TikTok is owned by a Chinese company, and China is a totalitarian state, so it's basically owned by the Chinese government. Is it too paranoid to worry about all the videos and their metadata being controlled by the Chinese government?
Speaking personally, here's why TikTok concerns me: TikTok is a Chinese business, and China has shown no limit to how much it will meddle in the affairs of and even take control of Chinese businesses for the furthering of the Chinese state's agenda.
Simultaneously, TikTok has captured the daily attention spans of millions of Americans, many of them especially young and impressionable. They've captured their attention in the form of a black box algorithm that promotes content in whichever way TikTok deems most appropriate.
These two facts mean that the Chinese government now has direct access to the brains of millions of young Americans, with zero oversight. Imagine China subtly promoting videos to create outrage and civil unrest in the US, or to feed anti-US propaganda to germinate terrorist groups in the US. These might sound like far flung possibilities, but I think it's hard to say what a country that views the US as its enemy (politically, economically, philosophically) might do with that kind of power, and I don't think we can wait to find out.
China pretty notoriously controls their companies and the content they put out. I think it's wrong to assume they're all of the sudden laissez-faire with Tiktok content.
Please explain why TikTok is "owned and controlled" by the Chinese government.
TikTok is just as much "owned and controlled" by an adversarial state as any app by US corporations is "owned and controlled" by the US government due to national security letters and the CLOUD Act.
Are you actually concerned that the Chinese government might get access to your data or is it a matter of principle? What do you think they want to do with it? If they really wanted it could they not acquire it by other means? I ask as I'm genuinely curious. I'm considering install it on my phone to try it out and see how it compares to youtube. I'm not dissatisfied with my youtube feed. Just curious as to how much better TikTok would be based on the descriptions on the article and on this thread.
TikTok itself is painful to see being used by otherwise presumably intelligent persons when other free video hosting services exist, because its entire purpose is to get non-Chinese people using the internet outside of the great firewall accustomed to using a social media platform that's subject to centralized censorship by the CCP and Chinese domestic law. Go post stuff on it about Uighurs, Xinjiang, prison camps, tiennaman square etc and see what happens.
The company that owns TikTok is obligated under Chinese law to provide a data pipeline on users, activity, their back end database to the ministry for state security.
Is it a security concern compared to everything else we get from China, or are we just holding TikTok specifically to an unattainably high standard? We get so many products from China that could potentially be used for spying that we've never tried to ban due to security concerns. Who can say the ESP32 Wifi module doesn't have a hardware or software backdoor hidden in it?
AFAIK, there has never been any evidence or reason to suspect TikTok of sharing private data from Americans with the Chinese government. It seems like simply being from China is the crime the US government wants to ban TikTok for.
TikTok is concerning. With it's data and algorithms it could be used as a very effective tailored propaganda machine in theory. Given that China is a communist dictatorship with a thing for propaganda, and where government is always involved with companies, I believe that this is mostly justified.
TikTok is a Chinese company bringing in mountains of data on US citizens, including the ability to influence what people in the US see on a daily basis. The Chinese government would never sell that kind of leverage to anyone, let alone to Facebook, which is banned in China.
I don't use TikTok, so I'm not particularly worried about the Chinese government using it to spy on me. What I am worried about is the Chinese government using TikTok to launch influence and misinformation campaigns against US citizens.
Correct answer, downvoted of course since this is HN. I personally don’t care about privacy too much, but the way TikTok operates and its ties with the Chinese government is more than a little concerning. The videos are fun, too bad about the content.
The implications, as far as I've understood, is that the Chinese government has access and, theoretically, could be slurping the information that TikTok collects which is seemingly more than some others collect. I'm not purporting to know this is happening but I believe this is the reason for the assertion.
The fear is that any large Chinese project holding the personal data of Americans is inherently a security concern. It wouldn't be a big issue if Tiktok were French or Korean or something.
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