No shit. I don’t understand why people thought it would keep their data safe, even from China. China can just get your data from one of the thousands of legal data brokers in the US. The ban is fully political.
Or from your ISP. The Washington Post ran an article about that today, but links to them get blocked by some sort of filter on lemmy.world
Was it the news community or here? Pretty much all of my posts get filtered on news for some reason.
All of them. I can post other sites just fine; it’s only washingtonpost.com and wapo.st links that are blocked.
Ah, I see. Annoying.
But then they have to pay, it’s not all free to them. And data brokers sell large data, whereas with TikTok they could just say “Give me everything that exists about @AmbiguousPoops” and know their whole life because they agreed to it in the terms of service.
“Device Information: We collect certain information about the device you use to access the Platform, such as your IP address, user agent, mobile carrier, time zone settings, identifiers for advertising purposes, model of your device, the device system, network type, device IDs, your screen resolution and operating system, app and file names and types, keystroke patterns or rhythms, battery state, audio settings and connected audio devices. Where you log-in from multiple devices, we will be able to use your profile information to identify your activity across devices. We may also associate you with information collected from devices other than those you use to log-in to the Platform.”
TikTok also uploads gigabytes of data from your phone. But yeah, it’s just political.
It is political, because Meta does the exact same thing you have quoted, and they aren’t getting banned.
We need stronger data protection laws, period.
As we illustrated several times in this thread, for Americans an American Company collecting your data is a lower risk than an adversarial dictatorship’s military operation collecting your data for free (or even for profit as a cherry on top).
It clearly isn’t lower risk considering the state of polarized politics in America and other western powers after the advent of Cambridge Analytica (which Facebook barely faced any consequences for btw).
Tiktok is a boogeyman, and Meta, Twitter, Google, whatever other social FAANG-adjacent platform you use, wants you to focus on them so that they can keep milking you for your data, while simultaneously feeding you ads and radicalizing political content directly targeted to you.
So I reiterate, we need better data protection and regulation laws for ALL social media.
Facbook recieved the mother of all fines of 5 Bn USD and lost 725 Mn USD in lawsuits over Cambridge Analytica despite there not being any evidence Facebook new of the firm’s connection to Russia.
Any notion that they profited from that scandal or would do so in the future is pretty absurd.
China is hostile. They’re a military expansionist dictatorship who routinely expesses malcontent towards the USA amd allies. They would pay good money to fuck us over.
It quite literally is political. It’s not legal for them because China but Meta, X, Snap, etc can do the same thing (plus more, Cambridge Analytica, for example) and be fine.
That is the definition of political, and anyone that told you it was to protect your privacy was lying to you, just like this article explains.
Also, do you think China has to buy the data from these companies? And even if they do buy it, what makes you think they do it all above board? Do you think they won’t just bribe and steal their way to your data?
The problem was never TikTok alone. The problem is social media corps altogether, and the fact that the government doesn’t actually give a shit about our privacy (probably because of the lobbying that these companies do, also explained in the article). If the US government cared, we’d have laws preventing much of this data from being collected in the first place.
Did you read the article, which mostly talks about these companies as a whole and not just TikTok?
Facebook spent years in court just to get hit with the largest fine in the history of fines, 5,000,000,000.00 USD. They also payed another 725,000,000.00 in lawsuits.
All for selling to a British market research company that they had no idea was a Russian shell.
Idk how much you think they made off the deal, but probably nowhere close to as much as they lost.
I’ll allow it.
In that sense, TikTok is really their competition. They’re upset not because it steals your data, they’re upset because they’re not the ones getting your data.
I thought the concern was manipulating public perception.
Correct. This was the big reason. Data is only important for micro targeting your propaganda.
And also for scams or other fraud campaigns.
For me its hard to believe massive widespread “pig butchering” scams are being orchestrated by some random Chinese thugs with no affiliation.
Micro targeting, like what trump has to do to keep from pissing on the floor.
More specifically, Chinese state interests influencing Americans. US elected officials are AOK with US, plutocrat and commercial interests influencing Americans.
It’s not about protecting the public, it’s about who gets to engage in malicious action against the public.
There can be more than one concern at once, propaganda is certainly a problem but there is a greater one on what kind of AIs china is training.
But of course lemmy only things AI is dangerous because some fucking furry deviantartist didn’t get paid for their cock-and-ball-torture scribbles were one of billions of images scraped.
When the reality is that services like tiktok, youtube, and any media aggregator can use AI to make deep inferences about people’s lives and build up a near complete profile of your personality, income, political leanings, mental illnesses, family relations, and physical location JUST from your watch history.
Most of you are sneering right now because you really have no clue how bad it is going to get.
15 years ago, Walgreens used a primitive AI to determine women who were pregnant from their purchasing patterns, and would send out coupon kits for baby things and a congratulations letter. It was so accurate it knew often before the women themselves.
So anyway, some 16 year old kid gets a prenatal package based on AI, outing their pregnancy to her parents. Things didn’t go well for anyone and Walgreens dropped the program.
THIS WAS FROM 15 YEAR OLD AI TECHNOLOGY!
Imagine what modern models can glean from you. Even after reading this most of you will be clueless and strangely arrogant in your ignorant positions about how none if this is really a big deal
It’s from 15 years ago because it’s super easy to track shopping for something like a pregnancy.
There’s zero “AI” needed, even if such a thing existed.
I don’t think you understand at all, not even a bit.
It wasn’t that the women were shopping for pregnancy items, its that they were shopping for other normal items just in the pattern that pregnant women tend to shop for early in the pregnancy.
Like I said, a ton of women getting the notice WERE NOT AWARE THEY WERE EVEN PREGNANT YET!
But you deliberately misunderstand to shift the focus away from the ACTUAL problem.
It was target not walgreens, and it was probably not even real. Please stop belligerently pushing unsubstantiated bullshit as if it’s incontrovertible fact. https://www.kdnuggets.com/2014/05/target-predict-teen-pregnancy-inside-story.html
Also scams. They know you, your name, your contacts, dob, where you work, where you spend leisure time, your face, your house layout, and from your message details probably your darkest secrets and ssn.
Chinese online and over the phone scams have been surging massively in the past few years.
Banning TikTok never had anything to do with “protecting your data”.
You are correct. TikTok uses Oracle servers in the USA with a backup server in Singapore. The FCC made sure data does not got to China.
You are incorrect. Id be the dumbest motherfucker to believe that China isn’t slurping that data up in tens of different ways. TikTok has the backing and approval of the CCP, so that to me is suspicion enough. Don’t try to obfuscate shit behind shell companies and undercover CCP operatives in advantageously-aligned countries.
advantageously-aligned countries.
Like the USA? Already slurping up data first?
But will it finally convince people that vertical videos are horrible and short form content obliterates your attention span?
I know the answer is no, but an old man can dream.
I shouldn’t feed the troll, but…
Why are vertical videos bad?
Vertical videos have their place but still kinda suck…however I always think of this video.
Vertical videos are a thing because phones are vertical screens
The answer is to not use social media.
Said I, on Lemmy. Heck, some even call IRC social media.
I would use an activity pub Lemmy verse Facebook
I would never use anything Zuck touches
Cool, what’s a reasonable replacement?
For social media you don’t care about being private in, Mastodon. For large chat groups like Slack, Matrix. For private communication: SimpleX + PGP
Or, we could, you know, mulch every fucking one of the bastards and rejoice in a world free of their self-indulgent bullshit.
Oh wait, I keep forgetting, a shitton of you still worship billionaires.
You don’t get it… If I don’t defend Musk and Bezos, then I have to admit I’m being fucked over. Then I have to actually deal with the reality that life is completely out of my control except for collective bargaining and class consciousness.
That takes a lot of unlearning and reformulating to do, and a lot of grace towards myself for falling for propaganda and that rails against my rugged individualism as I have been taught since childhood.
All of this takes time and effort, as well as the mentioned patience and acceptance that I am not the sole master of my own destiny. That my parents were taught a lie and lied to me, and so did their parents.
So I believe i n sunk cost fallacies and worship said billionaires.
Don’t worry pal, it certainly does take time. So much fucking time. You’ll have way too much time to get use to everything while waiting for that class consciousness. Even then, when you’ve grasped the concept entirely, more time.
I don’t worship them! I just follow their every move and emulate them in my daily life. They are in fact chosen by god himself.
Remember kids: unless the social media site is owned by a US company, it’s a bad social media site.
The billionaires in the US are good guys and don’t sell your info.
/s
An alternative, if an alternative could ever even be viable, would just be open to the same corruption and greed. We need regulation and laws to protect privacy and data. Regulate it such that companies are not allowed to retain private and unconsented data without severe legal or financial penalties. Severe enough that companies or individuals that abuse the rights of people are either shut down and dissolved or jailed.
Isn’t the guy that developed Pixelfed working on a short-form video platform? That would be better than TikTok I would think.
Last I heard he’s folding it into Pixelfed, kind of like Reels is part of Instagram. I’m psyched to try it whenever it becomes publicly available, either way. Hoping it’s more like Vine than TikTok
I would argue that only revolution will stop them, but it would be nice to have a peaceful option work instead
It’s almost impossible to get a darn email server installed and working. And it’s a matter of time before it gets hacked according to everyone who says not to do it yourself.
So as of now, phone numbers are a joke for communication. Email is something you can use but it takes a whole department to keep fake emails from stealing your data at work and you can’t host it at home. So forever email will be a thing you can’t have at home with a simple click install. We need something different.
Self hosting email is a bitch, but professional email hosting is pretty darn cheap. A hosting provider may not be perfect but at least their business is protecting your data and not selling it, paying for a product with money instead of your data.
And that’s my whole hisifit with email. Number 1, I literally haven’t used email for anything personal at all for a long long time. So maybe it’s not even worth trying to get emails to be stored sent and received from my house. But one thing I would like to try is to setup a webmail system at my house to receive my Gmail emails so I can erase them from Gmail but still have them available for search if I want. That would be a good compromise. It’s amazing to me that no easy to install server exists right now that can do this. I think round cube can do it but it beats me how to get that done.
I’m surprised this was published in Foreign Policy.
I was surprised by that too.
You can tell who read the article and who didn’t based on whether their comment is about the TikTok ban (which wasn’t actually the focus of the article at all).
Anyway, GetGee sounds like an interesting project but it wasn’t clear to me how work has actually been accomplished to date. Is it just a proposal at this stage? The website is pretty bad and doesn’t provide much in the way of recent updates or information.
I know another thng that will stop them and it rhymes with guillotine.
