers and analytics partners.

When you couple this with the fact that China had secret police stations in the US trying to capture Chinese dissidents, you could use such data to track those people to kidnap them, regardless of if the information was sensitive on the app or not.

> China had secret police stations in the US trying to capture Chinese dissidents

What's the evidence for this?

Re: TikTok Owner Had 'Backdoor' for CCP Access to US Data, Lawsuit Alleges

#55

Post by Kadin »

stale2002 wrote: post #32
Lucasoato wrote: post #7

I would be extremely surprised if a state-actor like China couldn’t access most US company data at will. If you can invest several billions and have thousands of people working to create a breach, no company is safe, not even AWS or Microsoft. In this case, that’s even way easier, the company is Chinese, the CCP can have this access lawfully, is this something unexpected? I’m much more concerned by the laziness of mo…

> the CCP can have this access lawfully, is this something unexpected Oh it is completely expected. People have been warning about TikTok for years, and yet those people get called crazy. The US should have taken action against them years ago. We can still fix the issue now though, by creating a targeted law against them.

> We can still fix the issue now though, by creating a targeted law against them.

That's not a great idea, since it will invite a lawsuit on the (potentially valid) grounds that it's a de facto bill of attainder. Which the US has traditionally taken a dim view on for very good reasons.

Better would be if it prompted a more general law about foreign ownership of corporations which have access to large amounts of information on US persons, regardless of how it is obtained or who they are.

As a US citizen, I don't want any government that I don't have input into -- even the relatively indirect and less-than-satisfying input of casting one vote among millions -- compiling a dossier on me, and I expect my government to do what it can to make that at least somewhat difficult. (And yes, I am aware there is no way to stop it completely. If the Chinese government wants to task its intelligence service to compile a dossier on me, there's nothing much that can be done about it. But let's at least try to raise the bar on the difficulty and effort involved. The more difficult and expensive, the more illegal, and the more internationally frowned-upon the task becomes, the harder it is to do at scale to millions or billions of people at once.)

Re: TikTok Owner Had 'Backdoor' for CCP Access to US Data, Lawsuit Alleges

#56

Post by 1101010010 »

jsdeveloper wrote: post #47

Will you install a secuirty camera in your daughters room, specifically when the the camera comes from country with most leaked cam footage!(where various reports argue that State is involved in such leaks)

Are there even IP cameras manufactured domestically to even choose? I have some inside my home (pointed at exterior doors; not inside bedrooms which seems borderline creepy and/or sadistic), but they're not connected to public networks and thus I don't consider them a risk.

Re: TikTok Owner Had 'Backdoor' for CCP Access to US Data, Lawsuit Alleges

#57

Post by crmd »

aardvarkr wrote: post #35
grugagag wrote: post #19

Im more curious what tiktok data amouts to and how it could be used by CCP. I’ve heard of bans of Tiktok use by politicians and army bases and such. Without sensitive location data to some specific users but solely the young sharing memes, I wounder how CCP could use that data… Not a Tiktok user myself, if anyone could illuminate me on this it’s be great. For example does tiktok have direct messages from users to use…

Imagine that a state actor would seek to flip a foreign National to their cause. You can do so with either a carrot or a stick or both. The carrot can be fancy dinners, free vacations, or access to what they want. The carrot can be threat of exposure of deep secrets, etc. Now imagine that there is an app that has the AMAZING ability to figure out EXACTLY what you like and don’t like. You haven’t used TikTok yourself…

And the 66% of US teens on TikTok are 66% of the next generation of US senators, presidents, cabinet members, military chiefs, etc. Imagine the competitive advantage of having a deep psychological profile for each of these personas of your geopolitical adversary.

Re: TikTok Owner Had 'Backdoor' for CCP Access to US Data, Lawsuit Alleges

#58

Post by Kadin »

samstave wrote: post #24
Lucasoato wrote: post #7

I would be extremely surprised if a state-actor like China couldn’t access most US company data at will. If you can invest several billions and have thousands of people working to create a breach, no company is safe, not even AWS or Microsoft. In this case, that’s even way easier, the company is Chinese, the CCP can have this access lawfully, is this something unexpected? I’m much more concerned by the laziness of mo…

Imagine the worms put on phones of employees of various tech companies - specifically datacenter employees in various commerical and government agencies - recall the STRAVA scandal which revealed secret military bases... The TikTok angle is like stuxnet for that type of corporate/gov espionage.... Its ludicris how poorly the USG has handled this. But then again, you have so many people in congress with dual citizensh…

The US government is and has always been reactive, not proactive.

About the most forward-thinking the US gets is writing the occasional contingency plan. Everything else is done in haste once a serious problem becomes plainly obvious to everyone, and people (deep-pocketed ones especially) start screaming to their elected representatives to fucking do something about it. Then and only then do the gears start to turn.

Re: TikTok Owner Had 'Backdoor' for CCP Access to US Data, Lawsuit Alleges

#59

Post by jimkleiber »

grugagag wrote: post #19

Im more curious what tiktok data amouts to and how it could be used by CCP. I’ve heard of bans of Tiktok use by politicians and army bases and such. Without sensitive location data to some specific users but solely the young sharing memes, I wounder how CCP could use that data… Not a Tiktok user myself, if anyone could illuminate me on this it’s be great. For example does tiktok have direct messages from users to use…

I think it's about knowing what people are interested in and having an algorithm that can control what people see and to try to nudge them to be more/less interested in certain things.

Eugene Wei's article [0] helped me see how TikTok uses more of an interest graph, whereas many of the other platforms use more social graphs. By this, I think he means that TikTok cares much more about knowing what people are interested in than knowing to whom they're connected.

> But what if there was a way to build an interest graph for you without you having to follow anyone? What if you could skip the long and painstaking intermediate step of assembling a social graph and just jump directly to the interest graph? And what if that could be done really quickly and cheaply at scale, across millions of users? And what if the algorithm that pulled this off could also adjust to your evolving tastes in near real-time, without you having to actively tune it?

I think the fear is that the algorithm can be tweaked to nudge people towards things that the platform, or in this case, the CCP, want them to want.

For example, if I see you watching videos about the book 1984, and I want you to be less interested in things that promote fear of a totalitarian government, and I also know that you feel really afraid of your home getting robbed, I can have the algorithm show you more videos about homes getting robbed so that you boost your feelings of fear of neighbors and therefore you may even want to have a stronger government to protect you from your neighbors.

[0]: https://www.eugenewei.com/blog/2020/8/3/tiktok-and-the-sorti...

Re: TikTok Owner Had 'Backdoor' for CCP Access to US Data, Lawsuit Alleges

#60

Post by netsharc »

pixl97 wrote: post #36
grugagag wrote: post #19

Im more curious what tiktok data amouts to and how it could be used by CCP. I’ve heard of bans of Tiktok use by politicians and army bases and such. Without sensitive location data to some specific users but solely the young sharing memes, I wounder how CCP could use that data… Not a Tiktok user myself, if anyone could illuminate me on this it’s be great. For example does tiktok have direct messages from users to use…

The memes you share are a representative of you... Lets say you're sharing a bunch of memes about being a private in the army. What is the likelihood you are actually a private in the army? Can tiktok use that to propagandize you in any way? For example, by sending you a lot of what I would consider far right propaganda that the US military is weak because it believes in 'wokeness', could this cause you to be less ef…

Also it's a place with many subjects for psychological experiments. What propaganda is best to fool someone like you? Or someone like person A, person B? And if "Program P" works best to convert people to whatever, hey hey, you still have the captive audience, just apply that program

Probably Cambridge Analytica has the best information on how such programming works. Or, Google/YouTube with their "What goes viral" algorithms.

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