Not that it personally affects me- I’m not in USA and it’s one of the platforms I dislike the most. But I can’t find a concise explanation for why.
I’ve searched for news articles and those I found either don’t address the reason behind the ban and talk about US politics, or are vague about it, saying it would collect user sensitive data.
I’ve also found lists of countries banning TikTok from government devices, okay I understand that, and some countries banning it completely because of cultural sensitivities, which I doubt is US’ case.
Fair enough. What kind of user sensitive data would it be collecting? Isn’t this what most social media apps do already? What makes TikTok stand out in this regard?
It basically boils down to the USA not wanting China to be the ones collecting all that data. Which is a bit tenuous. The owner of TikTok is ByteDance, ByteDance is registered in the Caymans, with global headquarters in LA and Singapore. The current CEO is a Chinese national, but lives in Singapore. TikTok does collect quite a lot of data, but the FB app collects at least as much. It’s a bit of Sinophobia.
My personal pet theory is the US alphabet boys have a deal with all the other social media giants for first pick of data they mine, and TikTok didn’t want to play ball.This is just what I’ve kinda thought, it’s by no means absolute fact, and I look forward to hearing what other people think/know about it.
IMHO you’re kinda right. There’s a trade war going on between the US and China, and data is damn valuable so it’s just logical to prevent the enemy access to your own citizens’ data, specially since we know how it’s used to manipulate elections (Russia’s been proven guilty of it for the 2016 US elections), but also Facebook was at least paid to do so.
Now I do agree with you in that the ban is probably due to the wrong reasons though. But it kinda doesn’t matter to me.Yet I am not US citizen either, I’m an EU citizen, so my opinion on US politics ain’t quite relevant. I just wished we would do the same here in Europe and more consequently. Both the US and China do have laws that require companies to hand over there user data to their respective country’s agencies, which is technically illegal under GDPR for EU citizens’ data (they shouldn’t be able to leave the EU). So we should ban all social media that stores data on servers belonging to US or Chinese companies (leaving basically only fediverse instances on european servers).
Caymans LA Singapore. Singapore.
A few years ago, all of that was China and nothing else but China.
Maybe these “international” items are just deliberate actions to conceil the truth?
People from within China have access to extensive user data collected by TikTok and use that access to retrieve the data. TikTok basically contains spyware to circumvent system restrictions, so the collected data is very sensitive.
The US laws do not allow this data to leave the country.
TikTok does not restrict this foreign access for unknown reasons. (Suspected state actors involved.)
So it will probably be banned to stop the spying.
https://apnews.com/article/tiktok-ftc-investigation-china-data-e91e02db5c4f3f7d5836ecafedbf4714
it all comes down to money. USA felt like the owners of tiktok were preying and taking advantage of us citizens and they wanted a piece of the pie or gtfo. it’s always money, only the attacking entity changes, and not that often.
What makes TikTok stand out in this regard?
the location of its base of operations is what makes it stand out.
it’s been banned in my country since its very inception (one of a very few agreeable thing that our otherwise very regressive far right government has done).
and the HECK lot of data it REQUIRES to operate. Things that are just “Why do they need THAT?”, tiktok is of course not the only one but its very aggressive on this.
Something about tictok and another app being able to recompile portions of code on the device itself so that detection was avoided , but also gave full access to a lot of the phone that permissions should not allow
I believe that’s temu, I can’t find info on tiktok doing that, atleast from the surface level search I did.
I will look for the tech podcast
Kind of a meta question. Is TikTok even worth it as a platform? Had a friend tell me they ditched FB and only use TK exclusively now. Overheard some people who were traveling say they only find restaurants to eat at based on TK. I’ve never used it before, so I have no clue how the interface even works, but I thought it was just random vertical videos?
Tik Tok
Ti To
TTMe, I’m going to start calling it Tito.
Maybe they mean Tik Kok, Bytedance’ underground betting platform and masculine porn tube?
FB is overrun with fascist propaganda, so perhaps TK might be less of a brain rot.
Maybe Trumpeltier brought up the idea of the ban after they played a prank on him during his campaign in 2020
It’s performative posturing by politicians who want to look tough on China and/or have been (or are pretending to be) convinced by TikTok’s competitors that they are a national security threat because they gather lots of data, just like every other app does.
If law makers really wanted to prevent the data being vacuumed up, they could pass meaningful privacy laws, but they own stock in companies that compete with TikTok and that also profit by vacuuming up everyone’s data, so they pretend that it’s just Chinese apps we have to worry about.
Except, since we have no privacy laws, if China wants to get the data, it’s perfectly legal for them to buy it from data brokers. We could enact laws that make what they (and Facebook, and Google, and…and…) are doing is illegal, but data brokers make billions, and politicians enjoy enabling billionaires in their exploitation of the general public. So the ban doesn’t stop China from bring able to get data on American citizens.
What the ban really does is (try to) force TikToks owners (Bytedance) to sell/divest to US companies that will enrich lawmakers and those lobbying the lawmakers.
Ars Technica has some good write-ups on the situation, and Techdirt has far more, and they don’t pull punches. I suspect EFF has something written on the subject too.
