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FCC: TikTok is unacceptable security risk and should be removed from app stores

blog.malwarebytes.com

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Re: FCC: TikTok is unacceptable security risk and should be removed from app stores

#71

Post by blackoil »

daenz wrote: post #40
jsiaajdsdaa wrote: post #2

However putting this data in the hands of FAANG is no problem at all, and totally can't end up in any nefarious hands.

Help me understand your perspective: are you American or no? I have a hard time understanding why an American wouldn't see FAANG as the lesser of two evils here.

I am not Op neither an American.

Practically, I'll be more concerned about my government having the data vs a third world. I rarely get involved in Chinese politics/threads and have little interaction with them except everything is manufactured there. I may visit China/Taiwan/Hong Kong as a tourist sometime in future.

For my own country I am actively interested in and sometime involved in political discussions/forums. I have stronger opinion in favour/against current government and will have lot more influence on my local.

So the govt./org. trying to suppress/persecute me will be with high probability my own vs China or Russia.

Re: FCC: TikTok is unacceptable security risk and should be removed from app stores

#72

Post by croes »

jmfayard wrote: post #21

Understandable but funny that US Americans start to care about data regulation only once the Chinese government is involved. Asking the stores to remove one app won't do it though, time to adopt EU-like regulations.

And at the same time they try to get data of european citizens through scams like Privacy Shield and Safe Harbor.

Re: FCC: TikTok is unacceptable security risk and should be removed from app stores

#74

Post by janekm »

gambiting wrote: post #61
snehk wrote: post #10

I don't have a horse in this race at all, but the annoying part is that the same rules don't get applied across the board. Everything they're accusing TikTok of - from data harvesting to the government having access to said data - is true for western companies as well and that should be the problem. Not the fact that the data is now in the hands of the Chinese but that the data is being collected at all provided to t…

>>Everything they're accusing TikTok of - from data harvesting to the government having access to said data - is true for western companies as well and that should be the problem The thing is, yes Facebook and Google's data collection is horrendous, but TikTok it literally on another level. Quite a good explanation here: https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/fxgi06/comment/fmuk...

Personally I feel this is as much a failing of of mobile OSs as anything else. As long as we have an environment where ad networks think it's desirable to collect this kind of information it's going to get collected, whether by TikTok or ad networks. Apple at least attempt to limit what data is accessible by apps, Google is less incentivized to do so.

It's not much help to "ban TikTok" while the ad networks run wild. If we're going to be worried about China I doubt it'd be too much trouble for them to place a few engineers into ad networks and exfiltrate the data from there.

Re: FCC: TikTok is unacceptable security risk and should be removed from app stores

#75

Post by keyme »

Genuine LOL.

Uncle Sam asking the 2 great censors of the west to get rid of the most popular app in their stores, so that the east will cease competing with said Uncle on who gets to brainwash their citizens. Gold.

Whichever way this goes, one of these parties loses big, which is a good thing for us humans.

Re: FCC: TikTok is unacceptable security risk and should be removed from app stores

#76

Post by rvz »

So it is no different or in fact even worse than Facebook, as expected and as found in this security analysis. [0]

From [0]:

> The above code taken from the TikTok APK, shows the collection of cellphone data, specifically the IMEI of the cell phone. The IMEI number of a phone is literally created to identify the phone.

> We at Penetrum believe that everyone should have the right to know what data is being harvested by companies and would like to give our readers a clearer understanding of what happens when you download the mobile application TikTok. From our understanding and our analysis it seems that TikTok does an excessive amount of tracking on it’s users, and that the data collected is partially if not fully stored on Chinese servers with the ISP Alibaba.

So essentially, a 900GB data breach at Alibaba suggests that TikTok user tracking data which ties hundreds of millions of users has been exposed out in the open to be used by criminals, and scammers. This is nothing new or surprising as I have already questioned a TikTok fanatic about the excessive tracking in this app but decided to deflect with more whataboutsims. [1]

On top of that denial from their own users, all this tracking was made possible due to TikTok's spyware and their mass collection programme, with the additional fact that TikTok staff in China DID have access to US data after lying and denying it. [2]

So something that is even worse than Facebook is hardly 'The best thing to have happened to the Internet.' [3] Especially when TikTok was found to do even more invasive tracking than Facebook with sending biometrics, IMEI numbers and voice prints, and is required to give up and funnel all this data and traffic to the China and the CCP meaning it is another honeypot surveillance tool luring in the sheep to willingly give up all their data and they cannot be trusted.

TikTok should get either a massive fine in the billions just like Facebook did or it should be totally banned until it is verified to rid of its invasive data collection just like what India did recently. Failing to comply, it should get both.

[0] https://penetrum.com/tiktok/Penetrum_TikTok_Security_Analysi...

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28137000

[2] https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/emilybakerwhite/tiktok-...

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28135484

[4] https://www.nrk.no/osloogviken/xl/tiktok-doesn_t-show-the-wa...

Re: FCC: TikTok is unacceptable security risk and should be removed from app stores

#77

Post by int0x20 »

germandiago wrote: post #62
moomoo11 wrote: post #42

Of course not. Every government is going to look out for themselves. Following your reasoning, look at China. They have their own playbook for operating within China, and it is quite restrictive. They make it harder for foreign entities to do business within China. From a geopolitical viewpoint this makes complete sense. You don't want your rival to have a backdoor into influencing/manipulating/discovering how people…

Which takes me at why we have to be rivals (we people in countries), because government are rivals and monopolize trading and resources for themselves? It is very stupid that we passively accept those rules and let them drag us like that into things of this nature. I am really (I am european) pissed off by the fact that someone decided we needed a war with Ukraine when we do not have anything for/against Russia or Uk…

No post body was provided.

Re: FCC: TikTok is unacceptable security risk and should be removed from app stores

#78

Post by unityByFreedom »

Not the FCC, this is one FCC commissioner's statement. He's not the chair, nor is he part of the majority party, so you can probably read this as a political statement.

Republicans had a chance to ban TikTok during the last administration. They did not do it.

Re: FCC: TikTok is unacceptable security risk and should be removed from app stores

#79

Post by clarionbell »

numair wrote: post #44

This is dangerous political rhetoric which sets the stage for all sorts of tit-for-tat regulation that seeks to optimize for the protection of local companies (in this case, Meta/Facebook/Instagram, which have the world's largest face database and have consistently violated laws + lobbied against them). Imagine what would happen if a Chinese regulator decided that Tesla's telematics stack was a massive national secur…

They already do that. China is notoriously strict about information control, hence minimal presence of western social media and tech companies on their market.

Like when Google refused to comply with censorship. They've got clipped almost immediately[0] and haven't recovered to this day. And no, there was no appeal, no political process or way to get around it.

If anything, America is lagging behind rest of the world in regulation, and is letting foreign companies get away with things that would get them banned in rest of the world. Another example would be ongoing EU crusade against media piracy.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_China#2010%E2%80%932016...

Re: FCC: TikTok is unacceptable security risk and should be removed from app stores

#80

Post by paulv »

liversage wrote: post #34
paulv wrote: post #23

Can someone explain the capturing "keystroke patterns" part? Are they saying the app is somehow capturing keystrokes while other apps are running?

In the article the TikTok spokesperson explains this: “It’s not logging what you’re typing. It’s an anti-fraud measure that checks the rhythm of the way people are typing to ensure it’s not a bot or some other malicious activity.”

That...seems completely reasonable to me.
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