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[–][deleted] 4 insightful - 1 fun4 insightful - 0 fun5 insightful - 1 fun -  (2 children)

Damn chinamen, spying on US citizens is our job. In all seriousness though this is extremely frightening and dystopian, good find on this story

[–]Insider 6 insightful - 2 fun6 insightful - 1 fun7 insightful - 2 fun -  (1 child)

Giving user data to US intel is the only way social media companies are allowed to operate in the US.

University of Toronto's Citizen Lab analyzed Tiktok's code and found nothing malicious. The Chinese Tiktok (Douyin), however, is more regulated: https://citizenlab.ca/2021/03/tiktok-vs-douyin-security-privacy-analysis/

Despite not exhibiting overtly malicious behavior, Douyin contains features that raise privacy and security concerns, such as dynamic code loading and server-side search censorship. TikTok does not contain these features.

The Chinese government tends not to care about apps outside of China. Case in point, you can find thousands of China hate propaganda on Tiktok: https://www.tiktok.com/tag/taiwanisacountry

It's still the US government spying on you. The reason why the government and MSM was in an uproar over Tiktok and tried to get it banned was because they don't control it like they do everything else. Chinese companies like Huawei cutting into the market share means that they eat into US monopolies and reduces the ability for the government to surveil and control you.

That's why the NSA is making its way into Tiktok's management and their fronts have taken it over:

https://gizmodo.com/tiktok-s-latest-suitor-is-oracle-a-company-with-close-1844759645

Tiktok’s Latest Suitor Is Oracle, a Company With Close Ties To CIA and NSA

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/tiktok-isnt-a-threat-to-our-privacy-and-security-but-the-nsa-is/

Here, too, the source of the suspicion is less what ByteDance is doing than what the NSA did. Edward Snowden’s leaks showed that the PRISM program forced major American companies to provide them with unconstitutionally broad amounts of data. The NSA benefited from U.S.-based companies with large collections of applications being forced to play ball on letting them root around in their data. In the cases of some companies, like Yahoo, the NSA managed to coerce them into illegally searching the data and passing on the results.

The Trump administration’s solution is further evidence of what was going on: demanding TikTok be sold to an American company and operated on U.S. soil where it would become vulnerable to U.S. data access instead. Arguably this is a bigger danger to the end user, because while China appears not to have approached ByteDance even once, the U.S. has routinely hit up major tech companies on fishing expeditions.

Microsoft was originally tapped by the U.S. to buy it, but it was Oracle that made a deal, allowing ByteDance to retain majority ownership but forcing them to move TikTok to the United States. The location of the servers is everything for the surveillance-minded, and if nothing else, Washington will by hook or by crook force them to relocate to a U.S. jurisdiction.

Since it worked in this case, expect the U.S. to try to fall back on this tactic in the future, both as a way of accusing China of things it didn’t do and to try to force more companies to relocate.

[–][deleted] 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Thanks for the explanation and references, this makes a lot of sense.