@Max_S : Yeah, your recent posts on this subject are why I wish we had likes available.
I use NoScript, and I love it, but it is limited. As long as the party you’re hoping to avoid running scripts on your box is hosted on the domain you’ve allowed, they’re going to get to run their scripts. If TikTok hosts the data-grabbing scripts on their main domain, you’re allowing them to run. I don’t use TikTok, so I can’t speak further on the matter.
Exactly. To answer the OP: Because it should be my choice to give them that information, not theirs.
I have a question for the OP.
If the OP does not use TikTok, why should we care if they care if China knows how many TikTik videos they see on TikTok? If you don’t use the product, and you don’t care what harm may come to others(which has been explained over and over again), then there is no answer to your question that will satisfy you.
Fair question, I suppose.
Note that there are quotation marks around the thread title, meaning that this was a question that I heard on the radio being asked by someone else. My OP was intended to make the point, little noted by anyone here outside of Max S., that the answers to her question (my pronouns incidentally are “he” and “his”) seemed remarkably complicated and obtuse, given the simplicity of the question, which always sets off my BS detector.
I myself don’t know much about electronic surveillance, nor am I much affected by it, so all along I was more interested in the rhetorical issue here, and I honestly expected this discussion would be more of a critique of the rhetorical ineptness used by NPR’s experts. Instead, I got answers that seemed to me to replicate some of that obtuseness and deflection so I engaged with those who had such difficulty giving a simple straightforward answer to a simple straightforward question.
Again, they (and NPR’s experts) leapt over that simple answer, which I still take to be “An exclusive watcher of cat videos is probably in very little danger from Tiktok, and a similar danger is posed by U.S.-based data-gathering organizations. The real danger, however, comes in revealing personal information, which all of these organizations demand from its users, and in giving them access to the users’ microphone and camera. Naive users may think these organizations are harmless, but state actors such as China may well harvest this data and use it malevolently…” etc.
This sort of approach seems, rhetorically speaking, to defuse the seeming harmlessness of the original question by acknowledging that in the purest sense the personal danger to a single cat-video watcher may well be minimal, but that many other Tiktok users expose themselves, and ultimately the U.S., to other dangers that are far greater [followed by an elaboration on those specific dangers to the other users, with the codicil that Chinese companies like Tiktok are essentially agents of the state, gathering data for malevolent purposes, data that could be purchased but users are giving them freely, etc.
I thought this sort of approach, acknowledging the relative safety of the OP’s OP’s position, made more sense than the responses of NPR’s experts and the first few broad and scary responses here, so I continued to probe a bit, creating apparently a lot of interest in my ulterior motives here, as a paid agent of the Chinese state, as a dullard whose fascination with cat videos betrayed an empty personal life, etc. none of which happens to be remotely applicable.
Well, since most of us seem to think the answers that you think are evasive or vague are actually decent answers, i can see why you didn’t get much engagement with the question you didn’t explicitly ask, “why does npr reporting suck?”
I think every response I’ve read so far raises good and valid concerns.
Now imagine that the primary ‘target’ for robust data collection and analysis is your young children.
Their habits, their fears, their locations, their health, their friends, their relationship struggles, their insecurities.
Everything.
With a keystroke logger, you can assemble an amazing dossier on any kid using your software – TikTok or other.
What you then do with that information is only limited by your own ethics.
Which is where many people think this whole thing moves beyond the realm of “dicey.”
So isn’t this a problem with the use of the Internet in general rather than specific to Tiktok cat videos?
Thanks for the acknowledgment that I have higher standards of clarity and responsiveness than most of the respondents here.
It’s like asking if your other neighbors might be drug dealers when you know that one of them is.
This, btw, just for the benefit of those who think I was disguising my interest in NPR’s “expert” response, was the very beginning of the OP, preceded of course by the question (in quotation marks) in the thread title.
…I mean if the issue at play here is that social media is collecting information about " habits, their fears, their locations, their health, their friends, their relationship struggles, their insecurities", then that cat is already well out of the bag now and TikTok is nothing but the "tip of the iceberg.
If you are concerned that “the information which TikTok is generating, and the social engineering which TikTok is capable of conducting, could be under the direction of the Chinese government”, then you should be even more concerned about the blatant manipulation and social engineering of social media algorithms by white supremacists and the so-called “manosphere.”
Andrew Tate has been in the news lately. Before he got banned from TikTok his videos had been watched 11.6 billion times.
The social engineering danger isn’t coming from the Chinese government. Not to the degree this thread is making it out to be. I mean: I agree it isn’t great. But the bigger danger is coming from inside the house. I want greater transparency across the board and I want all of the social media giants held to account. Both Facebook and Twitter have had a greater impact on our democracy than anything that TikTok has done IMHO. On the one hand you’ve got TikTok giving information to the Chinese Government. On the other you’ve got Elon Musk giving access to “gender critical” activists.
Everything in regard to the social media space is utterly screwed.
Well, different standards, obviously.
It’s a much bigger problem with some parts of the internet than others. Back when I hated the google keyboard, I restricted the keyboards I tried out to ones from developers who I had reason to trust. (Since a keyboard obviously has access to all your keystrokes. And there was one with really good reviews that was made in China or Russia or something that I never tried, because…it just seemed like it wasn’t worth it.) But other than keyboards, pretty much nothing needs keyboard access, and most apps don’t ask for it.
I haven’t actually tried TikTok, but I’ve been told that it asks for more permissions than most similar apps.
I mean, it’s not wrong that NPR’s reporting was bad. Their response should have been more like the response here. To whit: It’s not a TikTok-exclusive problem, mass surveillance is rampant online and especially on mobile devices. TikTok is notable because it’s likely a foreign state actor is collecting our information rather than a domestic corporation. You should care about all of this because our privacy is worth more than their profits, they are terrible stewards of this information, and it is often used in ways opposed to our best interests.
The worst part is “Ban TikTok” is a terrible solution. What we need are European-style privacy laws that put our interests ahead of companies profiting from the data we often don’t even realize we’re giving to them.
There’s an old saying in marketing: “If something is free, you’re not the customer, you’re the product.” This is absolutely true in social media: TikTok (and Facebook, Twitter, etc.) provide their content to you for free, but they are making their money by knowing things about you (your location, your demographics, your interests), and selling that information about you (and being able to target you) to third parties, who may not have your best interests in mind.
And frankly, the content they’re providing in exchange for me giving away my privacy ain’t worth it.
Yup. But that would cost profits.
NPR/1a’s guests made this point repeatedly during the segment, as I recall. Then they drilled in on how TikTok is unique because ByteDance is subject to Chinese laws allowing the government to access user data under gag orders.
The question emailed by a viewer was, “Why is TikTok stealing data any worse than Amazon or another American company? I don’t really care if the Chinese know how many cat videos I’m looking at.”
Niala Boodhoo of Axios hosted the NPA/1a segment on Tuesday afternoon, and at that time they were in the second half of the segment with Sara Morrison of Vox and Makena Kelly of The Verge on as guests.
Let me find the podcast… click the link below and skip to 24 minutes in:
Note the guests on the show talked about current efforts to negotiate something where TikTok would store its U.S. user data under U.S. supervision, and would prefer that over a complete ban. This was given special attention during the first half when Representative Krishnamoorthi was the guest. The journalists in the latter half of the program expressed a desire for stronger privacy laws and regulations, but they also talked about the political impossibility of doing so.
~Max
Well not yet. Maybe. We don’t know what they have and what they’re doing it, but we do know they have more resources than white supremacists. Plus American companies are at least under some pressure to shut down the worst offenders, while TikTok could be (or is) under pressure to get data.
There was an article in the Times today about how rich Chinese businessmen are moving to Singapore because they are afraid of the Chinese government.
…right now the white supremacists are having a significant impact, like directing bomb threats to children’s hospitals or recruitment to the manosphere. You don’t need government resources to do that.
Yesterday I heard about yet another white supremacist that Twitter had decided should be allowed to be unbanned and I went to check out his feed. It was wall-to-wall videos of black people beating up white people and him complaining, “why aren’t the media covering this?”
The thing about social media is that you get to personally curate what you see. So right now, all over Twitter and Facebook and TikTok and Instagram is an entire cesspool of racist and misogynist filth that most people will never even know exists. And because most people won’t see it, you aren’t ever going to see the type of pressure “to shut down the worst offenders” any more. Not when the marketplace is essentially a wild west. This is simply the free-market in action.
There is a significant chance that in the EU they actually will be able to shut this down. But that process will take a bit of time to work its way through.
But in the US?
The priorities are things like SESTA/FOSTA. You gotta keep those sex workers in their place, don’t you know?. But open displays of white supremacy? Not so much. Because “freedom of speech”, of course.
And I’ve been reading about how parents of trans kids are being forced to move to different states because they are afraid of the state government.
The world is simply fucked. I’m personally more worried about what Elon Musk is going to do with my data than what the Chinese government will do with it. But I’m not gonna stop using Twitter. Because if I stopped using everything that is collecting information about my habits, my fears, my locations, my health, my friends, my relationship struggles, my insecurities, then what even would there be left to do?