Snowden is sort of an unusual standard to apply for this sort of thing? Espionage and intelligence almost never meets a certain level of proof that's available to the public eye.
I'm not really sure what to make of Chinese government involvement with TikTok but from the information available, it seems like whatever it is, TikTok isn't being forthright about it.
You can distrust the US government and also think there's reasonable evidence the Chinese government has access to TikTok for domestic or foreign intelligence.
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.
I think it's more of a "China has been known to conduct mass espionage/monitoring of its citizens and abroad. Given that known fact, TikTok poses a concern." Don't think there's hard proof they are doing nefarious things via TikTok.
Tiktok has been used by the Chinese gov just like the U.S gov has been using its own internet companies(i.e apple, microsoft, google, meta etc). We already know from Snowden. I really dont understand why people act surprised.
If any national or supranational gov(i.e E.U) cares about privacy and security of its citizens it should ban data transfer and data access outside its jurisdiction(i.e require totally separate entity located in each country/jurisdiction). This would be better for taxes and local jobs too.
Considering that TikTok is a government controlled corporation (and all businesses in China effectively are) I don't know why anyone should be particularly inclined to trust their representations on this matter if they cannot be independently verified. It is in China's national security interest to deny the existence of any of this kind of data collection and analysis, especially in China.
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.
By theoretical, do you mean TikTok doesn't collect data that is made available to the Chinese government? In my mind, that's the practical use of an espionage tool. If not that, then what else do you mean?
Even if you ignore how suspicious that is, once the data is in China you have to assume it's made available to the government, since that's the official policy as far as I am aware.
I would have thought governments would be more worried about China spying on everyone and the insane data collection from TikTok (yes it might have an American operator in the US, but I can imagine they found a way to still siphon all that data to the mainland)...its a pretty big security risk if one thinks about it
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 stated issue is that TikTok may share American user data with China and that there’s not any real way for the US to prevent this possibility. So it’s seen as a national security issue that the Chinese govt could track Americans. TikTok has insisted that there’s no way that user data could be shared with the Chinese govt but I think US regulation bodies and intelligence do not buy it.
We now know that as a practical matter, American companies do cooperate with the US government in spying, influence operations, etc., and that the US government has a massive surveillance apparatus that is highly opaque and beyond the control of the American public.
That's why the sudden concern about TikTok theoretically being a problem comes across as an excuse for going after yet another Chinese company, as a way to pressure China and hamper its development.
My comment wasn't specific to TikTok, but rather OP's assertion that the U.S. is a hostile actor, whereas China is just being China.
Regarding TikTok, foreign-owned companies must follow U.S. laws, which are subject to due process. Additionally, they must not pose an imminent threat to national security. For better or worse, the government tends to be tight-lipped about matters of national security and isn't compelled to divulge details to the public. Normally, this is acceptable because we trust our government to act responsibility and in our best interest. Is TikTok a legitimate threat to security? I don't know, and with Trump's tendency to make everything look like a publicity stunt, my trust in the government to use its power responsibly is not very high.
So I'm an American who uses TikTok for entertainment.
I don't think it's utterly ridiculous to allow TikTok to continue. Even hearing these threats that China is possibly surveilling me - what do they get that other social media apps like Instagram get from me? From the FBI it sounds like the national security threat is that China may use it alter my feed to influence me or take over the control of my Apple phone? Has Apple warned users that TikTok will take control of their phone?
As far as I'm concerned, I'm just watching short 60 second videos and could not care less if China has my birthdate.
I feel like this TikTok backlash is so overblown. I don't think TikTok is spying on US consumers/business, and I don't think TikTok is sharing any US private data with CCP... I believe this because there's no evidence to the contrary, and out of principle you shouldn't assume malintent.
In fact, TikTok explicitly left Hong Kong because if they didn't they would have to share private data with CCP to comply with new laws... they're intentionally leaving MAU on the table to keep their users' data safe. [1]
If you look around, US social companies are making the same mistake with your clipboard data that TikTok did. LinkedIn just got caught reading your clipboard data [2], but we aren't talking about banning them... I would assume in all of these cases, it's just an engineer who accidentally shipped a bug. There are legitimate use cases to read the clipboard (eg. more seamless 2fa).
It feels like the negative reaction to TikTok is so politicized and just comes from a "China bad" attitude.
The only actual issue with this setup for citizens of the US is that US citizens like to be the people with access to the data and doing the spying. What you have described, a state intelligence service with access to loads of user data that they happily use for spying is what the US has normalized. Collecting all this data is par for the course (Snowden exposed that pretty conclusively) and non US citizens have no rights as far as the US is concerned. Are they (china) doing it, probably not, seems like a lot of effort for very little gain I mean you find out that I like puppy videos and mostly stay in my house. It's a fun app though :) - also to the original person's tweet, most of the apps on my iphone pop this up from time to time, so if we are going to accuse TikTok of spying on me we should be accusing Calm and Insight Timer too (to randomly pick two).
I'm not really sure what to make of Chinese government involvement with TikTok but from the information available, it seems like whatever it is, TikTok isn't being forthright about it.
You can distrust the US government and also think there's reasonable evidence the Chinese government has access to TikTok for domestic or foreign intelligence.
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