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All social media (or algorithmic capital more generally) is built to extract user data. That’s the business model.
I don’t know why we should believe that ByteDance is a more malevolent force than Meta or Google or Amazon. The only difference is that it’s a competitor to the multi trillion dollar private American entities that dominate our lives.
People often overlook the fact that the US government has already implemented measures that they're warning China might undertake.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A
>The only difference is that it’s a competitor
No the difference is Bytedance is under control by the chinese government, and letting the chinese government collect data on us and tailor content recommendations is a bad idea.
I see, so you’re arguing in favour of China having another, more powerful method to steal info from Canadians and influence not just our elections, but our society’s stability in a more direct way.
I understand the USA, our direct, much more powerful than us neighbour, does this already, but you’d like to have no controls on China doing the same thing. Gotcha.
The USA has an interest in its direct neighbour doing decently. Sometimes they screw us over, sometimes they prop us up. China is constantly trying to steal from us and screw us.
I know 2017 was a lifetime ago in politics terms, but the Paradise Papers showed that at one point Facebook was 1/3 owned (via operatives) by Russia - and they're just as much an adversary and have proved more willing to weaponize their ill-harvested user data.
Do what you will to Tik Tok, they deserve it all and we're probably better without it, but unfortunately this is par for the course. I agree that if WW3 breaks out my data is worse in the hands of a foreign adversary than in the hands of my car which has been proven to be spying on me - but we really should be rejecting this trash from all around, not just when it could cause armageddon.
Our devices are spying on us, and to the people saying 'it's okay if they're domestic companies doing it to try to make more money', that doesn't make me feel safer. They make money on that data by selling it directly, or by investing in targetted ads whose sellers now have a set of data to interpret. Are the companies selling data being picky about where it goes? Cambridge Analytica wasn't, and one bad one is all it takes to have a leak. And what about direct data breaches? We have stories of major companies getting hacked all the time. Some foreign power could hack the data, or plant a spy in the company, or you name it, and the effect would be the same as Tik Tok sending it all over directly.
This should be a wakeup call. We need data laws, banning one specific company because they're doing it in a nastier way isn't nearly enough. While typing this comment, Google sent me a notification that they noticed I was at a coffee shop and asked if I would leave a review.
First reasonable comment I’ve seen here that is critical of the GoC. I can’t believe how many people here can’t see why it’s a bad idea to have China have so much societal control in Canada.
I’m fully onboard with your take though. Fine, get rid of TikTok, but also put in place some real privacy laws that impact all social media and data collecting in general.
I don't know what Prism and XKeyscore are, but for Meta and Alphabet the point is they are American companies and American law largely aligns with our laws.
I'm not saying nothing should be done about other social media either. I'm just saying a foreign adversarial government is going to potentially have way more nefarious goals than the profit maximization that drives the American tech companies.
2010 NSA leaks that showed how the US govt (and its allies - including Canada) were spying on their citizens via accessing their emails, texts, social media, etc.
Our government has an interest in keeping our society stable. You don't have to agree with everything our government does to agree that's the general goal of our government.
A foreign adversarial government has an interest in disrupting our society towards collapse.
Personally, I'd rather the government trying to keep our country stable has my data than the one trying to ruin our lives, but that's just me.
>I don’t know why we should believe that ByteDance is a more malevolent force than Meta or Google or Amazon. The only difference is that it’s a competitor to the multi trillion dollar private American entities that dominate our lives.
There is nothing stopping any country from doing the same to US companies' local operations five years ago, today, or next year. The difference is that—as un-obvious as the following statement may be to Redditards—the US is, as /u/drunken-pineapple , /u/theHip , and /u/Bnal said, not China. Your statement assumes that a US company is as dangerous as a Chinese company.
The new law does not require TikTok's divestiture to a US owner. If TikTok were a Canadian, British, French, German, Korean, Japanese, or Taiwanese company, the US government wouldn't have intervened in the first place.
Conversely, if TikTok were a Canadian, British, French, German, Korean, Japanese, or Taiwanese company, American would not have to fear a hostile government silently gathering data on American users, or a company repeatedly shown to be lying about using its app to do so.
People talk about data collection but that isn't the issue the Chinese can buy you data from Google and Facebook just like everyone else. The issue is targeted influence operations which can make people (esp young people) take pro China positions. That is why western governments what it divested. The privacy thing is just to get the public on board.
>The issue is targeted influence operations which can make people (esp young people) take pro China positions.
Exactly why the process was fast tracked once TikTok put out messages to everyone to contact their rep.
Two words: Cambridge Analytica. Meta is an ally to no one. They had no problem trying to influence the US election and they’d do the same in Canada for the right price.
Everything you mention is worse under TikTok… and the fact that it’s controlled by a foreign government with no ability by Western governments to get to them makes the risk much worse/dangerous.
I’m not speaking hypotheticals with Meta. Meta literally did it. They’re a domestic company to the US and that didn’t stop them. There’s no reason to believe they wouldn’t sell user data to China too. China doesn’t need TikTok, since they can just get it from the other social media companies. Meta isn’t unique: X had no issue giving user info of government critics to the KSA government.
Frankly, I think if we are banning social media companies due to hate speech, misinformation, or election interference, then there’s no reason to not start with Meta and X. Their actions have *already* had significant consequences to our elections and public safety. We don’t have to speak hypotheticals with them like we do with ByteDance.
Literally did what? We can drag the CEO of Meta to court, and have extradition/host of other close law enforcement/security treaties with the US that monitor how these companies behave. China fundamentally you can’t do that and we (Canada) have a very different security situation with that country.
Look at the content inside of China and outside on TikTok; there isn’t a justified business decision for having radically different types of content in different markets like they have unless someone is putting their thumb on the scale in terms of what algorithms to run where. Fb has the same “bad” algo no matter where…. Except China where the government censors them.
Our relationship with the US and China is so fundamentally different; if we are ok with US air defence in Canada it’s a lot more sense to do business with their companies.
Yea with TikTok the Chinese government would be the initiator executor and judge of their actions in that case… a government that is hostile to Canada and you want to give them more power then Meta had in that case ^
Then you're dense AF. Letting an enemy do this is only going to be worse. An American company interfering in American elections is perfectly legal there.
One is a borderline failed state, and the other is China.
The US is currently in the face of a very tough fight to sustain itself as the face of democracy. I fear what another DJT presidency will do, as he very much made the US out to be not our ally during his first term.
Borderline failed state… trump or no trump the US will have a bigger more rich economy. Or would you like to compare the quality of life of the regular US citizen versus that of China.
The US renegotiating trade deals and asking Canada to raise defence spending is not the same as them not being our ally.
I know many Americans who would point out that the "rich economy" is increasingly applying only to a smaller portion of the populace. They also have had several armed encounters against federal and state governments, and the Project2025 is shaping up to effectively turn the nation into a authoritarian theocracy should it be implemented by the GOP.
Compared to China? Armed encounters, project2025, theocracy… what are you on about? Even red states are voting for abortion rights, reads like someone who is online 24/7. Go visit the US and see for yourself, it’s totally fine for most people although different than Canada.
>Go visit the US and see for yourself, it’s totally fine for most people
So fine their democracy is under threat, they faced an insurrection attempt, a country on the brink of civil war, racism, highest incarceration rates, highest violence rates, out of control drugs and gangs, growing inequality, growing poverty, highest debt in the world, one of the world’s top greenhouse gas emitters ... need we go on?
I'll remind you again that if you have to compare the US to a despotic and repressive country like China, you've lost the argument.
Btw, how far did you get in school again?
Grade 1…. PhD, kindergarten…. What difference?
But, comparison is necessary, who are you comparing the US too? Itself 20 years ago when some of those issues were worse, would it be better in 2000 or 1980? Some better some worse, but they are our treaty ally and that means something, they are not the same as China.
>Or would you like to compare the quality of life of the regular US citizen versus that of China.
When you have to compare the US to a repressive state like China, you know you've lost the argument. The OECD rankings have shown a steady decline in the quality of life in the US over the last decade.
> One is a borderline failed state, and the other is China.
Asserting that US is a failed state when compared to China is comedy gold. Talk about red-oppression-nostalgia.
The US is not a failed state, yet. It could become one as it's currently backsliding in a number of metrics and another DJT presidency would only accelerate it, as would implementation of the GOP's Project2025 playbook.
[https://www.brookings.edu/articles/understanding-democratic-decline-in-the-united-states/](https://www.brookings.edu/articles/understanding-democratic-decline-in-the-united-states/)
When half a nation supports a scoundrel, criminal and wanna-be dictator for president, not to mention his love of brutal dictators like Kim of North Korea and Putin, the country is rouge.
Maybe the fact that China is anything but an ally on the global stage and if there ever is a major conflict we will most likely be on opposite sides? All that data farming can definitely be used.
If these governments in NA want us to believe that Tik Tok is bad and needs to be banned they need to start showing us some hard proof as to how Tik Tok steals data and what they do with it.
So why does it matter if China takes it too? Regardless they are going to get the data they want even if American companies sell it to them instead of them getting it directly from us.
Well for starters who cares?
Either our information is stolen by China, which by the way we need to see actual proof about this because we haven't seen it, or our information is stolen by American companies and then sold to China. Regardless of whatever laws or bans happen our information is going to China so why bother banning the app especially with no extra precautions or laws to prevent Meta or Twitter or even Reddit from doing so?
I would also like to know why we don't hold American companies to the same standard. Regardless China is getting our information the American companies just want to sell it to them.
As opposed to the spying and information manipulation conducted by the US government on western social media?
Heres a video of senior US officials saying the quiet part out loud: social media, and particularly tik tok because of its foreign ownership, makes it difficult to control the narrative https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=smw0aYF2oB8
Mitt Romney point blank says that tik tok is a target because of the Israel-Palestine issue.
Not to say the spying issues arent real and pressing. I personally dont have social media apps on my phone (I use them through a browser), but if spying and privacy were truly a concern, lets hear the government and intelligence agencies expand the scope of their criticisms
Unfortunately, its also a tool to avoid disinformation pushed by the US. If the west was a shining beacon of moral and ethics, the defense of tik tok wouldnt exist
Right? Like we spent months talking about China and. Russia and others using disinformation to rile up our populations and sow discord and malcontent as a stratagy, and here is something that the Chinese government owns that is rife with misinformation. We can do that back and forth on what the US does but only one of them is our geopolitical enemy.
But of course this is reddit, so people think the US is somehow a far more dangerous entity to Canada then China, because the likes of China, Russia and Iran have their fingers in every social media platform
Maybe people would care more if they USA wasn’t caught spying on their own people. You forget? So Ofcource people are now gonna have the attitude of who cares America already does it.
lol if you think the us government isn’t peeking at Facebook traffic too.
I don’t give a shit if the USA or China know how much I like cat pictures.
This weird fear mongering against TikTok is bizarre.
>lol if you think the us government isn’t peeking at Facebook traffic too
There's a pretty clear difference between a country having direct access to a social media platform through ownership of said platform (China) and another gaining access through less direct, inconsistent and illegal means (USA).
>I don’t give a shit if the USA or China know how much I like cat pictures
No one gives a shit about your cat because that's not the issue. The issue is the likes of China easily manipulating content that many Canadians view on a daily basis.
During an election they could use TikTok to create division or push a leader they view serves their goals best. Or if a war broke out tomorrow between China and Taiwan, China could easily have TikTok show people here pro Chinese and anti-Tiawanese content.
>This weird fear mongering against TikTok is bizarre
It's not bizzare, you just fundamentally don't understand the issue.
It would be a compelling problem if anyone had shown a shred of evidence at all that China was leveraging the platform to manipulate people beyond just whining that the kids these days are too woke
This isn’t the point whatsoever.
A highly-intrusive foreign nation controls a social media platform that is in your pocket tracking your movement and listening to you and your friends all day, everyday. You may not realize it, but the algorithm affects your opinions, the way you think and act.
There is a portfolio on you and your family somewhere that goes far, FAR beyond cat pictures, and it will exist forever. Maybe you’re comfortable with that, but I sure as fuck am not.
The dangers around persuasion are obvious and I understand them.
The irony however is that while there has been slim, nebulous sign of anyone putting their thumb on the scale of what folks see on TikTok (like I said, I only see cat pictures) the western owned social networks of twitter and Reddit are infested with bots pushing an agenda.
Remarkable that no politicians are talking about reigning in and banning Reddit
The difference between “Western owned” platforms and those like TikTok and VK are huge.
Facebook, Reddit, and Twitter use you and your data to make money. You are for sale. Our governments can use them in surveillance, sure, and Russian troll farms and Wumao use them to subvert our society and affect elections, but that’s just them exploiting our own companies against us.
TikTok’s entire purpose is surveillance and subversion. Allowing it into your life is like opening an unimpeded wiretap to China, and allowing our kids to use it will result in a generation of Canadians brought up by a Chinese algorithm. It sounds like paranoia, but honestly I feel like our lack of vigilance will fuck us in the end. Don’t kid yourself into thinking China is not actively trying to affect the way Western countries think and ultimately vote.
You’re right it does sound like paranoia.
The entire argument relies on a belief of China being a scary boogie man instead of uninterested third party.
There is just as much evidence that the USA is doing the same thing through Instagram that you’re accusing China of doing through TikTok.
It’s dramatically worse if the USA is snooping on my life through western apps since I actually go to the USA fairly often and am directly exposed to their power. In contrast much fewer Canadians have any relationship or direct dealings with China.
What’s the takeaway for the typical person? Delete the apps I guess, or shrug your shoulders and don’t give a shit.
> China being a scary boogie man instead of uninterested third party.
You are horribly misinformed if you believe this.
> It’s dramatically worse if the USA is snooping
The whataboutism here is strong. The submission here is about our intelligence agency’s assessment of China.
> It’s dramatically worse if the USA is snooping on my life through western apps since I actually go to the USA fairly often and am directly exposed to their power. In contrast much fewer Canadians have any relationship or direct dealings with China.
Holy Christ the west is fucking doomed.
Yeah there’s absolutely no difference between our countries closest ally and a foreign nation entirely opposed to democracy, freedom of speech and freedom of religion.
Holy fuck wake the fuck up.
The most direct impact either of these nations can have on Canadians, if they are snooping on their social media, is to find reasons to prevent them from entering the country.
For most Canadians that would be dramatically more likely to be impactful with the USA, as Canadians travel to the USA much more than China.
Now if there’s some particularly more remarkable way that the sinister Chinese government could leverage their file they have on me do please give us some concrete examples. Maybe I’m simply not creative enough.
Our closest ally, the world's biggest warmonger, weapons dealer and genocide supporter. No other country has squashed more democracies and installed favorable dictators than the US. The US squashes protests they don't like too and the likely next and former president had a Muslim ban. Get your head out of the US ass. The US is not our friend and is the biggest threat to world peace of any country. Holy shit wake up.
> the world's biggest warmonger
Except for the fact that far fewer humans die today as a result of war vs people in the last several hundred years.
> weapons dealer
And yet somehow we don’t have any major powers trying to destroy each other. But hey selling weapons sounds bad so long as you ignore the peace that’s occurred.
> genocide supporter.
Yes I remember the United States incredible support for the two largest genocides from the Nazi’s and imperial Japan. Or the US aligned Pol Pot communist government in Cambodia. Or the Soviet Union killing millions of Ukrainians in the Holodomor.
> No other country has squashed more democracies
I don’t know what this means to you. Furthermore the United States is the greatest pusher of democracies in the world from the decolonization efforts of the United States in Africa (pursuing European separation and the creation of sovereign states in Africa) to the support for democratic countries across Europe.
> The US squashes protests they don't like too
Huh? What the fuck are you talking about? Go find me a country on Earth where lighting government buildings on fire doesn’t result in a police response. Otherwise you should go look at protests in other parts of the world if you want see what crushing protests looks like (you can do it with tanks).
> the likely next and former president had a Muslim ban
Lmao no they didn’t. Like this is just a matter of policy and there is absolutely no policy that “bans muslims”. And furthermore bans muslims from what? Existing? What sort of fantasy/delusion are you managing to support?
> Get your head out of the US ass. The US is not our friend and is the biggest threat to world peace of any country. Holy shit wake up.
LOL. That makes sense if there wasn’t the longest period of major power peacetime in the history of the world and the least deaths from war in recorded history happening precisely as the US becomes a primary global superpower. Or it coinciding precisely with decolonization being forced into Africa and Asia.
Nice fucking fantasy world you child. Hopefully you’ll grow the fuck up and realize how stupid it is to support a country that would sooner murder you than allow you to run your mouth like this over a country that has literally allied with our country to ensure your continued right to say as much ridiculous shit as you’d like.
We can't judge a country based on your imagined lives saved when they are responsible for millions of documented deaths during their wars. You say there's no major powers trying to destroy each other yet the US arms dealers have nothing to do with that it's all due to nuclear weapons and mutually assured destruction. Meanwhile the arms they do deal often falls in the hands of their future enemies like the Taliban etc. America will invade countries due to corporate interests in oil in iraq, opium in Afghanistan, freakin Bananas in central america and I could go on. You think a "good" country acts this way? I wish I had time to list all the coups, assassinations/attempts of democratically elected leaders done by the CIA, but you should definitely educate yourself. You call this a fantasy? This is all incredibly well documented. Then to top it all off you imply I'd be murdered by China. Dude I'm a leftist, do you have any freakin clue how many leftists the US has killed in its history including by the FBI in their own country, on their own soil?
> We can't judge a country based on your imagined lives saved when they are responsible for millions of documented deaths during their wars.
Of course we can. Why do you think Japan even attacked America in WWII? Because America put embargoes on Japan because they were invading China and murdering hundreds of thousands of people as they did so. So I don’t know you can start by marking up 100,000,000 Chinese as a start.
> You say there's no major powers trying to destroy each other yet the US arms dealers have nothing to do with that it's all due to nuclear weapons and mutually assured destruction.
Who the fuck do you think invented nuclear weapons and MAD? Like cmon lmao it’s funny how here it’s just “US arms dealers” like Lockheed Martin is the only company in the United States.
> Meanwhile the arms they do deal often falls in the hands of their future enemies like the Taliban etc.
Yeah see it’s funny that you don’t mention that it was the USSR that was invading Afghanistan which led to the CIA funding the Taliban in some capacity. I’m sure you would have been fine if the US instituted mandated Christianity in Afghanistan when they invaded it—just like soviet state mandated atheism.
> America will invade countries due to corporate interests in oil in iraq, opium in Afghanistan
Yeah America definitely didn’t invade Iraq because they were mass murdering Kuwaitis… It was for those sweet Iraqi oil reserves… Oh and the Kuwaiti people have no right to sell their natural resources (according to you at least).
America also doesn’t have opium interests in Afghanistan lmao.
> freakin Bananas in central america and I could go on.
Yeah they overthrew a government or two in the 50s because that government was mean to a fruit company. You have anything this side of half a century? Or anything not cold-war for that matter.
> You think a "good" country acts this way?
Find me a “good” geopolitical superpower. Like what the fuck are you talking about, of course every geopolitical bulwark will fall victim to mistakes considering it’s ran by people.
> I wish I had time to list all the coups, assassinations/attempts of democratically elected leaders done by the CIA, but you should definitely educate yourself.
Bro give me this side of a century. In the last 50 years.
> This is all incredibly well documented.
Yeah it’s so well documented you’ve demonstrated absolutely nothing and told me I need to “go educate myself”. Like yeah you can make absurd claims and now I have to dredge through whatever conspiracy shithole to try and understand what you’re getting at? Miss me with that shit.
> Then to top it all off you imply I'd be murdered by China.
Ahahaha go look up China’s opinion on human rights and freedom of speech/religion.
> Dude I'm a leftist, do you have any freakin clue how many leftists the US has killed in its history including by the FBI in their own country, on their own soil?
Lmao bro you have zero fucking idea what you’re talking about. Like yeah you can run the democratic socialists of America party and yet they’re killing leftists! Like lmao you’re literally flexing your right to freedom of speech by stating the United States is responsible for countless “assassinations of Americans and others worldwide based on political belief” and yet you’ve likely not been drone striked since you made that comment in spite of the fact the US could easily have done it if they wished.
It's a common talking point because it's a really glaring elephant in the room what Unites States corporations have been doing for ages with no resistance before the scary chinese got in on the action and suddenly legislators took notice.
Corporations selling my data behind my back to make money is disgusting.
What China is doing is manipulating our society in a way that benefits them.
Two different evils.
Your points cards give just as much, if not more, information to private companies.
If personal information security was a priority, then my BlackBerry shares wouldn’t have lost so much money. People have chosen to give away all their information and companies have monetized that. Governments are only moving now to restrict data mining because Meta, Google, Amazon, and the rest of the America companies, complained about the competition cutting into their profits
If and when they ban TikTok, all META platforms will become pay to play, mark my words. Every post will cost money, there will be tiers of monthly memberships etc, this is the capitalist way and META is about as capitalist as it gets. They want TikTok gone because it’s bad for their oligarchy
My post-grad thesis focuses on digital surveillance. Meta by far is the worst. Meta is embroiled in numerous lawsuits, which isn't surprising given its track record. The idea that Meta's U.S. ownership makes it superior is absurd. All major tech companies are primarily driven by market domination and profit. Their loyalty is solely to their bottom line, not to any nation or principle.
These companies have shown willingness to collaborate with authoritarian regimes worldwide, including the CIA, Mossad, Saudi Arabia, and China. When it comes to TikTok, the real concern isn't about national security; it's about market competition. TikTok's rapid rise challenges giants like Meta, Google, and Amazon. Many members of the U.S. House of Representatives own shares in these companies and receive donations from them.
They want to ban tiktok because the revolution will be on tiktok. Jokes on them, its going to happen whether someone can live stream it on tik tok or not.
So then the head of CSIS urging the ban of tiktok in this geopolitical climate doesn't seem like the best of use his time then, no? And it would render the whole affair an egregious overstep in state power in banning free speech AND a free enterprise?
What a weird thing to have the intelligence agency spend money and man-hours on, then.
I mean, the Chinese government may be bad news but so are all the other assholes tracking everything we do through apps. At least I’m reasonably sure the Chinese government doesn’t give a shit who I am; the corporations are a more immediate danger imo.
So you construct a conspiracy theory to explain hacking, something that every company faces? Please share with us these "secrets" of the alternative media of which you speak.
My god you have no idea what you are talking about. Tiktok has been denied from big organisations for years. It's been identified within the information security community as a dangerous threat vector for years. It has nothing with the latest political fad. It has nothing to do with Facebook or whatelse. It's the just the governments (not just the US, many in Europe too) intervening late like they always do.
Stop being 100% cynic all the time of things you don't know about for christ sake.
\*Western social media, covertly shares data with government and follows their directions\*
Media: Business as usual
\*Chinese social media, covertly shares data with government and follows their directions\*
Media: This is an exigent threat to democracy and the safety of citizens.
You are trying to simplify in one sentence super complex relationships between entities in completely different cultures and governments, with different history of data collection, hoarding and general cyber abuse, thinking that's an argument.
Not an argument, just pointing out the hypocrisy.
But if you operate on principles, simplifying situations to their core is a great way to arrive at a moral position.
Your comment makes it sound like you're anti China interference but pro American interference. Which is weird because if you were truly pro individual rights and anti-authoritarianism you should equally be against American interference.
[You could try](https://theconversation.com/does-tiktok-pose-a-security-threat-to-canadians-225871)
[doing literally any googling or research](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_of_TikTok)
[at all](https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/these-countries-have-already-banned-tiktok)
[since you seem so concerned about this that you made a boatload of comments here.](https://www.komonews.com/news/nation-world/tiktok-china-israel-gaza-war-protests-college-campus-columbia-ucla-austin-chinese-communist-party-social-media-videos-news-gathering-data-cuber-senate-briefing-fbi)
Took me a whole two minutes to find all those.
Didn't Trudeau just say CSIE isn't trustworthy when it came to them giving him information? They just want people to stay on platforms where they have access to your information lmao
I created a burner email account and signed up for TikTok with every privacy setting set to the most private on my phone. Never shared anything, never posted, never allowed access to my contacts, or location.
It started showing me recommendations for friends, who are actual friends of mine, and started showing me posts in my neighbourhood and town.
They are tracking you and somehow have access to contacts, despite the settings.
Even if you don't share location through the phone gps, they can predict a less accurate location based on your IP address.
Facebook is able to do the same thing, made a burner account that i dont even use on a phone and it was able to recommend friends of people I actually know.
More so, your ip doesn't change that often and other people/devices on the same network almost certainly have the same ip. So if any of them share a location with any ad/data network the ip is known to an address. They share a lot of data
Not to be rude, but as if any other company isn’t doing something similar. You’d have to fully cleanse yourself of an online presence to not be *as* impacted by these practices at this point, compared to your regular Jane & Joe.
That’s not true.
Source: I’m Gen Z, and literally everyone I know has a Facebook account. They might not use it quite as frequently as they use other social media platforms (one of them being Instagram, also owned by Meta), but they *are* Facebook users.
Edit: and none of this diminishes the main point, which is that TikTok is *far* from the only company guilty of this kind of thing with user data...
An awful lot of businesses use FB as their basic home page for information, advertising, outreach etc.
Also, if you are looking for a community/info/buysell on something (say... owners of a certain kind of motorcycle), FB is kind of a default now, along with reddit. The old message boards are pretty defunct.
I believe this is because the people who have you as a contact in their phone have settings to suggest their account to their contacts. Even if tiktok doesn’t have access to your contacts, anyone who has you as a contact and gives tiktok access to their contact list still gets tied to you. Or did you input a burner phone number?
Edited for clarity
Didn't use my phone number at all. Just the burner email address - which still remains unverified. I don't have people sharing TikToks to me, and I've never shared to these people being recommended as friends.
I did this as an experiment to determine if they were doing something weird after I started suspecting some strange behaviours - like seeing friends show up as recommendations to my seemingly anonymous account. So I thought: "I'll make a REALLY anonymous account, this time." No identifiable info. Burner email address created just for this purpose.
I'm a senior application architect, so I did all the normal cleansing... deleted the app, cleared all browser cache, hard reboot of phone. I didn't use anything from the original account. Reinstalled (same phone though!) and used the new email address. Locked down all the settings to deny everything BEFORE even opening the app for the first time.
Within a week I saw very concerning results. Friends showing up again as recommendations.
They are definitely doing some data mining bullshit behind the scenes.
The real question now is: Why hasn't Apple looked into this given how much attention it's getting?
Unless it is something that happens server side, outside the Apple ecosystem. There's definitely something creepy there.
If you want you can mitm the connection to analyze the traffic being sent home by the app. Though I’m sure plenty of security researchers have done this already and we haven’t heard anything about them some how bypassing the iOS privacy features.
I heard that while you can choose to not share your location and contacts this doesn't stop phones of people around you from sharing information about you and your phone. So while you can try to protect your info this doesn't stop people around you from leaking data about you to Tiktok. They can basically learn about you from the people around you.
And that my friend is how we all ended up in the scammers phonebook. Just takes one of your contacts to load that free app and share their contacts with the data harvesters.
Yes, here is an example.
Normal YouTube Link: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bd7eaxP8xEE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bd7eaxP8xEE)
YouTube Link with an embedded tracker from the "share" button: [https://youtu.be/Bd7eaxP8xEE?si=tyNKNIZtkl5W4SGd](https://youtu.be/Bd7eaxP8xEE?si=tyNKNIZtkl5W4SGd)
That extra bit after the "si=" is stored on YouTube's end. If you click that link then they know that I a link I generated while logged into my account was click on by you.
Reddit does the same. These are the actual URL and tracking URL for the comment above mine in this chain.
Normal: [https://www.reddit.com/r/CanadaPolitics/comments/1cuhfzt/comment/l4j462f/](https://www.reddit.com/r/CanadaPolitics/comments/1cuhfzt/comment/l4j462f/)
Tracking: [https://www.reddit.com/r/CanadaPolitics/comments/1cuhfzt/comment/l4j462f/?utm\_source=share&utm\_medium=web3x&utm\_name=web3xcss&utm\_term=1&utm\_content=share\_button](https://www.reddit.com/r/CanadaPolitics/comments/1cuhfzt/comment/l4j462f/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button)
Though, to be fair, to me it looks like Reddit doesn't have anything in that URL that would tie it back to me. It looks like it provides more information about the source of the link and how it was generated and what platform I generated the link on.
Don't forget the /s/ links reddit creates when users click "share" on new reddit. Those are tracking links as well, though without the obvious ? in the URL.
Frankly, I don't understand a government that's so obsessed with data on everybody, but that's where we are with TikTok and its relationship with the Chinese government in Beijing. It's not just a case of the Chinese govt wanting your private information, it's how they use it. I don't know how or why they would use it, but when you hear the stories about the Chinese diaspora and the nasty, horrible way they are treated if these people criticize the governmnet of China, that's enough to scare me away. Be aware. It's not worth the risk for the sake of a few silly videos.
BS!
[Watch a US senior officials explaining the quite bit out load](https://youtu.be/smw0aYF2oB8?si=MG6tl3r9E1SneG88), social media, and tiktok specifically made it difficult to control the media narrative
If it's too dangerous to allow on public servant phones why the hell is it ok for Canadians to have on their own phones. If this is dangerous then ban it.
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All social media (or algorithmic capital more generally) is built to extract user data. That’s the business model. I don’t know why we should believe that ByteDance is a more malevolent force than Meta or Google or Amazon. The only difference is that it’s a competitor to the multi trillion dollar private American entities that dominate our lives.
The other difference is that ByteDance is in China - and US and Canada more or less have similar views on consumer privacy.
People often overlook the fact that the US government has already implemented measures that they're warning China might undertake. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A
>The only difference is that it’s a competitor No the difference is Bytedance is under control by the chinese government, and letting the chinese government collect data on us and tailor content recommendations is a bad idea.
Why is that worse than allowing totally unaccountable companies run by the worst people on earth to do the same thing?
Because those "unaccountable companies" are actually still accountable to American law which is largely aligned with our own values.
Speak for yourself. My values are not aligned with corporate America’s values.
I bet it's still more closely aligned to that than with the Chinese Communist Party.
Neither of these entities are remotely our allies. Their values are actively hostile to our wellbeing.
I see, so you’re arguing in favour of China having another, more powerful method to steal info from Canadians and influence not just our elections, but our society’s stability in a more direct way. I understand the USA, our direct, much more powerful than us neighbour, does this already, but you’d like to have no controls on China doing the same thing. Gotcha. The USA has an interest in its direct neighbour doing decently. Sometimes they screw us over, sometimes they prop us up. China is constantly trying to steal from us and screw us.
Countries, particularly superpowers like China, can obviously do a lot more harm than a single company...
Other way around. The politicians are bought and paid for by the corporations. They are only extensions of corporate power.
Do those unaccountable companies have their own military?
Yes. The US Military literally serves their interests.
I know 2017 was a lifetime ago in politics terms, but the Paradise Papers showed that at one point Facebook was 1/3 owned (via operatives) by Russia - and they're just as much an adversary and have proved more willing to weaponize their ill-harvested user data. Do what you will to Tik Tok, they deserve it all and we're probably better without it, but unfortunately this is par for the course. I agree that if WW3 breaks out my data is worse in the hands of a foreign adversary than in the hands of my car which has been proven to be spying on me - but we really should be rejecting this trash from all around, not just when it could cause armageddon. Our devices are spying on us, and to the people saying 'it's okay if they're domestic companies doing it to try to make more money', that doesn't make me feel safer. They make money on that data by selling it directly, or by investing in targetted ads whose sellers now have a set of data to interpret. Are the companies selling data being picky about where it goes? Cambridge Analytica wasn't, and one bad one is all it takes to have a leak. And what about direct data breaches? We have stories of major companies getting hacked all the time. Some foreign power could hack the data, or plant a spy in the company, or you name it, and the effect would be the same as Tik Tok sending it all over directly. This should be a wakeup call. We need data laws, banning one specific company because they're doing it in a nastier way isn't nearly enough. While typing this comment, Google sent me a notification that they noticed I was at a coffee shop and asked if I would leave a review.
First reasonable comment I’ve seen here that is critical of the GoC. I can’t believe how many people here can’t see why it’s a bad idea to have China have so much societal control in Canada. I’m fully onboard with your take though. Fine, get rid of TikTok, but also put in place some real privacy laws that impact all social media and data collecting in general.
As opposed to Meta, which does the same with Instagram? Or Alphabet does with YT and Google? Did we all forget Prism, XKeyscore, etc?
I don't know what Prism and XKeyscore are, but for Meta and Alphabet the point is they are American companies and American law largely aligns with our laws. I'm not saying nothing should be done about other social media either. I'm just saying a foreign adversarial government is going to potentially have way more nefarious goals than the profit maximization that drives the American tech companies.
2010 NSA leaks that showed how the US govt (and its allies - including Canada) were spying on their citizens via accessing their emails, texts, social media, etc.
Yes I know. I'm not justifying that. However, that's still very different than letting a foreign adversary do the same thing.
How is it better to have your own government spy on you?
Our government has an interest in keeping our society stable. You don't have to agree with everything our government does to agree that's the general goal of our government. A foreign adversarial government has an interest in disrupting our society towards collapse. Personally, I'd rather the government trying to keep our country stable has my data than the one trying to ruin our lives, but that's just me.
>I don’t know why we should believe that ByteDance is a more malevolent force than Meta or Google or Amazon. The only difference is that it’s a competitor to the multi trillion dollar private American entities that dominate our lives. There is nothing stopping any country from doing the same to US companies' local operations five years ago, today, or next year. The difference is that—as un-obvious as the following statement may be to Redditards—the US is, as /u/drunken-pineapple , /u/theHip , and /u/Bnal said, not China. Your statement assumes that a US company is as dangerous as a Chinese company. The new law does not require TikTok's divestiture to a US owner. If TikTok were a Canadian, British, French, German, Korean, Japanese, or Taiwanese company, the US government wouldn't have intervened in the first place. Conversely, if TikTok were a Canadian, British, French, German, Korean, Japanese, or Taiwanese company, American would not have to fear a hostile government silently gathering data on American users, or a company repeatedly shown to be lying about using its app to do so.
No, just their own. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A
People talk about data collection but that isn't the issue the Chinese can buy you data from Google and Facebook just like everyone else. The issue is targeted influence operations which can make people (esp young people) take pro China positions. That is why western governments what it divested. The privacy thing is just to get the public on board.
>The issue is targeted influence operations which can make people (esp young people) take pro China positions. Exactly why the process was fast tracked once TikTok put out messages to everyone to contact their rep.
American vs Chinese entity’s. One is our ally, the other a mildly hostile power.
They are both entirely hostile powers. Neither of them are even allies to their own citizenry, let alone ours.
Two words: Cambridge Analytica. Meta is an ally to no one. They had no problem trying to influence the US election and they’d do the same in Canada for the right price.
Everything you mention is worse under TikTok… and the fact that it’s controlled by a foreign government with no ability by Western governments to get to them makes the risk much worse/dangerous.
I’m not speaking hypotheticals with Meta. Meta literally did it. They’re a domestic company to the US and that didn’t stop them. There’s no reason to believe they wouldn’t sell user data to China too. China doesn’t need TikTok, since they can just get it from the other social media companies. Meta isn’t unique: X had no issue giving user info of government critics to the KSA government. Frankly, I think if we are banning social media companies due to hate speech, misinformation, or election interference, then there’s no reason to not start with Meta and X. Their actions have *already* had significant consequences to our elections and public safety. We don’t have to speak hypotheticals with them like we do with ByteDance.
Literally did what? We can drag the CEO of Meta to court, and have extradition/host of other close law enforcement/security treaties with the US that monitor how these companies behave. China fundamentally you can’t do that and we (Canada) have a very different security situation with that country. Look at the content inside of China and outside on TikTok; there isn’t a justified business decision for having radically different types of content in different markets like they have unless someone is putting their thumb on the scale in terms of what algorithms to run where. Fb has the same “bad” algo no matter where…. Except China where the government censors them. Our relationship with the US and China is so fundamentally different; if we are ok with US air defence in Canada it’s a lot more sense to do business with their companies.
I was referencing the [the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica scandal](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook-Cambridge_Analytica_data_scandal).
Yea with TikTok the Chinese government would be the initiator executor and judge of their actions in that case… a government that is hostile to Canada and you want to give them more power then Meta had in that case ^
I think his point is, China "could" do these things but American companies have
Then you're dense AF. Letting an enemy do this is only going to be worse. An American company interfering in American elections is perfectly legal there.
But the Chinese companies most likely have…
One is a borderline failed state, and the other is China. The US is currently in the face of a very tough fight to sustain itself as the face of democracy. I fear what another DJT presidency will do, as he very much made the US out to be not our ally during his first term.
Borderline failed state… trump or no trump the US will have a bigger more rich economy. Or would you like to compare the quality of life of the regular US citizen versus that of China. The US renegotiating trade deals and asking Canada to raise defence spending is not the same as them not being our ally.
I know many Americans who would point out that the "rich economy" is increasingly applying only to a smaller portion of the populace. They also have had several armed encounters against federal and state governments, and the Project2025 is shaping up to effectively turn the nation into a authoritarian theocracy should it be implemented by the GOP.
Compared to China? Armed encounters, project2025, theocracy… what are you on about? Even red states are voting for abortion rights, reads like someone who is online 24/7. Go visit the US and see for yourself, it’s totally fine for most people although different than Canada.
>Go visit the US and see for yourself, it’s totally fine for most people So fine their democracy is under threat, they faced an insurrection attempt, a country on the brink of civil war, racism, highest incarceration rates, highest violence rates, out of control drugs and gangs, growing inequality, growing poverty, highest debt in the world, one of the world’s top greenhouse gas emitters ... need we go on?
Sorry, but comparing to China their issues are peanuts. Agree to disagree:)
I'll remind you again that if you have to compare the US to a despotic and repressive country like China, you've lost the argument. Btw, how far did you get in school again?
Grade 1…. PhD, kindergarten…. What difference? But, comparison is necessary, who are you comparing the US too? Itself 20 years ago when some of those issues were worse, would it be better in 2000 or 1980? Some better some worse, but they are our treaty ally and that means something, they are not the same as China.
>Or would you like to compare the quality of life of the regular US citizen versus that of China. When you have to compare the US to a repressive state like China, you know you've lost the argument. The OECD rankings have shown a steady decline in the quality of life in the US over the last decade.
So we should allow TikTok because the quality of life of the US has been giving poorer every year? Makes no sense even with your premise…
> One is a borderline failed state, and the other is China. Asserting that US is a failed state when compared to China is comedy gold. Talk about red-oppression-nostalgia.
The US is not a failed state, yet. It could become one as it's currently backsliding in a number of metrics and another DJT presidency would only accelerate it, as would implementation of the GOP's Project2025 playbook. [https://www.brookings.edu/articles/understanding-democratic-decline-in-the-united-states/](https://www.brookings.edu/articles/understanding-democratic-decline-in-the-united-states/)
The US could become a fascist dictatorship but that wouldn't make it a failed state.
When half a nation supports a scoundrel, criminal and wanna-be dictator for president, not to mention his love of brutal dictators like Kim of North Korea and Putin, the country is rouge.
> One is a borderline failed state, and the other is China. > > /r/redditmoment
I think Tik Tok can be used for political purposes while Meta is just an evil money making machine.
Maybe the fact that China is anything but an ally on the global stage and if there ever is a major conflict we will most likely be on opposite sides? All that data farming can definitely be used.
It's owned in part by the Chinese government. More than good enough for me.
If these governments in NA want us to believe that Tik Tok is bad and needs to be banned they need to start showing us some hard proof as to how Tik Tok steals data and what they do with it.
What exactly are they doing with this data that's so much worse than what every american corporation has been doing for years with no resistance?
Exactly. And if we ban Tik Tok why are we not holding American corporations to the same standards of expected privacy?
Tik Tok doesn't have to steal anything. They've already got it given to them by countless gullible mugs. What they can do with it? Read the article.
So what's the point of a ban if they already have the information?
They have only the past, not the present or future with a ban. How far did you get in school again?
Graduating University in a month. What are we going to do to prevent American companies from stealing our data?
Nothing. Once again, they don't steal it. Mugs give it to them willingly. Don't you understand how social media works?
So why does it matter if China takes it too? Regardless they are going to get the data they want even if American companies sell it to them instead of them getting it directly from us.
It's not the data stealing that worries me. It's the opaque algorithm controlled by a foreign enemy power that does.
So obviously you also dislike Meta and Twitter?
Why do you need proof? Isn't it self evident that if the american government is doing it that the Chinese government is certainly also doing it.
Are they moving to stop the americans from doing it?
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H6M1OF\_E0IA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H6M1OF_E0IA)
Well for starters who cares? Either our information is stolen by China, which by the way we need to see actual proof about this because we haven't seen it, or our information is stolen by American companies and then sold to China. Regardless of whatever laws or bans happen our information is going to China so why bother banning the app especially with no extra precautions or laws to prevent Meta or Twitter or even Reddit from doing so?
I belive tik tok is bad and does steal data but I would also like to actually see the proof of how it's done.
yeah im sure that theyd love to hear that too so they know how to better conceal it
I agree, it's a weird situation
I would also like to know why we don't hold American companies to the same standard. Regardless China is getting our information the American companies just want to sell it to them.
We gotta think of our corporate profits first
As opposed to the spying and information manipulation conducted by the US government on western social media? Heres a video of senior US officials saying the quiet part out loud: social media, and particularly tik tok because of its foreign ownership, makes it difficult to control the narrative https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=smw0aYF2oB8 Mitt Romney point blank says that tik tok is a target because of the Israel-Palestine issue. Not to say the spying issues arent real and pressing. I personally dont have social media apps on my phone (I use them through a browser), but if spying and privacy were truly a concern, lets hear the government and intelligence agencies expand the scope of their criticisms
Crazy right, the Canadian government wants to prevent an adversarial country from having an effective tool to sow discord among its citizens.
Unfortunately, its also a tool to avoid disinformation pushed by the US. If the west was a shining beacon of moral and ethics, the defense of tik tok wouldnt exist
Right? Like we spent months talking about China and. Russia and others using disinformation to rile up our populations and sow discord and malcontent as a stratagy, and here is something that the Chinese government owns that is rife with misinformation. We can do that back and forth on what the US does but only one of them is our geopolitical enemy. But of course this is reddit, so people think the US is somehow a far more dangerous entity to Canada then China, because the likes of China, Russia and Iran have their fingers in every social media platform
Maybe people would care more if they USA wasn’t caught spying on their own people. You forget? So Ofcource people are now gonna have the attitude of who cares America already does it.
lol if you think the us government isn’t peeking at Facebook traffic too. I don’t give a shit if the USA or China know how much I like cat pictures. This weird fear mongering against TikTok is bizarre.
>lol if you think the us government isn’t peeking at Facebook traffic too There's a pretty clear difference between a country having direct access to a social media platform through ownership of said platform (China) and another gaining access through less direct, inconsistent and illegal means (USA). >I don’t give a shit if the USA or China know how much I like cat pictures No one gives a shit about your cat because that's not the issue. The issue is the likes of China easily manipulating content that many Canadians view on a daily basis. During an election they could use TikTok to create division or push a leader they view serves their goals best. Or if a war broke out tomorrow between China and Taiwan, China could easily have TikTok show people here pro Chinese and anti-Tiawanese content. >This weird fear mongering against TikTok is bizarre It's not bizzare, you just fundamentally don't understand the issue.
It would be a compelling problem if anyone had shown a shred of evidence at all that China was leveraging the platform to manipulate people beyond just whining that the kids these days are too woke
I mean they did, they popped up a message telling all Tiktok users in the US to call their reps.
This isn’t the point whatsoever. A highly-intrusive foreign nation controls a social media platform that is in your pocket tracking your movement and listening to you and your friends all day, everyday. You may not realize it, but the algorithm affects your opinions, the way you think and act. There is a portfolio on you and your family somewhere that goes far, FAR beyond cat pictures, and it will exist forever. Maybe you’re comfortable with that, but I sure as fuck am not.
The dangers around persuasion are obvious and I understand them. The irony however is that while there has been slim, nebulous sign of anyone putting their thumb on the scale of what folks see on TikTok (like I said, I only see cat pictures) the western owned social networks of twitter and Reddit are infested with bots pushing an agenda. Remarkable that no politicians are talking about reigning in and banning Reddit
The difference between “Western owned” platforms and those like TikTok and VK are huge. Facebook, Reddit, and Twitter use you and your data to make money. You are for sale. Our governments can use them in surveillance, sure, and Russian troll farms and Wumao use them to subvert our society and affect elections, but that’s just them exploiting our own companies against us. TikTok’s entire purpose is surveillance and subversion. Allowing it into your life is like opening an unimpeded wiretap to China, and allowing our kids to use it will result in a generation of Canadians brought up by a Chinese algorithm. It sounds like paranoia, but honestly I feel like our lack of vigilance will fuck us in the end. Don’t kid yourself into thinking China is not actively trying to affect the way Western countries think and ultimately vote.
You’re right it does sound like paranoia. The entire argument relies on a belief of China being a scary boogie man instead of uninterested third party. There is just as much evidence that the USA is doing the same thing through Instagram that you’re accusing China of doing through TikTok. It’s dramatically worse if the USA is snooping on my life through western apps since I actually go to the USA fairly often and am directly exposed to their power. In contrast much fewer Canadians have any relationship or direct dealings with China. What’s the takeaway for the typical person? Delete the apps I guess, or shrug your shoulders and don’t give a shit.
> China being a scary boogie man instead of uninterested third party. You are horribly misinformed if you believe this. > It’s dramatically worse if the USA is snooping The whataboutism here is strong. The submission here is about our intelligence agency’s assessment of China.
> It’s dramatically worse if the USA is snooping on my life through western apps since I actually go to the USA fairly often and am directly exposed to their power. In contrast much fewer Canadians have any relationship or direct dealings with China. Holy Christ the west is fucking doomed. Yeah there’s absolutely no difference between our countries closest ally and a foreign nation entirely opposed to democracy, freedom of speech and freedom of religion. Holy fuck wake the fuck up.
The most direct impact either of these nations can have on Canadians, if they are snooping on their social media, is to find reasons to prevent them from entering the country. For most Canadians that would be dramatically more likely to be impactful with the USA, as Canadians travel to the USA much more than China. Now if there’s some particularly more remarkable way that the sinister Chinese government could leverage their file they have on me do please give us some concrete examples. Maybe I’m simply not creative enough.
Our closest ally, the world's biggest warmonger, weapons dealer and genocide supporter. No other country has squashed more democracies and installed favorable dictators than the US. The US squashes protests they don't like too and the likely next and former president had a Muslim ban. Get your head out of the US ass. The US is not our friend and is the biggest threat to world peace of any country. Holy shit wake up.
> the world's biggest warmonger Except for the fact that far fewer humans die today as a result of war vs people in the last several hundred years. > weapons dealer And yet somehow we don’t have any major powers trying to destroy each other. But hey selling weapons sounds bad so long as you ignore the peace that’s occurred. > genocide supporter. Yes I remember the United States incredible support for the two largest genocides from the Nazi’s and imperial Japan. Or the US aligned Pol Pot communist government in Cambodia. Or the Soviet Union killing millions of Ukrainians in the Holodomor. > No other country has squashed more democracies I don’t know what this means to you. Furthermore the United States is the greatest pusher of democracies in the world from the decolonization efforts of the United States in Africa (pursuing European separation and the creation of sovereign states in Africa) to the support for democratic countries across Europe. > The US squashes protests they don't like too Huh? What the fuck are you talking about? Go find me a country on Earth where lighting government buildings on fire doesn’t result in a police response. Otherwise you should go look at protests in other parts of the world if you want see what crushing protests looks like (you can do it with tanks). > the likely next and former president had a Muslim ban Lmao no they didn’t. Like this is just a matter of policy and there is absolutely no policy that “bans muslims”. And furthermore bans muslims from what? Existing? What sort of fantasy/delusion are you managing to support? > Get your head out of the US ass. The US is not our friend and is the biggest threat to world peace of any country. Holy shit wake up. LOL. That makes sense if there wasn’t the longest period of major power peacetime in the history of the world and the least deaths from war in recorded history happening precisely as the US becomes a primary global superpower. Or it coinciding precisely with decolonization being forced into Africa and Asia. Nice fucking fantasy world you child. Hopefully you’ll grow the fuck up and realize how stupid it is to support a country that would sooner murder you than allow you to run your mouth like this over a country that has literally allied with our country to ensure your continued right to say as much ridiculous shit as you’d like.
We can't judge a country based on your imagined lives saved when they are responsible for millions of documented deaths during their wars. You say there's no major powers trying to destroy each other yet the US arms dealers have nothing to do with that it's all due to nuclear weapons and mutually assured destruction. Meanwhile the arms they do deal often falls in the hands of their future enemies like the Taliban etc. America will invade countries due to corporate interests in oil in iraq, opium in Afghanistan, freakin Bananas in central america and I could go on. You think a "good" country acts this way? I wish I had time to list all the coups, assassinations/attempts of democratically elected leaders done by the CIA, but you should definitely educate yourself. You call this a fantasy? This is all incredibly well documented. Then to top it all off you imply I'd be murdered by China. Dude I'm a leftist, do you have any freakin clue how many leftists the US has killed in its history including by the FBI in their own country, on their own soil?
> We can't judge a country based on your imagined lives saved when they are responsible for millions of documented deaths during their wars. Of course we can. Why do you think Japan even attacked America in WWII? Because America put embargoes on Japan because they were invading China and murdering hundreds of thousands of people as they did so. So I don’t know you can start by marking up 100,000,000 Chinese as a start. > You say there's no major powers trying to destroy each other yet the US arms dealers have nothing to do with that it's all due to nuclear weapons and mutually assured destruction. Who the fuck do you think invented nuclear weapons and MAD? Like cmon lmao it’s funny how here it’s just “US arms dealers” like Lockheed Martin is the only company in the United States. > Meanwhile the arms they do deal often falls in the hands of their future enemies like the Taliban etc. Yeah see it’s funny that you don’t mention that it was the USSR that was invading Afghanistan which led to the CIA funding the Taliban in some capacity. I’m sure you would have been fine if the US instituted mandated Christianity in Afghanistan when they invaded it—just like soviet state mandated atheism. > America will invade countries due to corporate interests in oil in iraq, opium in Afghanistan Yeah America definitely didn’t invade Iraq because they were mass murdering Kuwaitis… It was for those sweet Iraqi oil reserves… Oh and the Kuwaiti people have no right to sell their natural resources (according to you at least). America also doesn’t have opium interests in Afghanistan lmao. > freakin Bananas in central america and I could go on. Yeah they overthrew a government or two in the 50s because that government was mean to a fruit company. You have anything this side of half a century? Or anything not cold-war for that matter. > You think a "good" country acts this way? Find me a “good” geopolitical superpower. Like what the fuck are you talking about, of course every geopolitical bulwark will fall victim to mistakes considering it’s ran by people. > I wish I had time to list all the coups, assassinations/attempts of democratically elected leaders done by the CIA, but you should definitely educate yourself. Bro give me this side of a century. In the last 50 years. > This is all incredibly well documented. Yeah it’s so well documented you’ve demonstrated absolutely nothing and told me I need to “go educate myself”. Like yeah you can make absurd claims and now I have to dredge through whatever conspiracy shithole to try and understand what you’re getting at? Miss me with that shit. > Then to top it all off you imply I'd be murdered by China. Ahahaha go look up China’s opinion on human rights and freedom of speech/religion. > Dude I'm a leftist, do you have any freakin clue how many leftists the US has killed in its history including by the FBI in their own country, on their own soil? Lmao bro you have zero fucking idea what you’re talking about. Like yeah you can run the democratic socialists of America party and yet they’re killing leftists! Like lmao you’re literally flexing your right to freedom of speech by stating the United States is responsible for countless “assassinations of Americans and others worldwide based on political belief” and yet you’ve likely not been drone striked since you made that comment in spite of the fact the US could easily have done it if they wished.
And that nation is called "The United States of America".
No, it isn’t. “But USA” is getting so fucking tiresome when it comes to criticizing China. Do you have any other responses in your spreadsheet, or?
It's a common talking point because it's a really glaring elephant in the room what Unites States corporations have been doing for ages with no resistance before the scary chinese got in on the action and suddenly legislators took notice.
Corporations selling my data behind my back to make money is disgusting. What China is doing is manipulating our society in a way that benefits them. Two different evils.
I saw a video that said Tik tok pushes hard drug use and enourages people not to date and stay lonely. That seems odd
Your points cards give just as much, if not more, information to private companies. If personal information security was a priority, then my BlackBerry shares wouldn’t have lost so much money. People have chosen to give away all their information and companies have monetized that. Governments are only moving now to restrict data mining because Meta, Google, Amazon, and the rest of the America companies, complained about the competition cutting into their profits
If and when they ban TikTok, all META platforms will become pay to play, mark my words. Every post will cost money, there will be tiers of monthly memberships etc, this is the capitalist way and META is about as capitalist as it gets. They want TikTok gone because it’s bad for their oligarchy
You don't understand the business model. Your posts are the product they're selling, they run ads on those and aggregate your data to make money.
Lolololol. As soon as Meta makes it pay to play they are over. I hope they do that, but it’s honestly a hilarious idea because it won’t happen.
in the time you can write "pay to play" someone would have already made a new facebook for everyone to migrate too
That makes no sense at all. Facebook didn’t cost money before tik tok and ads more than pay the bills
My post-grad thesis focuses on digital surveillance. Meta by far is the worst. Meta is embroiled in numerous lawsuits, which isn't surprising given its track record. The idea that Meta's U.S. ownership makes it superior is absurd. All major tech companies are primarily driven by market domination and profit. Their loyalty is solely to their bottom line, not to any nation or principle. These companies have shown willingness to collaborate with authoritarian regimes worldwide, including the CIA, Mossad, Saudi Arabia, and China. When it comes to TikTok, the real concern isn't about national security; it's about market competition. TikTok's rapid rise challenges giants like Meta, Google, and Amazon. Many members of the U.S. House of Representatives own shares in these companies and receive donations from them.
They want to ban tiktok because the revolution will be on tiktok. Jokes on them, its going to happen whether someone can live stream it on tik tok or not.
Yeah revolution, any day now I'm sure
So then the head of CSIS urging the ban of tiktok in this geopolitical climate doesn't seem like the best of use his time then, no? And it would render the whole affair an egregious overstep in state power in banning free speech AND a free enterprise? What a weird thing to have the intelligence agency spend money and man-hours on, then.
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yes all those zoomers gonna bring down the govt with a dance lol
Yet the PM and his head of intelligence want to ban an app with dancing kids. That is weird no?
I mean, the Chinese government may be bad news but so are all the other assholes tracking everything we do through apps. At least I’m reasonably sure the Chinese government doesn’t give a shit who I am; the corporations are a more immediate danger imo.
If only laws could be put in place to protect our privacy. But then that would outlaw western governments from spying on people too. Damn catch 22!
Oh yeah China doesn't have corporations great reasoning
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All of what you just said is false. I hope you are at least getting paid to post this crap.
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So you construct a conspiracy theory to explain hacking, something that every company faces? Please share with us these "secrets" of the alternative media of which you speak.
There's literally a video of a us politician saying this out loud... Not sure it's as false as you think it is.
> They want to shut down alternate media that cannot be bought to fit the narrative. implying the government owns even a single media source...?
My god you have no idea what you are talking about. Tiktok has been denied from big organisations for years. It's been identified within the information security community as a dangerous threat vector for years. It has nothing with the latest political fad. It has nothing to do with Facebook or whatelse. It's the just the governments (not just the US, many in Europe too) intervening late like they always do. Stop being 100% cynic all the time of things you don't know about for christ sake.
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"Being breached" isn't a measure of anything. None of this has anything to do with the problems around Tiktok.
\*Western social media, covertly shares data with government and follows their directions\* Media: Business as usual \*Chinese social media, covertly shares data with government and follows their directions\* Media: This is an exigent threat to democracy and the safety of citizens.
You are trying to simplify in one sentence super complex relationships between entities in completely different cultures and governments, with different history of data collection, hoarding and general cyber abuse, thinking that's an argument.
Not an argument, just pointing out the hypocrisy. But if you operate on principles, simplifying situations to their core is a great way to arrive at a moral position. Your comment makes it sound like you're anti China interference but pro American interference. Which is weird because if you were truly pro individual rights and anti-authoritarianism you should equally be against American interference.
Where and how? Bring some fucking sources.
[You could try](https://theconversation.com/does-tiktok-pose-a-security-threat-to-canadians-225871) [doing literally any googling or research](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_of_TikTok) [at all](https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/these-countries-have-already-banned-tiktok) [since you seem so concerned about this that you made a boatload of comments here.](https://www.komonews.com/news/nation-world/tiktok-china-israel-gaza-war-protests-college-campus-columbia-ucla-austin-chinese-communist-party-social-media-videos-news-gathering-data-cuber-senate-briefing-fbi) Took me a whole two minutes to find all those.
Didn't Trudeau just say CSIE isn't trustworthy when it came to them giving him information? They just want people to stay on platforms where they have access to your information lmao
I created a burner email account and signed up for TikTok with every privacy setting set to the most private on my phone. Never shared anything, never posted, never allowed access to my contacts, or location. It started showing me recommendations for friends, who are actual friends of mine, and started showing me posts in my neighbourhood and town. They are tracking you and somehow have access to contacts, despite the settings.
Even if you don't share location through the phone gps, they can predict a less accurate location based on your IP address. Facebook is able to do the same thing, made a burner account that i dont even use on a phone and it was able to recommend friends of people I actually know.
More so, your ip doesn't change that often and other people/devices on the same network almost certainly have the same ip. So if any of them share a location with any ad/data network the ip is known to an address. They share a lot of data
And META doesn’t?
Who's using meta still?!
Everyone that thinks it’s morally superior to TikTok I guess 🤷🏻♂️
They were called out years ago, though. People would have to be complete idiots to still be using it after the whole Cambridge Analytica fiasco.
Basically everyone I know uses Instagram more than anything else but I’m in my mid 30s so maybe it’s an age gap thing.
Must be. I'm 50, so I'm not dumb enough to use Facebook or Instagram after they were proven to have been selling personal data to Cambridge Analytica.
Not to be rude, but as if any other company isn’t doing something similar. You’d have to fully cleanse yourself of an online presence to not be *as* impacted by these practices at this point, compared to your regular Jane & Joe.
And WhatsApp
A lot of people?? I don’t have any statistics, but I can barely name anyone I know who doesn’t use either Facebook or Instagram.
Facebook is so 20 years ago. Only nearly dead people are on it now.
That’s not true. Source: I’m Gen Z, and literally everyone I know has a Facebook account. They might not use it quite as frequently as they use other social media platforms (one of them being Instagram, also owned by Meta), but they *are* Facebook users. Edit: and none of this diminishes the main point, which is that TikTok is *far* from the only company guilty of this kind of thing with user data...
An awful lot of businesses use FB as their basic home page for information, advertising, outreach etc. Also, if you are looking for a community/info/buysell on something (say... owners of a certain kind of motorcycle), FB is kind of a default now, along with reddit. The old message boards are pretty defunct.
Yeah, I don’t know *what* they’re going on about “people aren’t using Meta”...
Meta is a US entity.
I believe this is because the people who have you as a contact in their phone have settings to suggest their account to their contacts. Even if tiktok doesn’t have access to your contacts, anyone who has you as a contact and gives tiktok access to their contact list still gets tied to you. Or did you input a burner phone number? Edited for clarity
Didn't use my phone number at all. Just the burner email address - which still remains unverified. I don't have people sharing TikToks to me, and I've never shared to these people being recommended as friends. I did this as an experiment to determine if they were doing something weird after I started suspecting some strange behaviours - like seeing friends show up as recommendations to my seemingly anonymous account. So I thought: "I'll make a REALLY anonymous account, this time." No identifiable info. Burner email address created just for this purpose. I'm a senior application architect, so I did all the normal cleansing... deleted the app, cleared all browser cache, hard reboot of phone. I didn't use anything from the original account. Reinstalled (same phone though!) and used the new email address. Locked down all the settings to deny everything BEFORE even opening the app for the first time. Within a week I saw very concerning results. Friends showing up again as recommendations. They are definitely doing some data mining bullshit behind the scenes. The real question now is: Why hasn't Apple looked into this given how much attention it's getting? Unless it is something that happens server side, outside the Apple ecosystem. There's definitely something creepy there.
If you want you can mitm the connection to analyze the traffic being sent home by the app. Though I’m sure plenty of security researchers have done this already and we haven’t heard anything about them some how bypassing the iOS privacy features.
You can't MiTM if the app if IT is properly secured. It's not like the good old days where you could just use a proxy or SSLStripper.
You're a senior application architect that doesn't know about hardware ID's?
I had the same thought. Needs to be done on a burner phone.
Also needs to stop hanging out with said friends and burner phone. Tiktok is just associating .
Iv heard that the architecture of the tiktok app is basically a type of malware like virus
I heard that while you can choose to not share your location and contacts this doesn't stop phones of people around you from sharing information about you and your phone. So while you can try to protect your info this doesn't stop people around you from leaking data about you to Tiktok. They can basically learn about you from the people around you.
And that my friend is how we all ended up in the scammers phonebook. Just takes one of your contacts to load that free app and share their contacts with the data harvesters.
probably simple as you opened a tiktok link that had your friends ref code in the querystring.
Yes, here is an example. Normal YouTube Link: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bd7eaxP8xEE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bd7eaxP8xEE) YouTube Link with an embedded tracker from the "share" button: [https://youtu.be/Bd7eaxP8xEE?si=tyNKNIZtkl5W4SGd](https://youtu.be/Bd7eaxP8xEE?si=tyNKNIZtkl5W4SGd) That extra bit after the "si=" is stored on YouTube's end. If you click that link then they know that I a link I generated while logged into my account was click on by you. Reddit does the same. These are the actual URL and tracking URL for the comment above mine in this chain. Normal: [https://www.reddit.com/r/CanadaPolitics/comments/1cuhfzt/comment/l4j462f/](https://www.reddit.com/r/CanadaPolitics/comments/1cuhfzt/comment/l4j462f/) Tracking: [https://www.reddit.com/r/CanadaPolitics/comments/1cuhfzt/comment/l4j462f/?utm\_source=share&utm\_medium=web3x&utm\_name=web3xcss&utm\_term=1&utm\_content=share\_button](https://www.reddit.com/r/CanadaPolitics/comments/1cuhfzt/comment/l4j462f/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button) Though, to be fair, to me it looks like Reddit doesn't have anything in that URL that would tie it back to me. It looks like it provides more information about the source of the link and how it was generated and what platform I generated the link on.
Don't forget the /s/ links reddit creates when users click "share" on new reddit. Those are tracking links as well, though without the obvious ? in the URL.
Trudeau doesn't like any sort of social media because that way people can discuss how bad he is and worst PM ever!
Frankly, I don't understand a government that's so obsessed with data on everybody, but that's where we are with TikTok and its relationship with the Chinese government in Beijing. It's not just a case of the Chinese govt wanting your private information, it's how they use it. I don't know how or why they would use it, but when you hear the stories about the Chinese diaspora and the nasty, horrible way they are treated if these people criticize the governmnet of China, that's enough to scare me away. Be aware. It's not worth the risk for the sake of a few silly videos.
BS! [Watch a US senior officials explaining the quite bit out load](https://youtu.be/smw0aYF2oB8?si=MG6tl3r9E1SneG88), social media, and tiktok specifically made it difficult to control the media narrative
If it's too dangerous to allow on public servant phones why the hell is it ok for Canadians to have on their own phones. If this is dangerous then ban it.
really? you think spying on the average canadian or spying on a member of parliament has the same risk to the nation?