I see this as a national security threat that it is. The potential for abuse from the CCP on the minds of US users exists as does the tracking the app could do and every data point that is generated is stored and potentially useful for blackmail or otherwise on members of Congress or others.
The US and its allies got rid of Chinese telecom hardware from their networks for the very same reasons now it’s time to do the same with TikTok.
Would you let an enemy supply you with the very same kit you would use to fight them? No. Would you let that same adversary install an app on your most used device to watch and track you? Hah no.
A spin to a US company is not enough. It needs to cease operating in the US because there’s no surety that even with a spin data and sharing won’t get back to ByteDance China.
Parallel to this we need a federal national data privacy law that protects us but also cracks down on the huge industry of data brokers selling Americans’ data to anyone that has cash.
To be honest, the use of the word "enemy" is far too strong, it sounds like we are at war with them while they somehow supply half of our goods at prices we've grown accustomed to. "Adversary" is a weaker word that is more apt (which you use later), where the US is not on the friendliest terms with China but isn't in an outright war with them.
Words matter, at the very least to avoid starting nationalistic flamewars here on HN.
The US is in a cold war with China as long as China is open to the idea of the use of military force on its neighbors, including Taiwan. A cold war is the only alternative to surrendering the free Taiwanese people to communist rule, and a hot war.
US is also open to the idea to use military force and not only on their neighbours but also on countries far away.
US is in cold war with China because China might soon be economicaly getting upper hand.
I don't get your first paragraph. Of course the US is open to the idea of using military force against, well, pretty much anyone. I don't see how that's relevant, other than as some form of pointing out hypocrisy? Or are you actually saying that "because the US is prepared to do its own military action, it categorically doesn't enter cold wars with other countries based on which military actions the other country could do"? I don't understand.
Hypocrisy mostly. You can’t tell others to stop doing what you keep doing.
The US considers all of LATAM as his own back yard. Why can’t China consider all of Asia as its own back yard?
This is what upsets people, the sheer size of hypocrisy.
So two wrongs make a right?
If your military is powerful enough, yes.
The point is that the US has set a precedence on military power around the world. The US told the world that using military power for your own country's benefit is ok to do. So why can't China?
No the GP, but their point is that the US can't complain about how China treats the rest of Asia when it looks so similar to how the US has treated Latin America.
That doesn't mean either side was right, or that one justifies the other. Only that the pot should into call the kettle black.
I was more interested in their answer, I don't think you have much more insight into what they meant than I do
The only way that China gets an upper hand economically is by selling products to the US and the Western world.
If they enter into a conflict where they are cordoned off, their export oriented economy would crash immediately.
A war between China and USA is impossible to win for either sides, due to both military size, budgets, interdependence, and nuclear weapons arsenal. And this is why it's a cold war.
I am not a geopolitician, but this looks like a little too simplistic perspective, doesn’t it? I mean China diversified its wallet, including by helping to create infrastructures in Africa where there is still a largely growing young population (in contrast to the general trend in the occidental countries, or even what the long standing single child policy led to in China).
If western demand goes away, you think African demand can compensate for that? Domestic would be more realistic, and even there China has nowhere near enough domestic consumption to keep the system running, let alone sustain historical growth rates.
Not really. China has so much manufacturing power that if they limited exports and focused on manufacturing for inland it would have major economic shifts for both china and the west. That's the problem with the world putting all of their manufacturing eggs in one basket
Without the West, China would collapse economically. I mean literally collapse, ever heard of tofu-dreg?
Exactly. It’s Cold War 2.0 this time we trade with them …
The two blocks traded in Cold War 1.0 - there was even direct trade between the US and the Soviet Union - although no denying that trade was a lot smaller than US-China trade is today
No I meant what I wrote. But I meant it about the CCP not the average Chinese person.
China wants to replace the US and the west as the global power. This will lead to upheaval and likely a war. When that finally comes to pass it behooves the west and the US to protect itself from anything that could undermine its own protection. In order to win a war you need hearts and minds. Not a populace that is being programmed to think despotic neo-communist-capitalist-when-it-suits-them rulers in China are somehow paper tigers.
Let’s compromise here: they are adversaries now but I think they are preparing to become enemies in every sense of the word. If they invade Taiwan, shed blood in the conflict over the breached rusting ship in the Phillipines, continue supporting Putin in his illegal attempt to annex Ukraine then yes they will eventually become enemies.
The idea that your population can be "programmed" in the first place is the antithesis of american ideology. The whole point of freedom is you're free to think and say whatever you want and society has to deal with that. Society either rejects the ideas or accepts them but either choice still represents an active choice, an exercise of freedom. Saying that people are being "programmed" reveals a rather shocking lack of respect for the intellectual freedom and autonomy of their fellow man.
I’m pretty sure that I have been programmed. By my parents, by my friends, my education, my environment.
Change any of those things in a significant way and I’m sure I would be a different person now. I love the idea that I am an autonomous agent of my own that exists self evidently outside of those bounds, I just don’t think it’s true.
Then humanity today would approximately the same as humanity of its first era. I don't really understand the tendency to deny one's own agency. We were all once teenagers. And one of the first things we do as our brain starts to develop is rebel against the authority of a time. And, for some, that spirit of independence and rebellion never ends.
People are dumb, and like to believe the first thing they see, so "programming" a population is as easy as showing everyone something so often that it is all they see, tge human mind is incredibly malleable, and many big tech companies employ teams of psychologists to make best use of that, given china is a adversary or enemy or whatever you wanna call it, giving them a pipeline by which they can have direct access to tens of millions of American minds is a little silly to say the least, you do not win a war by winning battles, you win a war by breaking the enemies will to fight "Hence to fight and conquer in all your battles is not supreme excellence; supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy’s resistance without fighting" Sun Tzu said that, and I'd say he knows a little more about fighting then you do pal because he invented it
Were this true then any of the countless authoritarian states which ended up in complete control of all media, news, and even the ability to enter or leave the country - would have had a nation full of fully misinformed and obedient people. Instead it's invariably the exact opposite. The USSR is one of the best examples. They not only controlled all media, all news, and even who was allowed to leave the country. Yet trust completely collapsed as the state of nation completely collapsed.
The fact that you might be programmed to hate/dislike/fear China despite, I'm guessing having never been to China, is proof that America also programs you, just in another way.
Hint: Mostly through media.
Even in the times of the Great Empires, there were always other great powers - perhaps not peers, but powerful enough to be truly independent. This era most of us grew up in where the US was this unchallenged global hegemonic power was a major outlier in history, owing exclusively to rare circumstance. That being that after the USSR suddenly collapsed, there were not only politicians in the US that wanted to be rulers of the world, but also no other powers that could even remotely compare on a technological or economic level except Japan. But Japan itself also began a rapid economic collapse just about the time that the USSR collapsed.
And now not only were these circumstances rare, but they were also inherently liminal. Technological and economic edges fade rapidly, especially in light of major population level differences. I see no reason to think China imagines they could or even wants to be anything like the US was 30 years ago. The world is returning to its more natural multipolar state, as it's more or less always been.
If my reading of history is correct while there might have been more than one power or more or less equal powers they all vied to be the one most powerful one. I think that’s the natural order of things and the question is do you want the west lead by the US or one of her allies to be that leader or China or her allies.
How exactly do you think China is going to be able to "lead" the US? This is what I mean. The era of one hegemonic power being able to be the sole judge and authority on every single action around the globe was an extremely brief and freak incident in history, and that time is over. It required an extreme economic/tech imbalance that has rarely existed throughout history, no longer exists, and will probably not exist again for the foreseeable future. So whoever calls themselves the 'most powerful' is ultimately irrelevant - it would just be a mostly meaningless title.
I would much rather live in a world with a balance of power than one with a concentration of one.
It’s by no means a given that a more even distribution of power leads to war or China ‘replacing the US’ as the only one. But an attitude where everyone thinks so, ironically, might.
The US has an official list of enemies and that includes China. I believe the list was introduced under Trump and is determined by the sitting president:
https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-15/subtitle-A/part-7/subp...
Your link names them "adversaries". Its an official list of adversaries.
Yes. They make it sound much nicer.
It is about connotation. I play Go against you. You are my opponent or, if it is a tournament, I could also call you my adversary(connotation is a bit stronger, less matter of fact like opponent, more around competition now). After the game, we sit down and have tea and laugh.
Now let's explore the connotation of enemy. Playing Go against you calling you my enemy is outright wrong. However, if you were my enemy, I would not drink tea and have a laugh with you afterwards. I wouldn't even be playing a game of Go against you, but rather trying to do other not so nice things to you.
Such is the nature of connotation. Being erudite helps here ;) .
Others are calling this out but they're not able to state why:
They're listed as adversaries and not enemies because aiding an enemy country suddenly unlocks a litany of other crimes.
Enemy is very specifically defined: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/50/2204
Adversary is very specifically defined: https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-15/subtitle-A/part-7/subp...
The word enemy is not used on that page at all. It says adversaries
I agree!
Back in Arcade Machines time, when a player is busy playing a fighting game, Street Fighter, I guess, and another person inserts a coin to play against him, the game pauses and a message that reads "Here's come a new challenger" pops up, so I think challenger would serve the purpose somehow!
I don't want to compare life to video games and I think comparing a genocidal dictatorship that ruthlessly suppresses its citizens and occupies foreign lands (Tibet for example) a challenger is a bit of a downplay
Not that this is relevant to anything, but if it were: no one was doing this.
With them picking Russia in their invasion of Ukraine, the term enemy is rather applicable at this point.
This whole thing is baffling to me. What are you talking about? What enemy? I would rather someone in China has my information than my own government. China has no power over me; my own government does. I don’t care if china knows whether I like cheesecake better than blueberry pie. They’re interested in monitoring their own citizens, im sure- for the same reasons our own government agencies and corporate behemoths monitor ours. But I don’t see what use china could have for data about Americans.
Look: the Cold War is over. And communism is a red herring. The world has changed. For some reason Americas elites view TikTok as a threat, probably because they don’t have the kind of total access to their servers that they’re accustomed to with American firms. But that has little to do with regular Americans. And there’s no argument other than decades old red baiting tropes they can think of to try to get us to care.
i don't think "cold war is over", in a way it is, but the amount of propaganda tik toks blows my mind and the most important thing is - it's so one sided, that i fully support this bill/law or what it is, EU should do something too.
Same. The wall fell as did Russian communism but it just swapped antagonists. Now it’s the Chinese government.
Scaring people is a great way to get them to stop asking awkward questions.
Reading your comment, it's pretty obvious that we should do something about propaganda here in the EU. About US propaganda I mean.
Commerce is not zero sum. When done right both parties gain something. But China’s ambitions directly counter those of the United States. They’re propping up Russia against Ukraine for example. Use of heavy state subsidies and lack of environmental controls mean they can flood the world with cheap solar destroying the incentives for local production. When all the world is dependent on China for something they then hold outside impact.
To not see the coming conflict be it cold or otherwise or not see the CCP for what it is is just ludicrous to me.
They want to — and as they should — become to dominant world power and reshape things as they see fit.
They will take Taiwan by force and it is zero sum: either China and its allies become the world’s leading economy and lead on things or the US and it’s allies remain in “power” and the west continues. This is the threat.
Now I’ve nothing against the people of China. It’s the government that I don’t trust.
On economic grounds this basically describes what every developing country would try to do as an offensive and hostile action.
But on topic I still think the ban is still old men barking at cloud. Somehow embarrassing really.
That's a funny argument, given that the same piece of legislation with the TikTok "ban" also includes a(nother) $60.8 billion package for Ukraine [1].
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/23/us/politics/senate-aid-pa...
Ok but even if I accept all that, what does it have to do with TikTok specifically?
I feel like all these arguments just come down to “China bad, therefore anything that annoys China is good” which is silly and juvenile reasoning
The cold war of authoritarian VS democracy never ended. And China has the ability to turn anyone with mainland access into a asset by holding family hostage and models itself after the British empire. The Indians did have no quarrel with the king of India, until they did. Westcentrism and neutrality are no strategy now that the fascists march again.
Word salad. There isn’t really any coherent thought there for me to respond to.
Worldviewsalad, there is no coherent concept for me to reply to. Not even values.
Separating the world into “good guys” and “bad guys” does not constitute “values”. That is the thinking of a child.
Cold war is over we are in the era of empires starting actual wars to annex other countries that is def not a cold war.
You are attempting to link Russia invading Ukraine with TikTok? I’d love to see the chain of reasoning here.
So how are you so sure that TikTok doesn't sell the data to the US anyway?
This way the same thing happens and china did also make some money. I don't see the argument that china having your data is somehow better than your government.
Because china doesn’t have direct power over me, and so there’s not much they can do with the data that affects me.
The problem is with the bill being legal.
For example, US citizens are free to listen to chinese radio stations, or chinese TV channels, read chinese books. Why the government needs to restrict what US citizens have access to in this specific case?
The bill is unconstitutional. See the recent Montana ruling.
https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/aclu-and-eff-applaud-rul...
No it isn’t. One, national security is a federal matter not a state matter. Two, Montana outright banned the app whereas this bill forces divestiture. If TikTok doesn’t want to divest, too bad, bye bye.
Extremely difficult to make a national security case for restricting speech or access to content. A court will also want to see a specific cause.
Much of the Patriot Act is probably unconstitutional but the government had 9/11 as a national security justification. No similar justification exists regarding TikTok.
Let’s see. Lawyers are split on this. The national security context is the strongest case. And as an American and a voter I support this 100%. In exceptional cases I support Congress banning companies especially if they happen to originate from hostile nations, us hedge fund investors be damned.
As an American, why don't you prefer allowing consumers to leverage their free will and just make clear what the risks of using TikTok are?
The government getting into the business of banning companies, and more specifically banning online services, is very, very dangerous in my opinion. This one move effectively creates the need for our own great firewall, starting with a list of only one service but with the executive power to grow that list as more "national security threats" are named.
You make it sound like that is a clever gotcha that a judge will rubber-stamp.
When has the US forced a private corporation to sell up via Congressional decree in peacetime?
Seems to me that Congress is betting that Bytedance will capitulate instead of taking the case to the Supreme Court.
Exactly this. The strongest case that the government can make in keeping this bill from being overturned in the courts is the national security one.
Your thoughts leave out one thing:
Radio and newspapers(including internet articles here in general) are a one way street. With Tiktok, you not only get access to the users device via the app, but it is also a two way street. Tiktok gets to choose what it feeds you.
And what you describe is also true in a lot of countries(I can choose my medium). However, with newspapers, radio and television what you feed the population is readily visible to anyone. I can turn on the telly to see what is being streamed. This is not the case with an app. Unless the government watches you 24/7 and I doubt that. The costs are prohibitive. The thing that does exist is metadata. If I were to visit terrorist.com or bombmanual.org.uk I would make a list. But watching TikTok all that is being seen is me communicating with content-servers(here the subject that needs to be watched also changes from the user(me) to the proprietor(the company)) from them and protocolling the content of everything watched, unless you break encryption at scale, and monitor everyone is also prohibitive. Not to mention analysis of the content. So Tiktok is the perfect vehicle for subversion of a foreign nation if I want to play for time.
All very good points! Which apply to all social networks, not only TikTok. The difference with TikTok being that the US do not have control over it, and they are not used to that.
I would generalize it. With radio, television and newspapers you have national sovereignty.
The internet broadened that and introduced apps. So I would see this as a correction rather than anything else.
The US law in question actually isn't specific to TikTok either. That's all that is brought up in the media and by politicians because it gets more attention, but the law is much .ore wide reaching.
This is the government grabbing the authority to ban online services that they deem a national risk. The bill would honestly have been much more benign if it was a few pages spelling out a specific ban on TokTok. Hell, I don't think they'd even need a law to have Google and Apple pull the app from the app stores.
Yes, but you think that possibility of government oversight/monitoring is an inherent necessity for government permitting any kind of media to operate in the US?
If doesn't work in many cases anyway, Government has no way to track who is tuning in and listening to hostile radio broadcasts.
Even it might be hostile propaganda, First ammendment protects both publishing and consuming content, without any "national security" considerations. But US lawmakers are now seemingly keen to introduce such conditions in the publishing and consuming of content.
During the cold war it was perfectly legal for the Soviet Life magazine to be published in the US and for people to buy and read it.
First ammendment really does say that "Congress shall make no law .." without any caveats for national security or even war-time exemptions.
It will be interesting to see how it plays out in the SCOTUS.
Because TikTok not only has the tracking potential of BigTech, but it is a serious competitor to some of them.
It's just protectionism, like banning the Huawei phones (not talking about the infrastructure, that's different) or banning DJI drones. It just sounds better to mention national security than to say "we don't want others to do to us what we do to them, and we don't want them to compete with us".
Whenever these posts about limiting chinese influence pop up, a bunch of whataboutism comments against the US pop up. I'm thankful that hackernews highlights new accounts
Can someone please explain to me what the security threat is? I still haven't understood it.
If it's that China will know more about Americans through data ingestion, they can already do that. Americans willingly upload every little bit of their lives to YouTube, Twitch, and tons of other platforms. Not to mention that Temu is the most downloaded shopping app in the US. And what kind of attack can TikTok information provide that other publicly available online information scraped from other social media sites cannot?
If it's that China can show American citizens a curated list of topics and videos to make Americans think certain ways or vote certain ways, then I absolutely think that's a 1A problem. That's the exact same rhetoric tons of repressive Communist countries used and still use to deny people the freedom to read books from outside, watch movies from outside, read newspapers from outside, etc. And I'm never going to accept the idea that information (even full on lies) so dangerous that people shouldn't be allowed to see them.
Facial recognition database and tracking people at a global scale.
With advances in computing power and unsupervised machine learning, correlating a person with the person's surroundings is now largely or fully automated – what used to take forensic experts weeks, months or years to hunt down a person by poring over indirect clues in photographs or CCTV camera footage, is now almost instantenous.
Remember, TikTok is not just topless teenagers twerking on the camera, it is used by people to take short videos at random locations (and the locations are already easify to classify and account for), so if you happen to be a dissident (or a person of interest in general) hiding from the CCP, and you happened to have walked past a TikTok user shooting a short video and you got in the shot, your identity is matched up and your current location is revealed automatically, in near real time or with a short delay.
I have almost no doubt that people in TikTok videos are already digitised, and their faceprints are sunk into a gigantic database behind the Great Firewall. It is easy to project what other kinds of nefarious abuse are possible when such datasets are available.
I don't know of any system capable of doing what you describe. But if such a system existed it could just use publicly available videos from Facebook and Instagram. It wouldn't need its own social media platform to feed it data.
Such a system would be built on orders of the state and it would not be publicly or widely advertised, esp. in mainland China. Russia, for instance, has built SORM (deep packet introspection of the ISP traffic at the nationwide scale) – to monitor all internet activities of its citizens (on demand, not constantly), and its technical architecture is not widely known.
Having a direct feed of videos being uploaded from the user's device is also advantageous as the higher resolution of the original video will provide more details before it is recomompressed for long term storage in a smaller resolution. Most importantly, Instagram and Twitter won't allow uncontrolled access to the content they host whereas a Chinese company simply does not have a choice and has to serve the content up on its state demands.
Until proven otherwise, it is safer to project that such a system exists.
Deep packet introspection is a completely different problem from the kind of facial recognition of people in video backgrounds that you envisage. Videos uploaded from cell phones are already MPEG-4 compressed and don't need re-encoding to be served. While it is true that social media companies don't allow unfettered access to their data, server farms for scraping web sites are a dime a dozen. I don't agree that it is safe to assume that systems there is no evidence for exists. It's one step removed from Chinese mind control viruses.
Sounds like you have been watching Travelers - specifically the episodes where the Director is looking for Traveler 001. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Travelers_(TV_series)
I don't think China are going to find their Dissident in TikTok videos any time soon. The false positive rate on even the best facial recognition is way too high for tracking individuals globally.
I *think* the main national security argument is that TikTok can tweak the algorithm to incite discord and inflame conflicts within the US. They can do this far more effectively from their own platform than by doing it on other social networks via bots and fake accounts.
I tend to come down with the same opinion as you though. It's all still essentially a first amendment issue and the negatives I listed aren't going to disappear if TikTok goes away.
"Don’t think you are going to conceal faults by concealing evidence that they ever existed." - President Dwight D. Eisenhower.
Not from US so I had to check the 1A:
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances"
"or of the press" sounds like it applies here but does 1A covers also foreign companies?
That a foreign nation with aims not aligned with the US has the dominant social network with the CAPABILITY to use this influence to influence the US, collect data, shape the minds of youths and future voters etc etc. that is enough for me.
It is because it is the adversary who controls the algorithms and suggestions.
The establishment wants and needs a monopoly in shaping the opinions and thoughts of its citizens.
The US government is a far greater danger to the average American than the Chinese government is, and this bill just gives even more power to the US government to dominate its citizens.
The US government could, if it wanted to, slaughter the entire civilian population of the US right now and no one could stop them. I don’t believe for a second that China would be so restrained if it suddenly had that power over the USA. So, while it’s true that having the power that it does makes the US government a potential threat, it is nowhere near as much of an actual threat as China.
Very doubtful. Military would defect en masse and you would get a civil war where government gets the boot in the end rather sooner than later.
It's not defection to refuse to carry out unlawful orders, soldiers can be punished for carrying out orders that they knew were unlawful, or orders which are so obviously unlawful that the soldier should have known. The united states does not have an SS.
What the fuck are you talking about???
Just to spell it out, you are suggesting that if "China" could, would conduct a mass scale genocide against Americans ?
And you base that where exactly ?
This statement is not obviously true.
It is also a logical fallacy. Even if it is true that the US is a greater threat in some sense, that doesn't invalidate that China is also a threat. It also doesn't justify not taking this action.
[ citation needed ]
You are also more likely to be murdered by a loved oned than by a stranger, but this doesn't mean that it's rational to open your door to strangers and bar it to your loved ones.
Should other countries do the same with US companies? US government regularly (ab)uses FISA to get data on foreign nationals: https://transparency.meta.com/reports/government-data-reques...
And also dismantle the law where the US can request any data on any person, even abroad, if the company is US-based
It is called a fortified democracy. And absolute democracy like the Weimarer Republik is a dangerous thing. All modern democracies are fortified these days. And it is good that they are. And yes if the US is caught with the hand in the cookie jar the nation in question is not happy, but there is a difference: Spying is passive and not influencing the democratic process of the nation or disrupting it. The concern with Tiktok is that it is active, trying to disrupt. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7T_Lu1S0sII
Also, unlike the Bytedance and the Chinese Government, US companies do not run intelligence operations. They are in it solely for the money, otherwise the NSA wouldn't have had to snoop on Google in 2013(?).
and this point
I find questionable. It is too blanketed. There are international criminals afoot after all. Red Letters do have their purpose as do international treaties for law enforcement to cooperate across borders in a bespoke manner in accordance with their and international laws.
Is this a joke?
No. Feel free to educate me though. Only request I have, nothing older than 30 years please as I feel it may not be relevant any longer and before long we would argue about the antebellum period and what have you not. And it must be large scale.
There's a difference between "Hey, France, we would like this info on a known criminal" and "U.S.-based companies have to turn over all data on any person regardless of that data location or the nationality of the person in question".
That's basically the basis for both Schrems I and Schrems II.
Edit: See also CLOUD Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CLOUD_Act
--- start quote ---
The CLOUD Act primarily amends the Stored Communications Act (SCA) of 1986 to allow federal law enforcement to compel U.S.-based technology companies via warrant or subpoena to provide requested data stored on servers regardless of whether the data are stored in the U.S. or on foreign soil
--- end quote ---
This is already in process in case of EU: https://noyb.eu/en/update-cnil-decides-eu-us-data-transfer-g...
This decision is based on Schrems II, which does not really apply anymore since the DPF. Though the latter is already being challenged.
Absolutely.
Given the well documented Russian tendency to wage nation hostile whisper campaigns and app algorithms natural tendencies to promote such speech we are in place where every country both democratic and not have CIA levels of disorder, new mental health issues, and general productivity drain introduced by social apps. I think every country should take a hard look at what is happening and should consider banning or time limiting some U.S. apps.
I believe the underlying narrative of TikTok was with government control the algorithms would be purposefully tuned to promote disorder elsewhere which is a level of control the U.S. government does not have over U.S. companies and they were jealous (although with the level of information control during Desert Storm I am not 100% certain on that). However, I think this law was very premature and should have required evidence of tuning or actual war. While soldiers may have apps they should not the spies should know better.
The China side where they have banned encryption apps also seems to be war preparation. A digital iron curtain while depressing for the population behind it is not something that can be torn down from the outside. A per app legal war seems an unfeasible use of congressional time when many Chinese smart device control apps require location to function and are on many phones. This also appears to be an opening shot by congress for putting up a U.S. national firewall if TikTok just leaves all US offices and continues business through web based offerings.
I agree. However, banning Tiktok won't change anything. If Tiketok is banned another company will take its place.
Now coming to the subject of Facebook, Twitter etc, these apps pose the same threat to nations other than the US. As in, these apps serve US interests by pushing US propaganda onto the rest of the world and constantly monitors/tracks the individuals who have these apps installed.
So a better option is to ban any type of tracking - on all apps. But it is extremely unlikely that this will be made into law.
Why should the US to other governments jobs? I say this while not being American.
I sometimes get upset when I see that every privacy and safety law is written to protect only US citizens, when it is the US that creates and fuels those predatory companies. And I understand they basically don’t care if they destroy everyone if it benefits them. Great. But what are our governments doing?
Huh? Where did you get this idea? The GPDR in the EU isn't a US law, it's an EU law to protect EU citizens.
The US government really doesn't do much to protect the privacy of US citizens, certainly nothing at the level of the EU's laws.
US and EU are very alike, I'm from neither.
No they are not. Just today, it made news here in HN that the (US) airlines will have to compensate their customers for cancelations/delays. EU has that for something like 20 years [1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_Passengers_Rights_Regulati...
I am not saying that US should protect the rights of non-citizens but this will likely result in retaliatory action by other nations on apps from the US.. though I won't hold my breath
Yes. Two pronged. Much stronger US consumer data privacy laws including a culling of the business of data brokers. And a total ban of TikTok in the US.
It may not solve it, but it will change it. The amount of influence these apps have on people make them a prime target for planting and spreading misinformation.
CIA and FBI propaganda campaigns on US and Europe's population are however acceptable somehow.
QAnon is not really accepted.
gp is probably referring to hollywood type of prop not the imageboard born type
Perhaps not broadly within the US, but certainly by a handful of U.S. congressional representatives .. and seemingly seriously to boot, not just as an affectation of convenience.
Let's be critical here: We should differenciate between spying(passive) and misinformation/manipulation(active)
Mentioning propaganda you choose the latter.
Pray tell what are those campaigns you talk about? If you are posing this question you must have at least some in mind and ready at hand to share.
Remember all those "independant" experts that were calling for the invasion of Irak because of those WMD?
Or all those action movies relying on leased military equipments under the condition they will never portray the US military in a bad manner?
Or Operation Mockingbird during the cold war?
Those are all examples of US propaganda.
There is much I left aside ofc, including anything related to the support of the ongoing "military operation" against the palestinian people.
I know that tactic and the response to this argument is: Two wrongs do not make it right. Just because the they did a wrong the others should be permitted to do it or continue doing it until the other party stops...wink wink? The answer to that is NO. That is whataboutism and a smoke screen.
But let's entertain those smokescreens even just to see where it leads:
The second Gulf war was outright wrong agreed. The hawks had their day and it was a dark one and all that followed because of it. A falling from grace. No argument there. But it is not an argument one should make when arguing over operations done by other countries especially since it is not related and long past and the current subject of discussion is happening right now.
The action movie thing... it is their equipment, they may provide it under any condition as they see fit. I wouldn't want to lend my neighbor a canister either if I knew he chooses to use it to write not so funny stuff in burning letters into my front lawn. I would not be surprised if other militaries would do the same thing if they were to lend their equipment at all.
Was that even a real operation?
That one is a doozy. The US made it clear that Israel should do more to shield civilians from harm. But let's be clear. Israel and the US are the wrong party to be mad at. If you want to be mad: be mad at Hamas, at Iran for supporting Hamas and at China and Russia for using it in a game of Geopolitical checkers in the UN security council. Without the scourge that is Hamas, who still continue to shoot missiles from South Gaza and who deny a sovereign nation the right to exist, non of this would've happened. Hamas uses the Palestinian people as shields, uses humanitarian institutions(e.g. hospitals) as hide outs and ammunition storages and subverts aide organizations created to help the people in the Gaza strip. They also slaughtered innocent civilians and kidnapped 100s a few months ago. And the people in Gaza should also be mad at their long ago elected inapt and impotent president and their dysfunctional governing bodies. And their inability to face down those terrorists hiding amongst them.(I cannot blame them though, it is a horrid and couraguous thing to do in any circumstance.)
And let's entertain the scenario that the US would step out.... well the entire Middle East would implode or explode like a powder keg. Trade would also suffer considering the shipping routes, oil and other things. And then Iran with Russia's and/or China's blessing would then do evil things... not a very comforting thought either, especially if you give a hoot about religion.
Now, let's have other countries doing the same to Meta, Google, Microsoft and the likes. They all collect the data and send them to a foreign country (USA). They also use their algorithms to manipulate public meaning and to censor opposite opinions.
Oh, and a US company spaying foreign citizens in not only legal in the USA, but also required.
Frankly... other countries should probably consider this IF they have an adversarial relationship with the US.
And they already do -- neither China nor Russia allow Meta services in their countries. Nor do they allow most of Google's services.
That means the data of US enemies is much safer than the data of US vassals^H allies.
Does having the pipe that gets you cheap gas blown up by the US count as an adversarial relationship? /s
now that would be a bridge too far...
Hey, you found a typo, and that made me learn a new English word.
Thanks for being a spelling-nazi :)
This is the idea of the "clean network" originally brought forward by Trump.
Basically all tech is clean and ok if comes from the good guys (the US and allies) and unclean if it comes from the bad guys (China, Russia ...).
IMHO a sad state of affairs. We would be at a healthier and less hypocritical place if our tech was secure by design, and suppliers and platforms were subject to open objective criteria and rule of law wrt. censorship and surveillance.
My local library blocks Yandex but allows the Daily Stormer when using their wifi.
I don't see how "secure by design" tech would solve the TikTok problem. TikTok isn't hacking people's devices, it's tracking them and giving them disinformation and propaganda. Secure code isn't going to fix those problems; the only way to fix them is to simply not exchange data with tiktok.com.
Well a lot of agencies do that out of the box because secure by design is not believed. Trust but verify. You see that when intelligence agents talk about cooperation between partners. So in the grand scheme of things it wouldn't really change things.
The one thing it would change though is that it would make the life a bit harder for cyber criminals(think downgrading tls connections).
And the criteria you talked about, they are open. Called capitalism, and regulations those companies operate under. Along the way that abomination of surveillance capitalism was born though.
Musk has already alluded to bringing back Vine, so the eradication of TikTok would be no great loss.
As an aside, I always viewed TikTok as a real world analogue to the mind control subplot from Zoolander (Frankie says 'relax')...
Twitter couldn’t make Vine work. Trying to do it in the severely weakened form it’s in now strikes me as less plausible than his Mars plans.
We already have YouTube, Instagram, Snapchat, and even LinkedIn to fill the short video void - bringing back Vine would be a Johnny-come-lately move.
How do we know a China man doesn’t work at Sony and is listening in to all PlayStations In households? Actually with all these Alexa devices and so many employees at Amazon it’s probably best to make sure all these devices are controlled by the government. Yes we have freedom of speech and privacy but no where in there did it say all communication shouldn’t be owned and and monitored by your government. It’s for the greater good.
Yea that mind set sounds awful.
Spies exist, yes that is a problem but it is a different problem.
And the reach of one individual is just not the same as a nation state. I’m not sure I get your point.
Can we apply this logic to Facebook, Twitter, Google, etc?
I personally only support a ban of TikTok if we apply the logic universally. Such services are weapons, and weapons are sure to be weaponized.
All centrally mass collected, plaintext or effectively plaintext data will sooner or later be co-opted by state actors.
Best to ban the practice of bulk plaintext data storage entirely unless it can all be E2EE and anonymozed to the point of being useless to the companies storing it.
We can ostensibly anyway regulate the American social media companies whereas the Chinese ones are a black box even though they might operate here under an American entity. That’s why we are here. They claimed they didn’t share data but they do. And that’s how the whole algorithm and value works
This was passed because TikTok posts are not supporting US (horrendous) foreign policy. There are recorded statements from congressmen of them discussing and saying exactly this, it’s not even a secret.
To me the real national security threat is that Americans don't know how to use social media safely.
The exact same way Facebook and other U.S. social networks abuse the minds of US users.[1]
Yep, and in a similar way every large US player hoards as much data about its users as it can get away with, even if it doesn't know what it'll do with it, and eventually loses said data in a giant breach, which can lead to blackmail, etc.[2]
And here we sit, either toothlessly regulating the U.S. actors or attempting to ban the foreign ones instead of teaching people how to actually use social media in a way that helps them instead of melting their brains and exposing their deepest secrets to malicious actors.
I'm not much of a capitalist or a social darwinist but I'd say the best thing to do is let people learn the hard way. We seem cool to do that with junk food,[3][4] and the similarities in social engineering between the social media and junk food are striking.
[1] https://www.chicagotribune.com/2023/08/11/waukegan-district-...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_data_breaches
[3] https://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/24/magazine/the-extraordinar...
[4] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21999689/
At this level of paranoia you may as well ban Facebook and other social media as there is no guarantee their data is not getting intercepted by China.
Why trade with enemy at all? Why do money transfers? Mutual investments? Why let enemy people live in your country?
Every step you do to isolate yourself from your enemy makes them even more your enemy.
At the end of this process is war. Completely unsurprising. Pretty much inevitable.
Alternatively you could accept that you are loosing competition in some fields without turning it into mortal conflict.
I want it to shut down because I believe it’s a bad influence on kids in general.