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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

#131
post #104

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 stim…

how does this differ from newspapers, books and the spoken word?

They don't directly tickle the reward center of the brain like social media does, cf. e.g. "Brain anatomy alterations associated with Social Networking Site (SNS) addiction" [0].

This is by design, btw, cf. e.g. "Digital Madness: How Social Media Is Driving Our Mental Health Crisis--and How to Restore Our Sanity " [1]; not itself a primary source but it seems to be well received.

My point being, it's like cigarettes with a message. The message being divisive in all likelihood, in order to override rationality with emotion and increase engagement. [2]

[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5362930/

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Digital-Madness-Driving-Crisis-Restor...

[2] How social media shapes polarization: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1cHDXsRpzZ84svIv5L-7tfnOvJ-p...

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

#133
Half of the comments in this thread sound like they were written by CCP propaganda chatbots. A dead giveaway is the failure to address the topic at hand and immediately deflect to "but the USA does XYZ too!" No one is disputing such a claim, but that's also not what we're talking about here.

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

#134
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 infor…

> a more general law about foreign ownership of corporations Sure make it targeted against large scale companies owned by china, or "owned by countries on this specific government list, which happens to only include china and a few of our other enemies, like Russia". Same thing, and we are more than able to get away with it, even though it is basically just targeted at TikTok.

I dont know why it has to be complicated.

Just block all apps from countries that already block all yours.

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

#135
post #15

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…

I would have been unsurprised if the US government hadn't already forced them to host with Oracle a year or two ago supposedly to prevent exactly this from happening. Is Larry Ellison a Chinese spy? He would probably have to either be complicit or criminally negligent to allow this to happen given he was given the contract precisely for this reason. I'm also reminded of that fake story from the WSJ about American chi…

> I'm also reminded of that fake story from the WSJ about American chips being hacked that turned out to be entirely fabricated.

Bloomberg, not WSJ.

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

#136
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think they are bringing awareness to an additional issue rather than dismissing this one

They might be trying, but the end result will be a petty destruction of progress. "In order to make any change you must fix my much larger and harder to solve issue" will ensure that nothing ever gets done. In the face of just how serious this risk is, this sort of stance is self destructive and nearly malicious.

[dead]

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

#137

> Yu is a former engineering lead for ByteDance in the US who worked at the company between 2017 and 2018. This seems like an outrage bait lawsuit. The facts in the case are five years out of date, ByteDance has been through the wringer in the ensuing years and there’s no evidence that this backdoor exists in the current app.

There's a ton of evidence that the TikTok app is used for tracking and to assume the CCP doesnt have access to a huge trove of personal data from its primary geo-strategic competitor is ridiculouly naive.

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

#138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 intereste…

can control what people see and to try to nudge them to be more/less interested in certain things. You mean like mainstream media has done for decades?

Is mainstream media designing a user-specific content feed that is adjusted to your specific preferences? Your argument sounds similar to the one used against arguments of an encroaching police state: sure it has been done before but not at this scale or with this level of sophistication.

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

#139
post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Newspapers aren't nearly as effective at keeping attention indefinitely/at every opportunity, nor at controlling what you read next.

Fox news seems to have done a pretty good job of this in the US

Fox News isn’t a newspaper

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

#140

Half of the comments in this thread sound like they were written by CCP propaganda chatbots. A dead giveaway is the failure to address the topic at hand and immediately deflect to "but the USA does XYZ too!" No one is disputing such a claim, but that's also not what we're talking about here.

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