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U.S. looking at banning Chinese social media apps, including TikTok
- ikmoss 6y agoWill US abolish all other Chinese digital presence including Alibaba etc?
- SpicyLemonZest 6y agoThe US government almost certainly doesn't have the power to do that. (It's not tremendously clear how they'd even be able to ban Tiktok; they'd have a hard time getting Apple and Google to take it off the app store and an impossible time convincing Internet providers to block it.)
- coliveira 6y agoSince the beginning of the "tensions" with China people keep pushing the same key: "the government cannot do this, they don't have the authority, the constitution blah". And every time they have been proven wrong, as Trump has established travel bans, restricted visas, put people in concentration camps, imposed tariffs, and who knows what they will do next. People that keep pretending that freedoms are not eroding are just exercising wishful thinking.
- core-questions 6y agoSo this is how it's going to happen - with every country banning each other's social media apps, we will enter into a future of digital borders, limited speech, and broken international relations. All in the name of making sure people don't dare think some wrongthink.
- bruceb 6y agoTikTok can already limit your speech. If you "wrong think" on their you would be booted.
- core-questions 6y agoOf course. But Facebook limits our speech just as much, no?
- HenryBemis 6y agoFacebook, on the front end, manipulates what you see just to piss you off and increase "user engagement". On the back end it collects and sells data to anyone with money (see Cambridge Analytica, and whoever else). It is a filthy game, but a different game. They don't filter/block what you say/write, unless you go very extreme with your opinions posts. To ensure that I am not defending Facebook, it is a filthy company, with filthy management, and filthy agendas. Unfortunately they provide the 1-2-5-10 useful features that have captured some audience that would have otherwise dropped them.
- cameldrv 6y agoIt creates quite an opening for decentralized social networks, which I am very much looking forward to, because it means I can control the feed again.
- fiblye 6y agoI think the issue has nothing to do with it being Chinese, but with the extent at which it swallows up data on Americans. Why even bother sending spies to another country and making plans for infiltration when you can get them to download a full spying suite under the guise of social media? The problem is this opens a whole new can of worms regarding Facebook and other American social media. Other countries are equally justified in banning them for the same reason.
- wiml 6y agoWhat would it mean to "ban" an app? Would they force Apple and Google not to distribute it? Would they set up a national firewall?
- codezero 6y agoJust ask the app stores to ban them. The US couldn’t do anything more sophisticated right now, and that would solve most of their concerns.
- actuator 6y agoHas there been any precedence of US banning an app/website without some clear violation of law?
- rdlecler1 6y agoThis is a national security issue.
- vkou 6y agoTo be crude, I don't think someone in China seeing my TikTok videos is a national security issue. This interference with the free market is about politics, not security.
- JoshTriplett 6y ago> I don't think someone in China seeing my TikTok videos Leaving aside mechanisms and policies, this is not about seeing videos, this is about the invasive amount of information TikTok collects from devices it runs on.
- vkou 6y agoI don't think someone in China getting my GPS history, or my browsing history, or my mother's phone number is a national security issue, either.
- chvid 6y agoYou can hear the 8 minute Pompeo interview here: https://www.foxnews.com/media/mike-pompeo-tik-tok-china-communist-social-media-spying-fox-ingraham https://www.foxnews.com/media/mike-pompeo-tik-tok-china-comm... Covering a wide range of topics. Mostly it sounded like Pompeo getting ready for the upcoming election.
- sschueller 6y agoSo it is not ok for a foreign app the spy on its user but it's perfectly ok for Google and co to do so? Anyone remember what Uber did with their app and tracking users? What about the king of tracking, facebook?
- lightgreen 6y agoThere’s a quite a large difference between Google spying and China spying. When Google “spies”, users get more relevant ads. When China spies, people get into “Vocational Education and Training Centers” and other bad things happen. Chinese spying is like 10000 times worse in practice. But in theory, when dealing in absolutes, there is no difference, both are spies.
- apexalpha 6y agoLet's be honest: Google has been known to be in bed with the NSA and other agencies as well. It's very disingenuous to pretend Google only serves you ads but has no relations to the US national intelligence community but Chinese apps do.
- lightgreen 6y agoIf you have some references to confirm your theory about Google and NSA, please share a link. Otherwise it is just ZOG theory. Also, the statement about “being in bed” is very vague and non informative.
- myopenid2 6y agoFeigning ignorance doesn't make facts disappear.
- lightgreen 6y agoThis would be much more productive conversation if someone explained what they mean by Google being in bed with NSA and shared a link.
- AbrahamParangi 6y agoIt is absolutely foolish for any country other than China to allow TikTok within their borders. You might fairly ask whether or not it is equally foolish for non-US countries to use US services. I think that is also a reasonable question, and deserves reflection.
- lightgreen 6y agoGoogle is 1000 times more transparent company than ByteDance. It is OK to use US services for non-US countries.
- sschueller 6y agoSays the USA... "You can trust us, we don't listen on your foreign leaders". Come on, that ship has sailed years ago.
- lightgreen 6y agoIt was US government agencies, not private companies who were spying. So, to clarify, other countries can use US private company services, but should not blindly trust their secret data to the US government.
- HenryBemis 6y agoUSA has a track record of issuing a request for info (if not other shadier methods) tied with a gag order. So... and if the Snowden/Wikileaks/ATT room 641A has taught us anything (combined with the 5-9-14 eyes), is that we cannot trust any government when it has enough power to spy on its people. IT DOES. Major difference between USA, UK, France, Spain, Sweden etc. Vs Russia, Iran, China, Turkey, North Korea is that you end up in a cell, never to be seen again, tortured for your opinions. I do believe that there are some scountries like India, Pakistan a a couple of others that play in both courts. Semi democratic and semi dictatorial, at the same time..
- 6y ago
- libpcap 6y agoAbout time we level the playing field.
- coliveira 6y agoWelcome to dictatorship. Government will now start to ban all kinds of apps they don't want.
- ekianjo 6y agoIf some apps coming from other countries are riddled with spyware, is that dictatorship or common sense?
- dmix 6y agoIdeally coming from congress, then yes. There might be some valid arguments on national security grounds, but I personally wouldn't be comfortable having an all-powerful executive branch who could do this sort of thing unilaterally. Unless it's a wartime or emergency sort of thing. But Americans largely gave up that seperation of power after 9/11 and executive power hasn't stopped expanding since then. It's perpetually an 'emergency'. With this and the Huawei stuff, battling over advanced control over private networks for surveillance purposes, is a natural outcome of significantly increasing the power and influence of intelligence community. The kind of people who are naturally hyper-paranoid and see everything through a geopolitical risk lense. Which is helpful for a niche limited role but is ripe for abuse when their mandates expand.
- lightgreen 6y agoIt is kind of dictatorship. US could achieve the same effect without banning, eg by forcing stores to display warnings to users about where their data and what data is being send. That would be a reasonable compromise between freedom and safety.
- dicomdan 6y agoIt's like saying we should allow unregulated fentanyl sales on the streets as long as drug dealers provide a disclaimer to the addicted.
- lightgreen 6y ago
- tester34 6y agoDid anyone analyze the traffic sent out by this app and found something not-nice?
- JohnTClark 6y agoSomeone found this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23691190 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23691190
- chillee 6y agoThe headline is somewhat misleading. If you read the top comment, you'll see that many other apps also were "caught in the act", including ones that most people would agree are innocuous. This by itself is not compelling evidence.
- davidbonachera 6y agoYes, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-tiktok-lawsuit/tiktok-accused-in-california-lawsuit-of-sending-user-data-to-china-idUSKBN1Y708Q https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-tiktok-lawsuit/tiktok...
- myopenid2 6y agoThis report lack a lot of technical information. What counts as "personal information"? What did they send exactly? Is sending app analytics count as personal information? Why don't you hold American software companies to the same level of rigor? Case in point, almost all apps on my Android phone snoops on my "personal information"; Google literally knows where I am all the time; Facebook SDK snoops on the apps I use, and justify the collection of the data with "better personalization of services"; WhatsApp (owned by Facebook) vacuuming contacts off my phone; LinkedIn snoops on my clipboard etc.
- jml7c5 6y agoMade a (very) brief scan of the filing. The notable personal information mentioned: phone/social network contacts, MAC, IMEI, IMSI, device serial #, browsing history, cookies, "metadata", location. Pretty par for the course. (I'm not sure "browsing history" and "cookies" is correct, at least on Android versions after KitKat.) I believe you'd need to give permission for most (all?) of these before you download the app, or when you run it the first time. The filing also makes these claims regarding video uploads: >Once TikTok users click the “next” button, but before they click either the “save” or “post” buttons, their videos are transferred from their devices to the following domain owned and controlled by Defendants: [...] Not very damning. --- In the end, the concern is solely that the Chinese government may have access to the data, or may be able to upload exploits to users. This may be a reasonable fear. But people need to stop pretending TikTok's data collection is somehow worse than that of any other data-hoarding apps (Snapchat, Facebook, etc).
- tanilama 6y agoHow would this be implemented? Delisting from AppStore? Or ask ISP to ban tiktok domains? Or both?
- jeswin 6y agoIn India they did both.
- john4534243 6y agoCitation Needed
- yann_bleu 6y agoWell China has banned FB Twitter, Google etc. a decade ago
- ketzu 6y agoMany countries have banned some or more services (especially uber and the like received many bans). But even if others didn't, it seems like a very weak argument to me.
- realusername 6y agoVery few countries have banned to the extent of what the CCP did, walling off completely their internet. The CCP can't complain to get a taste of their own medicine here.
- ketzu 6y ago> Very few countries have banned to the extent of what the CCP did That's true, but the start of "they block our apps we should block all of them" seems to weirdly be china, but the argument is usually presented as a general obvious conclusion. I am very much in favor of banning apps that violate local laws and unfortunately that's what china does. So it's more the laws I don't like, not the ban in general. But this prevents me from accepting those bans (edit: banning them because they are chinese) in my (non-us) country. > The CCP can't complain to get a taste of their own medicine here. Sure they can. Everyone regularly complains about receiving their own medicine, including china and the us. But that's not the point. The point is holding yourself, your nation and other nations to your actual standards, not to some arbitrary standards of others. I want my government to enact regulation that benefits the citizens, such as privacy regulations, and enforce it, I don't want them to use nebulous national security regulation to do whatever they want. If possible, it should be clear what the requirements are so people can fulfil it. I really dislike arbitrarily enforceable laws where possibly everyone is in violation.
- realusername 6y ago
- kristopolous 6y agoThis is more of the protectionism/mercantilism/nationalism stuff. Sure, there's a B-story for it but it's all seated in revanchist nationalism and a tropish "suspicious foreigners" framing. If someone made a villainous fu manchu character people would rightly protest it as intolerable. Yet when we actually instrument official government policy based on the same sentiments that the character is based on nobody even reaches for the pearls to clutch. Once again, fiction and symbols are somehow more important to the political imagination than material reality.
- haecceity 6y ago> If someone made a villainous fu manchu character people would rightly protest it as intolerable. Asian stereotypes in media is pretty well tolerated.
- kristopolous 6y agoit's been toned down enormously. Mickey Rooney in Breakfast at Tiffany's as Mr Yunioshi for instance (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hb3gdUrIC4Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hb3gdUrIC4Q) this used to be common. The Flintstones, for instance https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mZ8lGDLARME https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mZ8lGDLARME ... it was bad ... really bad. If something like this was made today and the people somehow ended up in court over it, I'd probably think "well, they saw that coming"
- Craighead 6y agoThe material reality you're ignoring is that China is a massive authoritarian state which owns the data captured by tiktok Choose, US companies taking your data applying the philosophy of the Constitution or Chinese companies perpetrating genocide. Stay holier than thou all you want, the material reality is real.
- apexalpha 6y agoThis would be a good moment for the EU to reassess it's dependency on American apps like Whatsapp. If even the US starts openly blocking apps because they think it would be better for a local competitor to fill this part of the market it should be a wakeup call for the EU.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- chenzhekl 6y agoIf you view digital contents as industrial goods, the internet today which allows apps, services to flow around the world without much burden (e.g. tariff, import control) is already a miracle. It's no surprise of countries to start building "customs" on the internet and that may become a trend considering the deglobalization happening these years.
- simonh 6y agoAll this will do is validate that banning each other's social media apps is a legitimate thing to do, all you need is sufficient justification. The usual reason for tit-for-tat trade restrictions is to punish the original restrictions and try to coerce the other side back to a free trade position. That can't happen in this case, the CCP will never allow foreign social media in China, so it would end up with a permanent mutual ban. Either we believe that freedom of communication is a paramount principle that should be protected, or we don't and we think it's ok to interfere with it for 'national interest' reasons. Our national interest reasons might differ from theirs, but we'd still be validating that banning social media is an acceptable step to take depending on the circumstances. I realise this poses a problem because letting Chinese social media into our markets creates risks but if they operate in our markets they have to follow our laws and our standards. Playing the game their way by their rules is a losing strategy. We need to get a lot more creative on this.
- blackrock 6y agoHow much money is an American teenager or user, making from TikTok? Is TikTok doing revenue sharing with the content creator? If so, then this ban is just going to smack these American end users in the face.
- Markoff 6y agoI wish EU would done some with WeChat nobody cares really about TikTok, it's childish thing, but amount of data WeChat harvest is ridiculous and it honestly stops Chinese abroad from integrating with locals, if they keep communicating again just with Chinese within WeChat. if they were forced to use proper international apps with E2E encryption they could discuss whatever they want without sacrifing privacy I see it here, you have local Chinese living in EU still talking in WeChat groups under control of Chinese government which knows every word they talk
- chriselles 6y agoAre super-platforms such as FAANG and BATH(Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent, Huawei) Army, Navy, Air Forces, & Marines proxies on the digital layer? It certainly seems like the world is bifurcating between FAANG and BATH for that reason.
- reiichiroh 6y agoZoom, WeChat too
- sushshshsh 6y agoThis is such cancer. I didn't expect that trade wars and centralized app stores would lead to this, but here we are. Think back to 1999-- could you imagine if China had made Napster, the USA would block your access to download and use it? We would all just laugh at how easy it would be to get around it
- Balgair 6y agoSure, but with Napster I mostly get movies and songs I want, for free. Viruses too, sure. With TikTok I get bad choreography. I don't see a lot of people trying to get around firewalls for that.
- LyndsySimon 6y agoThat's... actually an interesting thought experiment. Let's say the US "bans" TikTok. Younger users around the country then install various VPN clients and learn a bit about security. This in turns leads to an overall more environment for US security services to perform mass surveillance.
- hintymad 6y agoThis may or may not have to do with trade war, but the banning TikTok makes sense -- it's just quid pro quo. The Chinese government banned FB, Google, Twitter, Netflix, after all.
- socrates1998 6y agoThe CCP bans so many apps, websites and other western technology, so this seems like a reasonable action just on that alone. And given how bad TikTok is with user data (mostly minors too), I don't see how banning it would be a bad thing. There will be American or western clones within days that replace it.
- tibbydudeza 6y agoTencent owns 40% of Epic Games ... shall we ban Fortnite as well then and make all the kids play Minecraft since it is wholly owned by a US company ???.
- john4534243 6y agoI think yes. If china is isolating itself from the internet, its only fair to not allow china to participate in the internet.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- bobbydreamer 6y agoI like Chinese tiktok "for you" recommendation than YouTube's recommended. Tiktoks reco is like yeah I will watch that, most of the time I am like thanks. Keep recommending like this. Youtube is like, algorithm thinks it has figured me but it's sort of showing me the same old videos like it's new. I will throw my data to China.
- echaozh 6y agoWhy should someone expressing their honest feeling get downvoted? Just because it looks like his sympathetic with the "evil" Chinese?
- hprotagonist 6y agoEven a stopped clock's right at least once a day.
- blackrock 6y agoThis sounds like a protectionist move from the United States, than anything else. TikTok appears to be the first China technology media company, that can actually make a dent in the universe. It wasn’t WeChat from Tencent. Nor anything from Alibaba; I don’t think they’re in the media space. Nor search from Baidu. Nor Sina Weibo for tweets. I can’t think of any other Chinese media company, that can actually make an impact, on the world, just yet. Perhaps the USA government is trying to kill this fledgling company, while it’s still small. It still hasn’t reached the prevalence of Facebook or YouTube or Twitter yet. The funny thing is, for a while, TikTok was trying to discourage political content. Just stick to fun dance moves. They tried to tell their users to keep that vile political stuff to Twitter and Facebook; and then, they got criticized for censorship. LOL.
- mike503 6y agoTrump administration banning an app that has allowed for worldwide social mobilization against him? No way.