Banning TikTok Won’t Keep Your Data Safe | Pompous billionaires, authoritarian regimes, and opaque oligarchs are hoarding our data. Only an alternative online ecosystem will stop them.
Banning TikTok Won’t Keep Your Data Safe | Pompous billionaires, authoritarian regimes, and opaque oligarchs are hoarding our data. Only an alternative online ecosystem will stop them.
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
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.
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.
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.
Alternative?!?? But I want this clout!
I know another thng that will stop them and it rhymes with guillotine.
Tbh, I just don’t like TikTok. Getting rid of it is kinda tempting.
Ye ye, I get u all, but lemmie have some lil joy out of this situation.
TikTok is not the problem. The problem is "I have nothing to hide" mindset. People don't care about privacy because "ignorance is bliss". Some people are just not aware about risks of giving up on privacy and other put continence over privacy. Until the general perception of privacy changes, apps like TikTok will thrive.
Slrpnk just feels like masked up tankies. They're even opaquely opposing the TikTok ban lol.
You really couldn't be further from the truth. Solarpunk is a firmly anarchist ideology, to the point of mild annoyance. There are plenty of reasons to oppose the TikTok ban that have nothing to do with ML.
For supposed anarchists they seem to say exactly the same things as a CCP cuck would. They banned me for arguing on a meme they posted about how awful "Western Democracies" are.
Banning TikTok is stop people learning about what's going on in Palestine and Zionist control of the US government. Nothing to do with keeping anyone safe.
Totally. Genocide support 101. Just check the timeline on this anti-tiktok campaign.
TikTok, the only thing between the Palestinians and the gas chamber.
I always try to explain to people that tiktok bans were laughed at for like at least two years, then as soon as Bidens unwavering support for genocide starting spreading on the platform that shit got passed in under a month.
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
https://web.archive.org/web/20240827152513/https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/08/27/chinese-government-hackers-penetrate-us-internet-providers-spy/
Was it the news community or here? Pretty much all of my posts get filtered on news for some reason.
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.
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?
I'll allow it.