This meme is a bit dishonest because its about Chinese government harvesting this data not about companies harvesting it. Both are bad but ones substantially worse.
How the Chinese government having my (Westerner’s in a NATO country) data is any worse than Western (and thus subpoenable by the Western governments) corporations having it?
Cause somebody is selling the Chinese king false dreams of invading America. And maybe having documents on every American citizen would be helpful post invasion.
Source: anonymous internet poster
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Then they’re wasting their efforts because I’m not an American citizen (thank gods)
You’re on the same “Risk Board game” like the rest of us. If you’re not in the American sphere of influence then NSA is just taking all your metadata the harder way.
American companies have way more power over my life than the Chinese government
The bill actually addresses any foreign adversary.
Yeah, if China wants the data of Americans they should buy it from American companies, not harvest it themselves.
They’re not mad about leaking data, they’re mad that China is drinking their milkshake.
“we will harvest your DNA and put a literal implant into your brain”
discord is also largely chinese btw
Just install an alternative app Store like Aurora or install it directly from TikTok sites.
For open source projects, you can also use Obtainium or F-Droid
Oh really? This ban won’t effect people who use (for example) F-Droid to get the app?? That’s great to hear tbh. Hopefully this stupid ass decision will have the effect of turning more people on to FOSS stuff more than it will actually prevent people from using TikTok.
I don’t think they will put it on fdroid, because it has to really be open source to be there, but there’s certainly other app stores which will have it.
How can a ban be enforced? It’s always thru Google app Store or IP, and you can always bypass both.
In Aurora Store there’s TikTok. You can install aurora store here:
In Worst case you can try finding the official tiktok .APK install somewhere
ok, thanks for the info. I don’t know a lot about how this kind of thing works (clearly), I just try to use and support FOSS and “piracy” whenever possible.
It’s really hard to bypass ip bans. Tik tok in India has been non existent since the ban.
You can use VPN (paid or free) for instance and if the ban is really badly done even by changing the DNS server (which is free) access can be restored.
Nope. You can’t access tiktok through vpn in India. You need a patched/modded app. I live in India and I’ve tried doing that. It’s a non-existent platform here. Bans will affect user engagement.
Aurora displays currently no app, be it anonymous or with login. Anyone knows why? I need it to reinstall my banking access app, dammit.
Aurora sometimes malfunctions. Try reinstalling it
Spottily is a Swedish company
Is it illegal for Swedish companies to store user data? Is it illegal for them to sell user data? Do they have very strict rules about showing users every time and how data they generate is saved?
Sweden is not an adversary of the United States.
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Op is just thanking the wrong country.
Came here to say this
I don’t think 23andme and TikTok are even comparable to the rest of the list.
Makes me remember when UK and France invaded China and forced then to commercialize opium and destroy their country:
“The First Opium War was fought from 1839 to 1842 between China and Britain. It was triggered by the Chinese government’s campaign to enforce its prohibition of opium, which included destroying opium stocks owned by British merchants and the British East India Company. The British government responded by sending a naval expedition to force the Chinese government to pay reparations and allow the opium trade.[1] The Second Opium War was waged by Britain and France against China from 1856 to 1860, and consequently resulted in China being forced to legalise opium.”
Social media addiction is not quite the same thing as opium addiction
Of course not, but can also make people unproductive and by guiding the content you can make the whole population acquire stupid behaviours
I think you’re really misevaluating the (non)equivalence between how you’re crippled as an organism by opium addiction vs just having your attention fucked up by tiktok
Yes, of course.
In this case, what UK+France did to China at that time is much worse than what China is doing to the US now.
So it would be much more hypocritical if UK followed suit
Excuse me, but I have a hard time seeing how is these two events are related?
Unless they’re implying that Chinese software will fail and bow down to “western software”, I’m not seeing a link either.
Hi, UK forced China to get their country destroyed, and no an UK-derived country is complaining that China is destroy them.
So in your analogy then Britain is the now China, and now U.S. is the then China? And TikTok is the opium released by China? Hence TikTok should be banned, if U.S. have the power to do so?
Apart from “should be banned”, you got my analogy right.
I mean if they ban it they are being hypocrites
fair, thanks for explaining.
US companies != US federal government
US federal gov already got their hand in companies ass.
reverse order
Ever heard about CLOUD act?
At first I thought you were being serious, but I think this is a joke? That Americans don’t care how many companies spy on them as long as it’s not the government?
Which, is laughable because of course the government has contacts at everyone one of these companies and they’d gladly hand over your data then go to court to protect it
No, you’re misunderstanding. The Chinese government has significantly more influence and power over Chinese companies than the US federal government has over US companies. People are acting like both are the same, but they are not.
This is sort of true, though it’s hard to make a clear distinction between US capitalists and the US government when the capitalists control the government, and have since the 1776 bourgeois revolution.
China is a proletarian state, where the capitalist class is not in control: China’s housing minister says real estate developers must go bankrupt if necessary
Whereas the US is a bourgeois state, where the capitalist class is in control.
Yeah okay. Your far-left talking points aren’t convincing me and are definitely making your point harder to parse.
yeah what was that? I guess thats lemmy.ml for ya
It should be a known fact at this point that US companies share all the data the goverment wants, i don’t think the greater influence matters in this case.
Upvoting cause I think this is a joke. Please don’t prove me wrong
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All of the US corporate social media platforms are part of the US military-industrial-intellegence complex. Look at their boards of directors and executives. Look at the Twitter Files. Look Hamilton 68.
Look at Reddit:
- Facebook Partners With Hawkish Atlantic Council, a NATO Lobby Group, to “Protect Democracy”
- Jessica Ashooh: The taming of Reddit and the National Security State Plant tabbed to do it
- A Reddit AMA Claiming To Be A Uyghur Quickly Exposes A CIA Asset Slandering China
- r/neoliberal was created by a neoliberal think tank » BPR Interviews: The Neoliberal Project
.
They have their eye on the fediverse now as well: Atlantic Council » Collective Security in a Federated World
You’re also misunderstanding. I won’t deny that US companies seek profit wherever they can, even from unethical sources. I also don’t doubt their involvement with law enforcement and intelligence agencies. But a company seeking profit through a partnership with the United States federal government is not the same as the totalitarian Chinese government requiring oversight of Chinese companies.
It might not seem like a big difference to you, but it’s an important one to me.
If you find it upsetting that the Chinese state imposes its will on the Chinese capitalist class, then you must really like capitalism, where the capitalist class imposes its will on the state.
Chinese companies != Chin…wait.
What about them ISPs?
A VPN and OpenWrt?
Then the VPN has your data, and also your ISP depending on how secure your setup is
Imagine spending the time and effort to make that perfect whatabout meme you spent all day thinking about- only to have people tell you that all of them should be shut down.
Your disabled mum did it, i just stole it. Retard
I don’t discriminate. I say the data protection of all of these services is terrible and you shouldn’t use them.
Yep.
I think users should embrace data harvesting and passively run chatGPT powered bots to generate more mindless data
Is there some way to trick the chatgpt training bots by intentionally mislabeling data? Like can I upload some
furry pornographytasteful erotica and label it “AP US history assignment - Civil War”?
Spying on user data is a constitutional right of US companies, what are the poor going to live on when they can’t traffic with your data, or when a disgusting red communist company steals their bread? A little more proper patriotism, guys. Bad enough that the EU is cutting the wings of this companies, therefore also don’t use EU apps to make America great again.
Wtf is Spotify doing?
the service serves ads, anything that will serve ads will also typically create a profile on users preference to then have targetted ads.
Still it’s not American but swedish
Gathering and selling your data.
So much data to infer from your music tastes. Listening to music about breakup? You had a breakup yourself. Listening to classical music? You’re a top earner. Listening to Eminem? You like mom’s spaghetti.
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I stopped using it as soon as I ordered a takeout of my data and saw they saved my unfinished searches even after I deleted them
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Selling to who?
How come every thread I see about this topic, there is nobody who is concerned about letting the federal government dictate which apps you can and cannot use to communicate with other people? This is some 1984 shit.
Because it isn’t new nor special.
Apps are a Service and services have been and are regulated for decades now and the system have been always arbitrary as fuck.
In the case of TikTok, the west, as a military alliance, should be concerned due to the nature of current valid Chinese laws and the implications of it.
And e.g. facebook has proven that they don’t like to stick to rules about how to handle data. In case of TikTok, this could easily have bigger implications for e.g. the American military.
If it’s really about the military as you suggest then the extremely easy solution is to order service members not to use Tik Tok.
Passing a specific law to compell the sale of one specific company is arguably some sort of Bill of Attainder, which I’m sure ByteDance’s lawyers will be argueing as soon as Biden’s pen touches paper.
Well look at that. And no, that isn’t enough from a military perspective. Look at the Russian propaganda war in e.g. Germany, that shit can have a negative effect on the defensive abilities of a nation.
Most of those bans are organizations saying that employees can’t install TikTok on organization issued phones and computers, which is not at all comparable to an overall ban? My work doesn’t allow me to play video games on work computers or drink on work property, but that’s not at all the same as a law banning all video games and alcohol.
Look at the Russian propaganda war in e.g. Germany, that shit can have a negative effect on the defensive abilities of a nation.
Yeah one problem with human and civil rights is that they tend to have negative effects on the defensive abilities of a nation. War would be so much easier if you could just arrest all the peace protestors, or hold suspected enemy agents without trial, or force people to work without pay in defence industries, or force women to give birth to more people so you can conscript more soldiers.
So let’s just do away with free speech and habeus corpus, reinstitute slave labor and force women to pop out lots of kids. Then Germany can defend itself again, just like the last two times.
Well, you can expect China doing the same. This kind of behaviour triggers retalliation.
You might look into the apps they have already banned.
They were blocking the bulk of the internet via their great firewall before mobile apps were even a thing
The current situation over in China still allows internet users to easily access services like Facebook or YouTube through VPNs, it was more of a measure of digital protectionism to allow local development of IT companies, online business, etc. If China wants to do similar censorship in response to these measure, they very well could still crack down on VPNs.
I would say make laws about data collection, usage, etc. instead of banning TikTok.
Heck, fix more important problems like income disparity, hunger, homelessness, healthcare, our wasteful spending, so many things more important and yet we’re wasting time on TikTok.
I don’t think people think this is a good use of time.
Seriously, it’s government overreach and ignoring freedom of speech, etc.
We can agree that there is at least a slight difference in having your own (or a friendly nation’s) Government tracking you, versus allowing a competing nation to have direct access to over half of the adult US population (as per their recent push-notification stunt), as well as a robust collection of their interests and preferences.
There is a reason China has banned most US-based software in the mainland (Meta, Google, etc.); in favour of self-developed alternatives. This is just treatment in kind; it’s not an outright ban, rather a forced sale to prevent more of that user data falling into dubious hands.
I’m not really ok with that type of anti other country behavior in (edit to add the word: almost) any case. Heck, I want cheap Chinese EV options in the US too.
Make government (and other) tracking opt-out-able by law. That is the law we need. Not this bs version.
This current bill literally sounds like it’s written by American companies to squash a foreign competition. You know Facebook, YouTube, etc. are biting at the teeth for more users (and ad revenue) of short form content; especially if TikTok users scattered to other platforms.
Once again: give users the freedom to chose what they want. This is a government overreach.
Yes, there is a difference. Having your own government spy on you is way worse because it has the monopoly on violence over you. No one protects you from that. But your government will (try to) protect you from foreign influences.
There is a reason for the outrage when PRISM came out of the closet.
because it has the monopoly on violence over you
I’ve been hearing this one going for a while, where does it come from? Sounds like a corpofascist slogan.
Probably a bad translation from German. Maybe a better translation would be “force” instead of “violence”. It means only the police is allowed to use force.
Still can’t understand the point of it. Like, is the state ordering that civilians must be defenseless in the face of crime, for example? But yeah in general it just sounds like the usual “I am the Senate” fascist kind of takeover and control of power.
But your government will (try to) protect you from foreign influences.
Oh, like stopping a forogn government from influencing people through a popular app. huh. Good point.
But your government will (try to) protect you from foreign influences That’s what this is, though.
Take a step back and consider for a moment the absolute mayhem TikTok was able to cause through one single push notification to their US user base (>170m, over half the adult population). That is not a power that should be wielded lightly, and definitely not one in the hands of a foreign adversary ready, willing and capable of weaponising it at their whim.
Think of the power that affords them to put their finger on the scale when it comes to the critical upcoming Presidential election, not just directly - but through slight manipulations of the algorithm to engage one political cohort and disenfranchise another.
My point was that there is some institution on your site of that standoff. This will not be the case if you have to fight against your own government. So it’s better to have to fight a foreign government, rather than one’s own.
TikTok is a dangerous influence, yes. I wasn’t trying to argue against that. But then, so are Facebook, YouTube, Reddit, Twitter and similar social media. Maybe even all social media.
Other than fighting with shortsighted regulations I don’t know how one would fight such an influence other than widespread education of the people. But that would make them more resilient against any propaganda.