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0 pointsgiantrobot4y ago0 comments

If I was a state intelligence service I would love TikTok. Especially if it was legally banned in my country so was used almost exclusively by foreigners. One better was if the government had a controlling stake in the company [0] and laws requiring the company to be virtually transparent to demands from state security agencies [1].

Not only does TikTok have a ton of overt data about users but also contemporaneous data like usage patterns and physical location. Then using the app to collect and exfiltrate information about all manner of foreign networks. I can pass off that data to my government run hacking [2] groups [3] as well as regime-favored businesses for some really great market research.

[0] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/bytedance-says-china-unit-hol...

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cybersecurity_Law_of_the_Peo...

[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/PLA_Unit_61398

[3] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/PLA_Unit_61486

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reillyse4y ago· 2 in thread

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).

giantrobotOP4y ago

AFAIK Calm and Insight don't have hundreds of millions of users nor is the CCP on their corporate boards. But with explanations provided by the apps as to why they want network device access they probably shouldn't be trusted.

As for the data collection, TikTok/ByteDance is definitely going to store it. They wouldn't collect it otherwise. To the utility of the data, if they've got MAC addresses of devices on your home network they can tell many of the brands of devices you own. They know when you get a new computer even if you never use TikTok on it. If you launch the app at your office they get the same information about your office network. In aggregate their network scanning will collect vast amounts of data.

The TikTok app is turning every user into a passive network scanner. Even if you want to ignore the CCP's influence on ByteDance I don't think there is any reason to give them the benefit of the doubt about their data collection. They'll sell their users and anyone around them. I have the same problem with Facebook and their damn shadow profiles and covert data collection.

reillyse4y ago

My point is that this just appears to be xenophobia and is completely hypocritical. Nearly every app on my phone asks to access the local network.It's a thing. It's not unusual in the slightest. The problem seems to be that this company is based in China. And we don't like China. Maybe that is not what you in particular don't like (I get that you don't like FB) but that is the reason why this is a topic conversation at all. So in effect what the people in this thread are saying is that American companies (and by direct link the US gov) are allowed to spy on people, but foreign governments should not be allowed. That seems like a huge double standard. For the record, I personally would prefer no governments were spying on me - but that doesn't seem to be on the table.

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