Can the US Lawmakers do anything about the US companies harvesting my data and selling it off… please?
Yes, they can make more money from it.
Can they? Completely wrong question.
“Will they” is what you wanted to ask but the answer is still firmly no
So when do they plan to do something about those domestic businesses trying to manipulate citizens of America?
As soon as the foreign businesses get better at harvesting data than the domestic ones, of course.
While you’re not wrong about double standards, anything that discourages the use of vapid social media platforms is a win in my book. Use whatever backwards logic you like to make it happen so long as it’s effective.
Well this goes into the direction of social media monopoly so I’m not sure
He says, on a social media platform
Lemmy is a message board, not social media. Like fark or something awful. You have no idea who the duck i am. How is that social?
Users create and/or share content, check. Users discuss content, check.
Unless you think something is missing from that definition, Lemmy is social media. It is pseudonymous, but it is still social because of the users.
Since when did that define social media? That’s the same thing as IRC. is IRC social media?
ICQ had message boards where people would chat about the news. Was that social media?
Again, fark is a place where people share content and discuss the news. Is that social media?
Yeah, I suppose those would. I wouldn’t have thought it, but definitionally, it would be! I mean, heck, some of those are listed by Meriam-Webster! Isn’t language neat? You learn something new every day.
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It is social media, just because your talking anonymously doesn’t mean you aren’t interacting socially. Jesus Christ your talking to people. Right now. Your being social media’d. Stop acting like your above it.
My tiktok account is also anonymous.
Your Lemmy account can likely be used to identify you, given a big enough data set.
Undoubtedly, especially since I haven’t taken particular steps to obfuscate my identity here.
But as I said in a comment below, I’m more worried about some unhinged nutbag online randomly targeting me than being a person of interest by any nefarious groups or organizations.
No it isn’t.
When you download the app you let them have the following information/data about you:
Purchases, location, contacts, search history, identifiers (!!), diagnostics, financial info, contact info, user content, browsing history, and usage data.
Please tell us how any of that is “anonymous”.
Cool dude, you’ve identified that big corporations data farm.
Random bloke user with a vendetta still doesn’t know who I am, and that’s who I’m more worried about on the personal scale.
Cool dude. Well you said your account is anonymous, and it isn’t. Words mean things.
Whatever Tiktok is doing, the correct response is to write enforcable laws to prevent ANY company from doing what Tiktok is doing.
This is bad governance.
That’s what they did. The “correct response” is described in the article as the law 50/50 signed here.
Did you read the article? The bill bans tiktok for being foreign. There is nothing in this article that describes a bill that outlaws any practices, conventions, or actions that tiktok has done.
Being afraid of foreigners for being foreign is not effective regulation.
I’ve read this comment over 10 times now and I have no idea what the words “the law 50/50 signed here” means, so I can’t be sure I understand the argument you are trying to make. My best guess is that you are using circular logic to suggest that every democratically decided upon decision is always the right decision, which is nonsense because democracy is demonstrably fallible.
My point might be a little Covid brain fogged but I’m just pointing out that they did exactly what the guy asked for, if they bothered to click past the title which makes it sound like a targeted “ban Tiktok” law.
I am not a guy. I read the entire article before commenting. The law did not do what I asked for. You would know if you read my comment all the way through.
I think you’re making assumptions that I can read into what exactly you find wrong with Tiktok. That context is not there in the original comment.
Being chinese by definition can’t effect any company. There is enough context.
This was a committee vote. The bill now must advance to the floor, pass a vote there, then go through the same process in the Senate.
Many bills are passed out of committee but are never given an actual vote.
Tik Tok pushes so much toxic content towards children and teenagers it should be shut down in my opinion.
Many users called lawmakers’ offices to complain, congressional staffers told Politico. “It’s so so bad. Our phones have not stopped ringing. They’re teenagers and old people saying they spend their whole day on the app and we can’t take it away,” one House GOP staffer was quoted as saying.
and they still voted 50-0. really tells you something about how much these politicians are willing to listen to their constituents.
It also tells you something about all the supposed gridlock in Washington that can magically evaporate when there’s money and power to be gained from it.
Are they “taking it away” though? Do normal people care about who owns it? Are they just worried about an unlikely ban?
you’re taking it as a given that bytedance will sell the app if this law passes. there is a chance that they won’t want to sell and then the app will be banned. (but i think this unlikely.)
also, if i’m understanding things correctly, there’s the possibility that they do sell and the app still gets banned. the article says
An app would be allowed to stay in the US market after a divestiture if the president determines that the sale “would result in the relevant covered company no longer being controlled by a foreign adversary.”
depending on who the next president is, there’s no guarantee that they’ll say any sale will result in the company not being controlled by a foreign adversary. (although this past is just speculation.)
anyways. this bill will certainly raise the chances that the app will be banned in the US. (and it opens the door for other apps to get banned if the US doesn’t like the country they were developed in.)
I also just noticed in the article:
TikTok urged its users to protest the bill, sending a notification that said, “Congress is planning a total ban of TikTok… Let Congress know what TikTok means to you and tell them to vote NO.”
Also from a BBC article about the same thing:
Earlier, users of the app had received a notification urging them to act to “stop a TikTok shutdown.”
So they were literally sending out misleading notifications (because a forced sale is not a total ban), and then the users wrote to Congress based on that…
The probability that they will sell seems really high to me, as the same thing almost happened back in 2020.
There’s no guarantee that making the sale will prevent the ban.
Yeah but if they sell then it’s someone else stuck holding the bags so why wouldn’t they?
because its not in the corporation’s interest to incur the expense and organizational disruption if they’re still going to get banned anyway - profit is maximized by continuing with business as usual instead of spending resources attempting to reach compliance
Good. Fuck them and all social media controlled by any big mega corp. But fuck the CCP especially.
The fucked up thing is they don’t seem to have a problem with rich 1%ers owning and manipulating millions of people. Only when it’s the Chinese. Facebook, Twitter, instagram are just as harmful. Although the delivery method of the content isn’t exactly “tailored” on those services like TikTok. I dunno how I feel about this. I mean, I think all social media services should die out. This just seems like an uneven hand.
Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good.
This is a really great way of putting it. I’d never heard that before, but it’s a truly apt way of summarizing one of the biggest problems I have with fellow leftists. However, I think I’d argue this is a slightly different situation.
Yeah, it’s a start toward something good. But it’s still sticky in its spirit.
It’s sort of similar to the complaint against incrementalism. It’s true, incrementalism is not a healthy solution to the problems we face. But fighting against good steps forward because you’re against the concept of incrementalism is…foolish…right? Or is it? Because sinking our efforts into incrementalism takes away effort from broad advancement. And incrementalism has been our MO since forever. And it’s only brought us further down the road to ruin.
But, again, fighting good incremental changes is nonsense. I dunno, it’s a nuanced issue and I’m not even sure how I feel about it. It’s interesting. And as someone who doesn’t use the more “standard” social media and never has, I’m all for erasing social media from existence. I’ve seen what it did to everyone in my life, and I was the perfect age for every step of social media’s growth: xanga/livejournal in middle school, MySpace in middle school/early high school, and then Facebook came about in my senior year, instagram in college and while i traveled in my early 20s…but I was an anti-anything-popular emo kid and goddamn I’m glad I was. But I also saw first hand how much social media changed my interactions with everyone in my life. It wasn’t pretty. People were addicted, constantly being just floored that I wasn’t on FB, countless people threatening to make me a Facebook page? It was severely strange behavior. And now tiktok is like all of that on goddamn super steroids. But it’s less people shoving it down my throat, and more just completely sucked in by it. Which is honestly scarier.
Bytedance needs to figure out which congresspeople Meta has been bribing.
Need to donate a couple hundred mil to Bill and Melinda Gates foundation and see if he’ll give up his strategy.
Oh man, is this a game? Are we supposed to name all the reasons this is dumb? The first two are obvious.
MSFT was famous for not taking lobbying seriously until they started getting anti-trust action against them. They quickly became good at it.
So NSA backdoors are mandatory but Chinese ones are bad.
Yes, governmental surveillance is always bad. But let’s not pretend being surveilled by NSA is as bad as being surveilled by the authoritarian government of China.
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The former is more pressing than the latter.
Both are bad but fuck Xi and the CCP 🖕
So TikTok is sending out app notifications that they are at risk of being shut down and urging their users to call their representatives right now. They are not going down without a fight.
The 165 days time limit would land the deadline in August-ish, right before the most intense phase of election season in the States, and I do think TikTok would be a very influential part of the election strategy this year.
Bold move. Who are they going to blame all the online privacy issues once they cant yell about the Chinese? Or are we going to start pretending everythings fine then?
Why do you think that they give a shit about online privacy? This isn’t a privacy bill, it’s a bill stopping another government from doing exactly the same shit that the US government does through domestic apps. They aren’t looking out for people, they’re afraid of the competition.
I expect the latter
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It can still be successful elsewhere. It’s clearly about data sharing.
I think here the point is that the US government seems to be not bothered by Meta’s data collection which by the way has already been used by Cambridge Analytica to swing elections in favour of one of the opponents and most likely used on countless more occasions but it is now super worried about Tiktok.
And what did they do against Meta? To the best of my knowledge nothing effective.
If they do this they should apply the same measures against Meta and other companies but they don’t. Which is disturbing.
Same with Gaza and Israel. Hamas kills around less than 1 K civilians (mind you a lot of the killed on that first day were military), it is utter tragedy. Israel kills 30+K people, starves the local population, destroys almost completely the infrastructure and their homes and it is business as usual. And every now and then they are scorned to please their voting base while weapon sales to Israel are continuing. Replace Israel with Russia/NK/China or any other country the US considers hostile and they will have them sanctioned to hell, but since it is Israel, nothing of this is happening.
At least have the fucking decency not to have double standards, because the rest of the world isn’t blind or stupid.
Yes, you have pointed out the subtext that was there all along and pretended like it’s some new argument.
It is about the data sharing. The US doesn’t like companies sharing data with countries that it views as its geopolitical rivals. Big surprise, am I right?
Seriously. Don’t cover your eyes and pretend you can’t see why the government treats US companies different than companies that are directly in the hands of adversaries. They might not care if Meta uses it to profit off of us, but they certainly do care if China will use it to achieve an advantage over us, militarily or otherwise.
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I can’t order Jimmy John’s on my work computer anymore. Why? Because tiktok is blocked on our work network. What does tiktok have to do with Jimmy John’s? Well I would have thought nothing expect it won’t let you set your delivery option unless it’s allowed to send data to analytics.tiktok.com.
Why is a God damn sandwich shop sending my location to tiktok? No idea, but it’s definitely not just the video app that’s the problem.
I dunno what hill you’re trying to die on here. A stupid dancing app that provides a data collection platform by a foreign surveillance state is a plot on the Orville. Nobody is concerned with it competing with Google, Apple orYouTube. It’s so off-base. Google sucks anyway. If people are searching on TikTok it’s because it’s giving better results for them than Google. It’s about who is collecting the data.
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No, I think it sets a bad precedent. I don’t think TikTok should be allowed in the US (if the US decides it doesn’t want it as they’re seeming to). Taking the property is going to cause a bunch of what you mentioned.
Well if it’s such a useful tool, it will do just fine in China, right? No biggie.
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Isn’t this in some way the same as how China bans a number of foreign companies from operating? I don’t think doing the exact same thing is entirely fair but when others aren’t playing by the same rules, it’s a lot less black and white.
I’m surprised that people are surprised that a country would favor it’s own businesses versus foreign ones.
I’m also unsure of which countries act differently from this.
I’m not surprised but I’m still outraged at the amount of hypocrisy they are pulling off out of this one.
Ah yes, the US, where no foreign company is allowed to be successful.
Such unsuccessful or banned foreign companies include Samsung, LG, Sony, Toyota, Nissan, Honda, Aldi, Shell, Siemens…
And if foreign politics won’t take care of it call the CIA and tell it they’re hiding oil under the presidents house.
Sooo… How do Republican’s square being the party of “Small Govt” and then interfering in a private business?
Is it a private business if it’s owned by the Chinese government?
No. It’s a malicious foreign entity.
They don’t. It’s all bad faith to get what they want - control.
Government is bad except when it comes to brutal subjugation of out-groups I don’t like, while the in-group gets protected and treated with kid gloves by the same.
Unfortunately most of them are the dupes not the protected class they think they are - “they’re hurting the wrong people” summed it up when it was uttered…
Too lazy to look up who said it, but there’s a quote I like that goes something like “conservative seeks to have an in group who the law protects but does not bind, and an outgroup who the law binds but not protects”
…TikTok would eventually be dropped from app stores in the US if its owner doesn’t sell. It also would lose access to US-based web hosting services.
Oh no. Where would children act out jokes they stole from old tweets?
So many out of touch people in every thread that mentions TikTok. The same shit we did on YouTube , FB , Twitter, vine, etc is the same concept on TikTok. Memes evolve or new ones are born, that is nothing new
Tik tok is at the root of so many of the social issues we’re facing today. It’s absolutely worse than Facebook, although both need to be addressed.
Sorry but this is giving ‘old man yells at clouds’ energy. How is tiktok any worse than any other social media platform? They’re all echochambers filled with misinformation, it just what happens when you get a lot of people online.
That you’re trying to ‘they’re all the same’ bs shows how ignorant many people are on this. They’re not all the same, this one is especially bad and it’s not JUST because it turns you into a fucking retard when you use it.
