Let’s forget the elephant (or rather “panda”) in the room and pretend both FB and Tiktok are from the same country.
On one hand you have the absolute largest social media with 2.9 billion profiles, including tens of thousands of high ranking politicians, ambassadors, even some government ministers and leaders from almost every country in the entire world, that each have dozens of private conversations that might cause unimaginable scandals or even international political issues if they were released to the public. Not to mention countless celebrities and various other public figures and of course almost three billion average people, many of which shared their darkest secrets, in some cases maybe even admitting to some crimes and so on, all of which could ruin their lives, families and maybe land them in jail if there was ever a massive leak and suddenly everyone could see everyone’s fb conversations.
On the other hand you have an addictive brainrot 5 to 10 second video site targeted mainly to younger people, that ruins the attention span of people, which has about a billion users or 3 times less, but which isn’t really used for deep conversations and connecting with friends and family.
So how is everyone suddenly worried about the privacy issues of a goofy brainrot app, but everyone could care less about the site that has some sort of dirt on a large percent of the population, including high ranking officials from the entire world?
Not to mention Insta and Whatsapp, which are extensions of FB that make it even worse in this sense.
Except the “China bad” argument, which absolutely holds water when discussing online privacy, there is little to differentiate between large online “social” media.
They all make money by selling “targeted advertising” - to do so they collect as much data about their users as they can get away with.
That right there ignores the point of those opposed to Tiktok: it’s owned by a Chinese company and there is reason to believe the Chinese government - who are not our friends and not at all adverse to both censorship and misinformation - has access to as much of its data as it wants.
Which is not to say Facebook is good, but given that the Chinese government arguably has interests in manipulating the US for its own benefit (and not that of US citizens) is cause for concern.
Ignoring that fact would make a discussion on the topic of this thread pointless.
The problem with separating TikTok and Facebook on the basis of “Facebook is just a company, while TikTok is (almost certainly) an arm of Chinese state strategy” ignores the fact that Facebook has effectively made itself available to foreign actors as well. Not consciously or deliberately in the sense of wanting to be an outlet for disinformation and a vector for espionage, but out of pure negligence, prioritizing profit and margins and cheap operations over any kind of responsible corporate governance.
Facebook is an especially lawless operator. As I mentioned in another thread, I’m currently trying to get them to comply with their regulatory obligations under the GDPR, and they’re flat-out refusing to honor the law. According to the GDPR, I have the right to withdraw consent for any company to process my personal data. I have notified Facebook of this. Their reply? No. If you want us to stop processing your personal data, they say, you have to pay us the non-consent fee. It’s flagrantly unlawful, but they have a compliant data protection authority in Ireland so they’re trying to get away with it.
Based on everything I’ve read about Facebook, it’s partly that they won’t want to comply, but also partly that they’re simply unable to. Their whole business model is built around hoovering up personal data and distributing it willy-nilly across dozens of nodes, and they’re simply not capable of controlling the spread and usage of the data. They’ve apparently made the technical determination that it would be prohibitive to reorganize and rebuild their systems to make compliance possible, so they’re going to the mat on the legal argument that they can substitute “consent or pay” for what the law actually says.
So the bottom line is, to whatever extent there’s a difference between Facebook and TikTok, it’s a matter of mild degree, and your interpretation of their intent. Neither of them is a good company, but they’re bad for slightly different reasons. And in a sane world, both of them would be hammered down using tools from the same privacy toolbox.
I was involved with military signals intelligence (SIGINT) about 20 years ago and even back then we knew that China had a formal national hacking program targeted and other nations.
Also, for non-Canadians, the Chinese government is willing to kidnap visitors and use them as hostages in the pursuit of their foreign policy interests (Google the Two Michaels (Detention of Michael Spavor and Michael Kovrig - Wikipedia)).
Basically, China doesn’t play by the rules of the west. When it comes to personal and digital data I would not trust them
Yes, correct. And, further, referring back to my earlier point, it’s okay when the American company opens its platform to essentially unchecked use by hostile foreign actors?
I have a very tiny sliver of expectation that American companies are less likely to do that and/or more likely to resist. Mind you, they’re not a lot better, but Chinese companies seem to think there’s nothing wrong and it’s entirely normal for the government to riffle through everything and dictate what can and can’t be said. American companies do not, even if that is only to gain a potential advantage over rivals.
This is like “Other than that, how was the play, Mrs. Lincoln?”
The US isn’t asking to shut TikTok down, it’s just asking to be sold to an American parent so they can be just as bad as the others, but not worse (by being controlled by an authoritarian government with interests hostile to the US).
My point is that this is not about TikTok collecting data. It’s about them collecting it for the wrong government. And as an American, yes I consider it more dangerous for my government collecting data on me than the Chinese doing it. The guv’mint ain’t doing it to send me an Amazon gift card.
They also aren’t doing it to undermine our democracy, though. And, they need some kind of cause, at least in theory, to get your info. And, they aren’t going to send disinformation your way in order to throw an election or something.
I mean, some governments would do that, but I don’t think the US government would, at least not under 45 out of 46 administrations.