TikTok is not the problem. The problem is the phone platforms that allow very intrusive tracking for apps that do not need it.

This problem will only get solved when iOS and Android are forced to change their operating systems in a very big way.

A video sharing app should not be able to track location or any other data beyond what you watch inside their app. When that underlying problem is addressed then our phones will not be voluntary spying devices we carry with us willingly.

Less China is every aspect of life is a good thing, at least as long as they remain a communist country planning on taking over the world. The United States need to start moving away from dependency on China NOW.

Banning one app from China isn't going to help. We need to ban all companies who are owned even in part by China. Tencent alone owns parts of a lot of companies.

https://dataromas.com/what-companies-does-tencent-own/

Before I get downvoted to the bottom of the sea, keep in mind that under current Chinese law any Chinese company must comply with any and all government requests. That could mean turning over user privacy data to inserting backdoors into services.

https://thehill.com/opinion/cybersecurity/532583-for-chinese-firms-theft-of-your-data-is-now-a-legal-requirement/

Edit: and that's just one Chinese company.

Well.. this is basically a spat between China and the US, in which case China bans virtually all US tech companies. Facebook, Twitter, and others are all banned.

That headline... I'm pretty sure they think it's necessary, if they're going to pay $75m on it.

But why is the necessity wireless, instead of the network?

I believe Yahoo pulled out of China a few years ago. Some things like Yahoo Mail can still be accessed, but everything else just shows a message from Yahoo saying they've discontinued their services in the country.

Only Americans are allowed to steal data from Americans!

Clam it, chinese shill

Wonder which politician's portfolio just went up

Free market until it's not.

It’s being pushed by Meta. Meaning their lobby groups are brigading socials to push out the debate that we could ban a foreign tech company, which is obvious non-sense. It’s getting to the top each time because they employ upvote bots.

You’re supposed to debate this issue as if banning a rival economy’s business in a “free market” is at all on the table or ethical or moral or reasonable or enforceable or legal. It’s none of those things and most everyone knows it. This is why there needs to be more posts..

This is a good read:

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2023/02/banning-tiktok.html

> At best, the TikTok ban considered by Congress would be ineffective; at worst, a ban would force us to either adopt China’s censorship technology or create our own equivalent.

and

> If we want to address the real problem, we need to enact serious privacy laws, not security theater, to stop our data from being collected, analyzed, and sold—by anyone. Such laws would protect us in the long term, and not just from the app of the week.

People inside China don't access the Microsoft servers in the west. They access servers hosted and operated by a different company in China. Try and use yahoo search inside of China. Stop pretending that information and services aren't tightly controlled by the CCP in China. They are.

Go on, insult Xi and see how far you get. Go and protest in the streets and see what happens to you.

And yet the fallacy is thinking there's some coordinated effort to do this.

Greed and fools more than adequately explains things.

American propaganda at its finest when US companies simply are outcompeted by Chinese

Oh hell no! The world will come to a grinding, f’ing halt if narcissistic idiots can’t record themselves

If there's one thing that republicans and democrats can agree on is banning Tik Tok.

Because one is foreign and one is domestic? Typically with "national security" things the foreign access is a bigger concern than domestic is. Especially so when it's a major global rival like China.

Throw heat on shitty US companies, they deserve it, but this "well what about American companies stealing data!" is just sidestepping the legitimate issues with TikTok.

Some be benefits are the average IQ of teenagers should increase and doing away with a TON of "influencers".

All upside and no real downside.

They should inspect all imports for monitoring devices. Corn is all ears, I hear.

Doesn't every iphone need an iCloud/Apple ID account? Doesn't every Android need a google/microsoft/Samsung account?

How are those more trustworthy for people outside of the US, than TikTok and Huawei?

So what's going to stop China from just buying the same data from Google and Facebook?

Don't be silly. Nobody has that kind of money.

I love all the fear mongering over data collection from Tik Tok but absolute silence from all the data collection form Google, Apple, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, etc.

That is misinformation.

Just out of the big companies, I can think of Microsoft, Apple, Yahoo, LinkedIn, Skype operate in China.

> even without a specific concern.

They do have specific concerns, a big one is their lack of ability to enact censorship on foreign platforms.

And of course, PRISM has shown that NSA has infiltrated all the major American tech companies.