13 ms·

TikTok: Logs, Logs, Logs

131 points by kkm 6y ago

oxymoran 6y ago
None of that matters though. The point is this: TikTok is owned by ByteDance. By definition, ByteDance is owned by the CCP. The CCP currently has concentration camps and is starting to act fairly imperialistic and bellicose. They clearly believe that their method of governance is superior to Democracy and they have ambitions to become the worlds superpower. The point is that they could use this to spy at any point in time if they wanted to even if they aren’t at this very second. The CCP simply cannot be trusted and never should have been in the first place. It is the exact same CCP that led to the death of millions of innocent Chinese during the cultural revolution. They still have portraits proudly displayed of Mao Zedong FFS.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- realusername 6y ago
  That's what people don't understand about TikTok and how the CCP works. Data gathered aren't the main issue, this app should not be analysed the same way as Facebook. The CCP will use it like they use anything else, as a tool to promote their own view.
  - FooBarWidget 6y ago
    Wait a minute... what happened to "we are against the CCP, not the Chinese people" and "the Chinese people and the CCP are separate"? There is no concrete evidence of spying. Tiktok is a private company. Yes one or more people in Tiktok may have ties with CCP members. But doesn't banning the whole of Tiktok, without concrete evidence, based merely on some level of association with CCP (and the level of association isn't even clear or proven at this point), then how can people still claim "the Chinese people and the CCP are separate"? It seems more like we're moving more and more towards "anything and everybody from China equals CCP and the whole of China is evil".
    - realusername 6y ago
      > There is no concrete evidence of spying. No but there's evidence of CCP propaganda already, just try to make a video about Taiwan, Hong-Kong or the insecurity issues within China and notice your account being banned. And before anyone tells me "it's the same as Facebook", I can go right now on Facebook and find as much anti-american or anti-Trump content as you want. > But doesn't banning the whole of Tiktok, without concrete evidence, based merely on some level of association with CCP (and the level of association isn't even clear at this point) The level of association is pretty clear, unless you have no knowledge on how large companies operates in China. > It seems more like we're moving more and more towards "anything and everybody from China equals CCP and the whole of China is evil". No, I'm only against the CCP, maybe one day the Chinese people will have the government they deserve.
      - FooBarWidget 6y ago
        I can tell you one kind of content that can get someone banned from Facebook: pro-China content. Even if someone genuinely believes that being pro-China is right, and that that person is not a bot. > The level of association is pretty clear, unless you have no knowledge on how large companies operates in China. > No, I'm only against the CCP, maybe one day the Chinese people will have the government they deserve. This looks like a huge contradiction to me. "Private companies in China have to follow Chinese law, so private Chinese companies are associated with CCP, so we should ban private Chinese companies, but I'm only against CCP". Imagine someone disagreeing with PRISM, and making the same statement as above, but substituting "CCP" with "American government".
        realusername 6y ago
        > I can tell you one kind of content that can get someone banned from Facebook: pro-China content. Even if someone genuinely believes that being pro-China is right, and that that person is not a bot. I don't see how you came to that conclusion. CGTN is still there on Facebook for example. They weren't even kicked out despite blatantly faking their subscribers count (yeah it's that obvious). > This looks like a huge contradiction to me. "Private companies in China have to follow Chinese law, so private Chinese companies are associated with CCP, so we should ban private Chinese companies, but I'm only against CCP". In China, if you did not know, there is no rule of law, the CCP is the law. Any large companies needs to have a CCP representative. There is no independent large company in China, that's not a thing yet. > Imagine someone disagreeing with PRISM, and making the same statement as above, but substituting "CCP" with "American government". The problem isn't just the data, it's the propaganda and the reach of the CCP.
- balola 6y ago
  The establishment of "Chinanet", such as Alibaba and Tencent, do pledge allegiance to (and are owned in part by) the party in name and action, in return they benefit from the protection and favorable policy it ensues. I personally don't like ByteDance mainly due to its product philosophy of reducing users to mindless eyeballs (it's a general indifference to social consequences in China tho ), but can't help but clarify that ByteDance isn't like those. Having billion-dollar app killed by the party without recourse is just not a remote possibility for the Chinanet establishment, but it is a reality for ByteDance. This is not to say it's impervious to CCP influence, but the dynamics is more nuanced. Old comment: >The CCP high officials don't really care about anyone but their own relatives and cronies, while your assumption is mostly right as in the cases like Alibaba and Tencent, ByteDance isn't exactly like them, it has a kind of autonomy and internationalization those companies wouldn't dare to dream of. ByteDance isn't as beholden to the party as those two since it's a startup capitalized on the app economy, it's growth is organic, didn't rely on government policies and protection. >In fact ByteDance already has blockbuster app Neihan Duanzi killed by Chinese authorities overngiht.
  - ethbro 6y ago
    > it's a general indifference to social consequences in China tho Interesting parallel to learned helplessness. [1] (Note: not making a value judgement, just using the psychological terminology) If (a) you are a company that exists in a state where the government can and does intervene at any time for purposes of social engineering, then (b) you would expect, over time, to develop a culture that deprioritizes considering social consequences, as (c) it's not something that's reliably in your control. By taking a more active hand in private-social interactions, it would seem the CCP ironically makes those same companies care less about it proactively, and simply follow the letter of the law. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learned_helplessness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learned_helplessness
- rvz 6y ago
  Well perhaps if you try criticising the CCP and the Chinese ambassador to the UK through this bizzare interview of the footage such as this [0] and repost it on TikTok and it goes viral, you might see yourself banned immediately. [0] https://twitter.com/BBCPolitics/status/1284784810200838145 https://twitter.com/BBCPolitics/status/1284784810200838145
- DarthGhandi 6y ago
  > By definition, ByteDance is owned by the CCP. This is just absurd, that's not the case at all. Your argument boils down to some bizarre implication that any Chinese company is state-run. For all the over-emotional CCP rants on this website this has to be up there as one of the most hilariously ill-informed. I get the feeling it's not possible to have a good faith discussion here.
- FooBarWidget 6y ago
  If its association with China is the only problem, then that means you'll have no problems with Bytedance selling Tiktok to a US company, and putting US employees in charge, right?
- plusCubed 6y ago
  Context: All internet companies in China operate under China's Cyber Security Law [0]. Among its consequences: "Companies could be asked to provide source code, encryption, or other crucial information for review by the authorities". (Tangent: TIL Apple's operation of iCloud in China is by a government-sponsored data company named Guizhou-Cloud Big Data [1] as a result of this law.) [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_Internet_Security_Law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_Internet_Security_Law [1] https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208351 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208351
  - DarthGhandi 6y ago
    This law exists in Australia The US just has secret laws and courts to compel boards to do what they say or otherwise straight sends its goons to illegally hack their own global companies seemingly oblivious to why rule of law even exists. I'd very much like to see this "definition" applied equally. Would you say Atlassian is controlled by the Australian government for the purposes of spying? https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/secret-court-rules-fbis-backdoor-searches-americans-violated-fourth-amendment https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/secret-court-rules-fbi... https://www.zdnet.com/article/us-says-it-does-not-need-courts-to-approve-encryption-backdoors/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/us-says-it-does-not-need-court... https://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/nsa-hacked-google-yahoo-report-article-1.1501596 https://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/nsa-hacked-google-... https://www.infoworld.com/article/2608141/snowden--the-nsa-planted-backdoors-in-cisco-products.html https://www.infoworld.com/article/2608141/snowden--the-nsa-p...
    - leesalminen 6y ago
      Is the CEO of Atlassian required to join a specific political party in order to remain CEO? Because that’s how it works in China. The 2 are not comparable.
      - dforrestwilson 6y ago
        Exactly. Completely different political context.
- FooBarWidget 6y ago
  You fear CCP propaganda. All right. But it seems that in your zeal to deny CCP propaganda, you seem to forget that all media is propaganda. All this western media attention towards how CCP is evil and how Tiktok can be used to spy or influence us, no matter whether they are right, are also designed as distractions from domestic issues. Let's say we should ban Tiktok. Everybody's data is still being spied on by the CIA, and gathered by PRISM. Go one step further. Ban Tiktok and Facebook, Twitter, etc.
  - TheAdamAndChe 6y ago
    A political system requires stability to survive, both internally and externally. Internal propaganda(to spread certain cultural norms and beliefs) is a stabilizing act, while external propaganda is (potentially) destabilizing. In this context, it makes sense why one would be allowed and the other wouldn't.
  - kumarvvr 6y ago
    This is an incredibly bad faith argument. What are you saying? Because everything is propaganda, either everything should be allowed or everything should be banned? What happens within the borders of a country is different, even if it is spying and suppression of human rights and what not. The destiny of a country should be in the hands of it's people. Be it good, bad or worse. But if you allow propaganda from another country to enter into your media, all is lost. Why? Because you lose faith in everything. How is one sure the revolution in a country is pure bred from that country? How is one sure the change one sought is because of the needs of the people of that country? It's an incredibly dangerous situation. Even if your own govt. spies on you, stopping the propaganda of a foreign country takes precedence at all costs, if necessary, even by war.
    - rydre 6y ago
      American social media app's dominate my country. Google 99% market share. Facebook/Instagram 95% market share in social. 5eyes/PRISM (they're not gonna forgive snowden, he ruined their reputation) monitors my country (not part of the anglospehere) and I never consented. Am I supposed to tell my government to block American apps so that I can compete with American apps or on "national security" grounds? Because this is the trend American's will see. And if Zuck is reading this, you're shooting your own foot. What do you think is gonna happen? You're pitting the government against TikTok because your company cannot compete fairly. You think you'll win like this? Your Facebook/Instagram will get banned in future by other democratic countries in future because of the precedent you're going to be setting. Let China do it's thing. It may very well turn out that their way of governance is better. Losers stick to old ways, if it turns out it's the superior system, they'll clearly be better. But for a system to be proven takes decades/centuries. As long as China does not force it's system, it's fine in my eyes.
- genidoi 6y ago
  Being able to influence geopolitics and orchestrate a pro-CCP feed to target demographics is a long, subtle plan that spans decades and TikTok is just the current instrument that the CCP has in their arsenal, and it's very likely early into that plan. It's a little naive to think that there would be a red herring found with a packet inspection, though the author deserves credit for settling doubts.
  - FooBarWidget 6y ago
    Any foreign app/website can be used to feed foreign propaganda. Should we ban all foreign apps/websites? Where does it end?
    - skywhopper 6y ago
      Why limit your worries to “foreign” apps? Assuming you’re American, Facebook and Twitter can and do carry a ton of “foreign” propaganda.
      - ClikeX 6y ago
        As a non-American. Facebook and Twitter spam me with American politics all the time.
  - ganfortran 6y ago
    Would you categorize Facebook/Twitter then, as the tool for US government to influence geopolitics on its behalf?
    - genidoi 6y ago
      You can post anything you like about Trump on FB/Twitter and you won't have federal police erase you 2 days later. The threshold for that in China is comparing it's current president to a cartoon character.
      - ganfortran 6y ago
- rydre 6y ago
  All media is propaganda. I like consuming the American and CCP kool aid at the same time tho... am I a sinner?
- namelosw 6y ago
  > By definition, ByteDance is owned by the CCP. By Which definition you're referring to? Now ByteDance is desperately trying to find a way out of this. It shows CCP is not intended to save their ass like how they try to save Huawei. Because it's just a company without government background. > They clearly believe that their method of governance is superior to Democracy and they have ambitions to become the world's superpower. It is the Western World who believe Democracy is superior to any others without contexts. Democracy is good of course on paper, however, it's usually used as a cause to target flawed developing countries and leaving them to burn in hell. The West got rid of Gaddafi, leaving Lybia people suffering even more. Assad was facing a similar situation, I believe if he died the situation in Syria would be much worse. They just want to judge, and don't give a shit about that they cause much more damages. A quote from Lee Quan Yew from the interview with Charlie Rose[0]: "I think to make sure that they feel they're accepted at the top table." China was THE superpower for a very, very long time (For example, in terms of GDP, and here's a video on the historical comparison [1]). The situation is more like, China has its own system and it's not possible to largely change or its people would greatly suffer (as always according to Chinese history, or just like Eastern Europe), and they're not quite accepted because the system is radically different. > They still have portraits proudly displayed of Mao Zedong FFS. State media has already started to criticize Mao for years. They didn't do it at scale because it would piss-off most middle-aged or old people, and it's pointless. It's very likely they will do this after these generations have died. It's basically like when people talk about Washington they rarely talk about how he treats slaves. [0] https://youtu.be/A8GwmsLXOx8?t=597 https://youtu.be/A8GwmsLXOx8?t=597 [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4-2nqd6-ZXg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4-2nqd6-ZXg
  - enkid 6y ago
    You know Washington freed his slaves in his will, (when that was very uncommon) right?
    - x86_64Ubuntu 6y ago
      Washington had no problem sending slave catchers after blacks who dared for their freedom. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hercules_Posey https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hercules_Posey https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oney_Judge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oney_Judge And he had no biological heirs which I can only imagine made it a breeze to not keep people in bondage.
- myopenid4 6y ago
  This rhetoric is so tiring. Don't see you whining when Western "democracies" do the same thing WITH proof to back the claims up. Smh. Edit: inb4 you tell me you'd rather get spied on by Murica than evil CCP.
- kerkeslager 6y ago
  Okay, but if I were an American civilian TikTok user, why should I care? If you're saying we shouldn't support China financially, I agree, but TikTok doesn't even scratch the surface on the ways in which Americans give money to Chinese companies. Banning TikTok might be the start of a larger set of sanctions against China, but that would have massive economic implications for the US, which aren't likely to be popular. I doubt this will happen. So banning TikTok as an economic sanction is a pretty meaningless gesture. If you're saying we should be worried about TikTok collecting data on us: again, I agree, but I think we should be more concerned about American companies and government agencies collecting information on us. Every time I know of an American civilian has been arrested, shot by law enforcement, canceled, etc., it has been due to actions of Americans. Has even a single action been taken by the CCP against an American civilian? Privacy is a fundamental human right, and it's unacceptable for the CCP, the US government, or US companies to violate that right. But if we're trying to protect ourselves, it makes sense to protect against the entities that are actually attacking us, and for US civilians, that's not the CCP. I don't see a strong argument for banning TikTok here that doesn't also apply to Facebook, Instagram, Google, or any of the various other corporations that collect data on you and then sell it to whoever will pay for it. EDIT: I'm sure the person who downvoted this post in the time it took for the page to refresh after posting it read the whole thing. /s
  - gruez 6y ago
    >Banning TikTok might be the start of a larger set of sanctions against China, but that would have massive economic implications for the US Have you missed all of this year and last year? The trade war ship has long sailed
    - kerkeslager 6y ago
      Tariffs are pretty different from bans. Compare to the 1979, 1984, 1995, and 1996 sanctions against Iran, each of which banned investment and trade with Iran in entire economic sectors. Such bans would be politically impossible for the US to direct toward china, since we are dependent on China for certain products--we literally don't have the production capacity to meet our own needs.
- atarian 6y ago
  >Huawei builds 5g first >USA bans Huawei >TikTok becomes the most popular social app >USA bans TikTok Yeah it's totally because China is "evil" and not because we're losing our edge.
  - cptskippy 6y ago
    It can be both.
- wruza 6y ago
  Yeah, but please save your fud shoes for the time when they will actually start doing what you're afraid of via tiktok. Or at least for when it will become unclear and better encrypted. Before that it's up to everyone to use or not to use private companies' apps who never killed millions of people and are just doing a regular business. (I'm not a US citizen and apolitical if that matters)
- zkid18 6y ago
  Just a bit more context. ByteDance is backed by Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, SoftBank Group, Sequoia Capital, General Atlantic, and Hillhouse Capital Group [0] The majority of investors and high-stake owners of Bytedance are non-Chinese. [0] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-tiktok-cfius-exclusive/exclusive-u-s-opens-national-security-investigation-into-tiktok-sources-idUSKBN1XB4IL https://www.reuters.com/article/us-tiktok-cfius-exclusive/ex...
DarthGhandi 6y ago
So nothing really surprising, shame he didn't go into the encryption lib but I'd guess it's something boring and normal.
- K0nserv 6y ago
  From what I have found(on iOS) they have some homgrown stuff with AES128 and a fixed key "yu*ods"
alexnewman 6y ago
I think America not allowing any Chinese product is not tenable and is a rejection of free markets. We must have a way of making them safe, providing penalties for violations of people's safety, and oversite provided by independent corporate entities
- secondcoming 6y ago
  Do you know nothing about how China works?
  - troist 6y ago
    Should we sink to their level though? I'm not sure tit for tat fighting is going to fix anything, it just drags us all down. I'm not saying I have a solution, but I feel there's got to be a better one than the direction we're going.
    - FooBarWidget 6y ago
      Isn't Bytedance selling Tiktok to Microsoft the solution? As far as concrete worries are concerned, doesn't that solve everything? But I'm not seeing anybody paying any attention to that.
      - deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
- solidasparagus 6y ago
  Markets are never fully free - ask any US company that has tried to sell to the Chinese market. What we are seeing here is the first truly global Chinese app. The US is grappling with the fact that China makes it very difficult for American companies to access the China market, but the US generally does not do the same for foreign countries. However, maintaining that approach puts US companies in a distinct disadvantage.
  - 6y ago
perrohunter 6y ago
So TikTok is not GDPR compliant?
- mratsim 6y ago
  Nor were/are Facebook or Google.
- FooBarWidget 6y ago
  Not necessarily. Tiktok could sign a Data Processing Agreement with whatever US cloud they host their stuff on.
  - sjmulder 6y ago
    That doesn't cover collecting the data in the first place.
strooper 6y ago
Thanks for excellent technical analysis! I personally enjoyed reading your article. However, to my knowledge, no decision maker is interested to learn the technical details. Don't we know already this tiktok is just in the US-China cross fire? Our American friends are interested to teach our Chinese friends lessons by hitting hard on their public business faces. Never mind not talking about thousands of real state investments by Chinese people in US cities. Never mind, not talking about CCP atrocities on the Xinjiang people going way back at least 15 years (since when I am following). It's not support for humanity, it's not about sudden urge for national security, it's about politics and populism.
- SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
  If it were just in the US-China crossfire, I'd expect to see a lot more voices speaking out in defense of it. The decisionmakers themselves aren't tremendously technical people, but technical people seem convinced there's a real problem here.
diminish 6y ago
> .. understand what data does TikTok regularly send back to its servers. I decrypted the content of the requests and analysed it. As far as we can see, in its current state, TikTok doesn’t have a suspicious behavior and is not exfiltrating unusual data. Getting data about the user device is quite common in the mobile world and we would obtain similar results with Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram and others.
T3RMINATED 6y ago
Its Telemetry, normal data everyone else collects.
kanox 6y ago
TL;DR: nothing I would be shocked to see solid proof that tiktok is substantially more intrusive than snapchat or instagram. Data collection should be limited at the OS level anyway. The only crime of tiktok is being chinese.
- walnuts110 6y ago
  Yup, it would be racist if tiktok is a person.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
seemslegit 6y ago
tldr; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UVgbFttx-6I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UVgbFttx-6I
gthtjtkt 6y ago
This is an extremely simplistic analysis and he even admits he only spent 3 hours doing it. He analyzed a single network call.
- GaryNumanVevo 6y ago
  I'm looking forward to your extremely non-simplistic follow up post then!
  - gthtjtkt 6y ago
    So you think examining a single network activity is a thorough analysis of an application with millions of lines of code?
    - GaryNumanVevo 6y ago
      I know nothing about android application development
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
tuyuri 6y ago
It's important to say that BURP only deals with http like requests ( http/https websockets ) and the app can be sending/receiving data via other protocols, the same way you can't see whatsapp messages via burp [0] [0] - https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/153944/burp-with-whatsapp https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/153944/burp-wit...
- DarthGhandi 6y ago
  This is an excellent point. Checking wireshark should really be done first.
AtomicOrbital 6y ago
Clearly apps ecosystem badly needs end-to-end encryption which is exclusively installed and applied by each enduser party not by server side which is easily circumvented by powers to be ... also to obfuscate who endusers are we also need a tor router like ecosystem ... until these layers become available everyone is simply rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic of mass surveillance
moreorless 6y ago
I recall reading somewhere: In China, you can change the policies, but you can't change the party. In America, you can change the parties, but you cannot change the policy.
beaunative 6y ago
TikTok is a company, and has many competitors, there would not be any issue for anyone to develop a tiktok copycat. Why should it be banned under a free market? Plenty of silicon valley leadership have their political allegiance. Why would that be a problem for the users?

131 points by kkm 6y ago

None of that matters though. The point is this: TikTok is owned by ByteDance. By definition, ByteDance is owned by the CCP. The CCP currently has concentration camps and is starting to act fairly imperialistic and bellicose. They clearly believe that their method of governance is superior to Democracy and they have ambitions to become the worlds superpower. The point is that they could use this to spy at any point in time if they wanted to even if they aren’t at this very second. The CCP simply cannot be trusted and never should have been in the first place. It is the exact same CCP that led to the death of millions of innocent Chinese during the cultural revolution. They still have portraits proudly displayed of Mao Zedong FFS.

deleted 6y ago
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realusername 6y ago
That's what people don't understand about TikTok and how the CCP works. Data gathered aren't the main issue, this app should not be analysed the same way as Facebook. The CCP will use it like they use anything else, as a tool to promote their own view.
- FooBarWidget 6y ago
  Wait a minute... what happened to "we are against the CCP, not the Chinese people" and "the Chinese people and the CCP are separate"? There is no concrete evidence of spying. Tiktok is a private company. Yes one or more people in Tiktok may have ties with CCP members. But doesn't banning the whole of Tiktok, without concrete evidence, based merely on some level of association with CCP (and the level of association isn't even clear or proven at this point), then how can people still claim "the Chinese people and the CCP are separate"? It seems more like we're moving more and more towards "anything and everybody from China equals CCP and the whole of China is evil".
  - realusername 6y ago
    > There is no concrete evidence of spying. No but there's evidence of CCP propaganda already, just try to make a video about Taiwan, Hong-Kong or the insecurity issues within China and notice your account being banned. And before anyone tells me "it's the same as Facebook", I can go right now on Facebook and find as much anti-american or anti-Trump content as you want. > But doesn't banning the whole of Tiktok, without concrete evidence, based merely on some level of association with CCP (and the level of association isn't even clear at this point) The level of association is pretty clear, unless you have no knowledge on how large companies operates in China. > It seems more like we're moving more and more towards "anything and everybody from China equals CCP and the whole of China is evil". No, I'm only against the CCP, maybe one day the Chinese people will have the government they deserve.
    - FooBarWidget 6y ago
      I can tell you one kind of content that can get someone banned from Facebook: pro-China content. Even if someone genuinely believes that being pro-China is right, and that that person is not a bot. > The level of association is pretty clear, unless you have no knowledge on how large companies operates in China. > No, I'm only against the CCP, maybe one day the Chinese people will have the government they deserve. This looks like a huge contradiction to me. "Private companies in China have to follow Chinese law, so private Chinese companies are associated with CCP, so we should ban private Chinese companies, but I'm only against CCP". Imagine someone disagreeing with PRISM, and making the same statement as above, but substituting "CCP" with "American government".
      - realusername 6y ago
        > I can tell you one kind of content that can get someone banned from Facebook: pro-China content. Even if someone genuinely believes that being pro-China is right, and that that person is not a bot. I don't see how you came to that conclusion. CGTN is still there on Facebook for example. They weren't even kicked out despite blatantly faking their subscribers count (yeah it's that obvious). > This looks like a huge contradiction to me. "Private companies in China have to follow Chinese law, so private Chinese companies are associated with CCP, so we should ban private Chinese companies, but I'm only against CCP". In China, if you did not know, there is no rule of law, the CCP is the law. Any large companies needs to have a CCP representative. There is no independent large company in China, that's not a thing yet. > Imagine someone disagreeing with PRISM, and making the same statement as above, but substituting "CCP" with "American government". The problem isn't just the data, it's the propaganda and the reach of the CCP.
balola 6y ago
The establishment of "Chinanet", such as Alibaba and Tencent, do pledge allegiance to (and are owned in part by) the party in name and action, in return they benefit from the protection and favorable policy it ensues. I personally don't like ByteDance mainly due to its product philosophy of reducing users to mindless eyeballs (it's a general indifference to social consequences in China tho ), but can't help but clarify that ByteDance isn't like those. Having billion-dollar app killed by the party without recourse is just not a remote possibility for the Chinanet establishment, but it is a reality for ByteDance. This is not to say it's impervious to CCP influence, but the dynamics is more nuanced. Old comment: >The CCP high officials don't really care about anyone but their own relatives and cronies, while your assumption is mostly right as in the cases like Alibaba and Tencent, ByteDance isn't exactly like them, it has a kind of autonomy and internationalization those companies wouldn't dare to dream of. ByteDance isn't as beholden to the party as those two since it's a startup capitalized on the app economy, it's growth is organic, didn't rely on government policies and protection. >In fact ByteDance already has blockbuster app Neihan Duanzi killed by Chinese authorities overngiht.
- ethbro 6y ago
  > it's a general indifference to social consequences in China tho Interesting parallel to learned helplessness. [1] (Note: not making a value judgement, just using the psychological terminology) If (a) you are a company that exists in a state where the government can and does intervene at any time for purposes of social engineering, then (b) you would expect, over time, to develop a culture that deprioritizes considering social consequences, as (c) it's not something that's reliably in your control. By taking a more active hand in private-social interactions, it would seem the CCP ironically makes those same companies care less about it proactively, and simply follow the letter of the law. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learned_helplessness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learned_helplessness
rvz 6y ago
Well perhaps if you try criticising the CCP and the Chinese ambassador to the UK through this bizzare interview of the footage such as this [0] and repost it on TikTok and it goes viral, you might see yourself banned immediately. [0] https://twitter.com/BBCPolitics/status/1284784810200838145 https://twitter.com/BBCPolitics/status/1284784810200838145
DarthGhandi 6y ago
> By definition, ByteDance is owned by the CCP. This is just absurd, that's not the case at all. Your argument boils down to some bizarre implication that any Chinese company is state-run. For all the over-emotional CCP rants on this website this has to be up there as one of the most hilariously ill-informed. I get the feeling it's not possible to have a good faith discussion here.
FooBarWidget 6y ago
If its association with China is the only problem, then that means you'll have no problems with Bytedance selling Tiktok to a US company, and putting US employees in charge, right?
plusCubed 6y ago
Context: All internet companies in China operate under China's Cyber Security Law [0]. Among its consequences: "Companies could be asked to provide source code, encryption, or other crucial information for review by the authorities". (Tangent: TIL Apple's operation of iCloud in China is by a government-sponsored data company named Guizhou-Cloud Big Data [1] as a result of this law.) [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_Internet_Security_Law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_Internet_Security_Law [1] https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208351 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208351
- DarthGhandi 6y ago
  This law exists in Australia The US just has secret laws and courts to compel boards to do what they say or otherwise straight sends its goons to illegally hack their own global companies seemingly oblivious to why rule of law even exists. I'd very much like to see this "definition" applied equally. Would you say Atlassian is controlled by the Australian government for the purposes of spying? https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/secret-court-rules-fbis-backdoor-searches-americans-violated-fourth-amendment https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/secret-court-rules-fbi... https://www.zdnet.com/article/us-says-it-does-not-need-courts-to-approve-encryption-backdoors/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/us-says-it-does-not-need-court... https://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/nsa-hacked-google-yahoo-report-article-1.1501596 https://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/nsa-hacked-google-... https://www.infoworld.com/article/2608141/snowden--the-nsa-planted-backdoors-in-cisco-products.html https://www.infoworld.com/article/2608141/snowden--the-nsa-p...
  - leesalminen 6y ago
    Is the CEO of Atlassian required to join a specific political party in order to remain CEO? Because that’s how it works in China. The 2 are not comparable.
    - dforrestwilson 6y ago
      Exactly. Completely different political context.
FooBarWidget 6y ago
You fear CCP propaganda. All right. But it seems that in your zeal to deny CCP propaganda, you seem to forget that all media is propaganda. All this western media attention towards how CCP is evil and how Tiktok can be used to spy or influence us, no matter whether they are right, are also designed as distractions from domestic issues. Let's say we should ban Tiktok. Everybody's data is still being spied on by the CIA, and gathered by PRISM. Go one step further. Ban Tiktok and Facebook, Twitter, etc.
- TheAdamAndChe 6y ago
  A political system requires stability to survive, both internally and externally. Internal propaganda(to spread certain cultural norms and beliefs) is a stabilizing act, while external propaganda is (potentially) destabilizing. In this context, it makes sense why one would be allowed and the other wouldn't.
- kumarvvr 6y ago
  This is an incredibly bad faith argument. What are you saying? Because everything is propaganda, either everything should be allowed or everything should be banned? What happens within the borders of a country is different, even if it is spying and suppression of human rights and what not. The destiny of a country should be in the hands of it's people. Be it good, bad or worse. But if you allow propaganda from another country to enter into your media, all is lost. Why? Because you lose faith in everything. How is one sure the revolution in a country is pure bred from that country? How is one sure the change one sought is because of the needs of the people of that country? It's an incredibly dangerous situation. Even if your own govt. spies on you, stopping the propaganda of a foreign country takes precedence at all costs, if necessary, even by war.
  - rydre 6y ago
    American social media app's dominate my country. Google 99% market share. Facebook/Instagram 95% market share in social. 5eyes/PRISM (they're not gonna forgive snowden, he ruined their reputation) monitors my country (not part of the anglospehere) and I never consented. Am I supposed to tell my government to block American apps so that I can compete with American apps or on "national security" grounds? Because this is the trend American's will see. And if Zuck is reading this, you're shooting your own foot. What do you think is gonna happen? You're pitting the government against TikTok because your company cannot compete fairly. You think you'll win like this? Your Facebook/Instagram will get banned in future by other democratic countries in future because of the precedent you're going to be setting. Let China do it's thing. It may very well turn out that their way of governance is better. Losers stick to old ways, if it turns out it's the superior system, they'll clearly be better. But for a system to be proven takes decades/centuries. As long as China does not force it's system, it's fine in my eyes.
genidoi 6y ago
Being able to influence geopolitics and orchestrate a pro-CCP feed to target demographics is a long, subtle plan that spans decades and TikTok is just the current instrument that the CCP has in their arsenal, and it's very likely early into that plan. It's a little naive to think that there would be a red herring found with a packet inspection, though the author deserves credit for settling doubts.
- FooBarWidget 6y ago
  Any foreign app/website can be used to feed foreign propaganda. Should we ban all foreign apps/websites? Where does it end?
  - skywhopper 6y ago
    Why limit your worries to “foreign” apps? Assuming you’re American, Facebook and Twitter can and do carry a ton of “foreign” propaganda.
    - ClikeX 6y ago
      As a non-American. Facebook and Twitter spam me with American politics all the time.
- ganfortran 6y ago
  Would you categorize Facebook/Twitter then, as the tool for US government to influence geopolitics on its behalf?
  - genidoi 6y ago
    You can post anything you like about Trump on FB/Twitter and you won't have federal police erase you 2 days later. The threshold for that in China is comparing it's current president to a cartoon character.
    - ganfortran 6y ago
rydre 6y ago
All media is propaganda. I like consuming the American and CCP kool aid at the same time tho... am I a sinner?
namelosw 6y ago
> By definition, ByteDance is owned by the CCP. By Which definition you're referring to? Now ByteDance is desperately trying to find a way out of this. It shows CCP is not intended to save their ass like how they try to save Huawei. Because it's just a company without government background. > They clearly believe that their method of governance is superior to Democracy and they have ambitions to become the world's superpower. It is the Western World who believe Democracy is superior to any others without contexts. Democracy is good of course on paper, however, it's usually used as a cause to target flawed developing countries and leaving them to burn in hell. The West got rid of Gaddafi, leaving Lybia people suffering even more. Assad was facing a similar situation, I believe if he died the situation in Syria would be much worse. They just want to judge, and don't give a shit about that they cause much more damages. A quote from Lee Quan Yew from the interview with Charlie Rose[0]: "I think to make sure that they feel they're accepted at the top table." China was THE superpower for a very, very long time (For example, in terms of GDP, and here's a video on the historical comparison [1]). The situation is more like, China has its own system and it's not possible to largely change or its people would greatly suffer (as always according to Chinese history, or just like Eastern Europe), and they're not quite accepted because the system is radically different. > They still have portraits proudly displayed of Mao Zedong FFS. State media has already started to criticize Mao for years. They didn't do it at scale because it would piss-off most middle-aged or old people, and it's pointless. It's very likely they will do this after these generations have died. It's basically like when people talk about Washington they rarely talk about how he treats slaves. [0] https://youtu.be/A8GwmsLXOx8?t=597 https://youtu.be/A8GwmsLXOx8?t=597 [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4-2nqd6-ZXg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4-2nqd6-ZXg
- enkid 6y ago
  You know Washington freed his slaves in his will, (when that was very uncommon) right?
  - x86_64Ubuntu 6y ago
    Washington had no problem sending slave catchers after blacks who dared for their freedom. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hercules_Posey https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hercules_Posey https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oney_Judge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oney_Judge And he had no biological heirs which I can only imagine made it a breeze to not keep people in bondage.
myopenid4 6y ago
This rhetoric is so tiring. Don't see you whining when Western "democracies" do the same thing WITH proof to back the claims up. Smh. Edit: inb4 you tell me you'd rather get spied on by Murica than evil CCP.
kerkeslager 6y ago
Okay, but if I were an American civilian TikTok user, why should I care? If you're saying we shouldn't support China financially, I agree, but TikTok doesn't even scratch the surface on the ways in which Americans give money to Chinese companies. Banning TikTok might be the start of a larger set of sanctions against China, but that would have massive economic implications for the US, which aren't likely to be popular. I doubt this will happen. So banning TikTok as an economic sanction is a pretty meaningless gesture. If you're saying we should be worried about TikTok collecting data on us: again, I agree, but I think we should be more concerned about American companies and government agencies collecting information on us. Every time I know of an American civilian has been arrested, shot by law enforcement, canceled, etc., it has been due to actions of Americans. Has even a single action been taken by the CCP against an American civilian? Privacy is a fundamental human right, and it's unacceptable for the CCP, the US government, or US companies to violate that right. But if we're trying to protect ourselves, it makes sense to protect against the entities that are actually attacking us, and for US civilians, that's not the CCP. I don't see a strong argument for banning TikTok here that doesn't also apply to Facebook, Instagram, Google, or any of the various other corporations that collect data on you and then sell it to whoever will pay for it. EDIT: I'm sure the person who downvoted this post in the time it took for the page to refresh after posting it read the whole thing. /s
- gruez 6y ago
  >Banning TikTok might be the start of a larger set of sanctions against China, but that would have massive economic implications for the US Have you missed all of this year and last year? The trade war ship has long sailed
  - kerkeslager 6y ago
    Tariffs are pretty different from bans. Compare to the 1979, 1984, 1995, and 1996 sanctions against Iran, each of which banned investment and trade with Iran in entire economic sectors. Such bans would be politically impossible for the US to direct toward china, since we are dependent on China for certain products--we literally don't have the production capacity to meet our own needs.
atarian 6y ago
>Huawei builds 5g first >USA bans Huawei >TikTok becomes the most popular social app >USA bans TikTok Yeah it's totally because China is "evil" and not because we're losing our edge.
- cptskippy 6y ago
  It can be both.
wruza 6y ago
Yeah, but please save your fud shoes for the time when they will actually start doing what you're afraid of via tiktok. Or at least for when it will become unclear and better encrypted. Before that it's up to everyone to use or not to use private companies' apps who never killed millions of people and are just doing a regular business. (I'm not a US citizen and apolitical if that matters)
zkid18 6y ago
Just a bit more context. ByteDance is backed by Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, SoftBank Group, Sequoia Capital, General Atlantic, and Hillhouse Capital Group [0] The majority of investors and high-stake owners of Bytedance are non-Chinese. [0] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-tiktok-cfius-exclusive/exclusive-u-s-opens-national-security-investigation-into-tiktok-sources-idUSKBN1XB4IL https://www.reuters.com/article/us-tiktok-cfius-exclusive/ex...

DarthGhandi 6y ago

So nothing really surprising, shame he didn't go into the encryption lib but I'd guess it's something boring and normal.

K0nserv 6y ago
From what I have found(on iOS) they have some homgrown stuff with AES128 and a fixed key "yu*ods"

alexnewman 6y ago

I think America not allowing any Chinese product is not tenable and is a rejection of free markets. We must have a way of making them safe, providing penalties for violations of people's safety, and oversite provided by independent corporate entities

secondcoming 6y ago
Do you know nothing about how China works?
- troist 6y ago
  Should we sink to their level though? I'm not sure tit for tat fighting is going to fix anything, it just drags us all down. I'm not saying I have a solution, but I feel there's got to be a better one than the direction we're going.
  - FooBarWidget 6y ago
    Isn't Bytedance selling Tiktok to Microsoft the solution? As far as concrete worries are concerned, doesn't that solve everything? But I'm not seeing anybody paying any attention to that.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
solidasparagus 6y ago
Markets are never fully free - ask any US company that has tried to sell to the Chinese market. What we are seeing here is the first truly global Chinese app. The US is grappling with the fact that China makes it very difficult for American companies to access the China market, but the US generally does not do the same for foreign countries. However, maintaining that approach puts US companies in a distinct disadvantage.
- 6y ago

perrohunter 6y ago

So TikTok is not GDPR compliant?

mratsim 6y ago
Nor were/are Facebook or Google.
FooBarWidget 6y ago
Not necessarily. Tiktok could sign a Data Processing Agreement with whatever US cloud they host their stuff on.
- sjmulder 6y ago
  That doesn't cover collecting the data in the first place.

strooper 6y ago

Thanks for excellent technical analysis! I personally enjoyed reading your article. However, to my knowledge, no decision maker is interested to learn the technical details. Don't we know already this tiktok is just in the US-China cross fire? Our American friends are interested to teach our Chinese friends lessons by hitting hard on their public business faces. Never mind not talking about thousands of real state investments by Chinese people in US cities. Never mind, not talking about CCP atrocities on the Xinjiang people going way back at least 15 years (since when I am following). It's not support for humanity, it's not about sudden urge for national security, it's about politics and populism.

SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
If it were just in the US-China crossfire, I'd expect to see a lot more voices speaking out in defense of it. The decisionmakers themselves aren't tremendously technical people, but technical people seem convinced there's a real problem here.

diminish 6y ago

> .. understand what data does TikTok regularly send back to its servers. I decrypted the content of the requests and analysed it. As far as we can see, in its current state, TikTok doesn’t have a suspicious behavior and is not exfiltrating unusual data. Getting data about the user device is quite common in the mobile world and we would obtain similar results with Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram and others.

T3RMINATED 6y ago

Its Telemetry, normal data everyone else collects.

kanox 6y ago

TL;DR: nothing I would be shocked to see solid proof that tiktok is substantially more intrusive than snapchat or instagram. Data collection should be limited at the OS level anyway. The only crime of tiktok is being chinese.

walnuts110 6y ago
Yup, it would be racist if tiktok is a person.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

seemslegit 6y ago

tldr; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UVgbFttx-6I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UVgbFttx-6I

gthtjtkt 6y ago

This is an extremely simplistic analysis and he even admits he only spent 3 hours doing it. He analyzed a single network call.

GaryNumanVevo 6y ago
I'm looking forward to your extremely non-simplistic follow up post then!
- gthtjtkt 6y ago
  So you think examining a single network activity is a thorough analysis of an application with millions of lines of code?
  - GaryNumanVevo 6y ago
    I know nothing about android application development

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

tuyuri 6y ago

It's important to say that BURP only deals with http like requests ( http/https websockets ) and the app can be sending/receiving data via other protocols, the same way you can't see whatsapp messages via burp [0] [0] - https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/153944/burp-with-whatsapp https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/153944/burp-wit...

DarthGhandi 6y ago
This is an excellent point. Checking wireshark should really be done first.

AtomicOrbital 6y ago

Clearly apps ecosystem badly needs end-to-end encryption which is exclusively installed and applied by each enduser party not by server side which is easily circumvented by powers to be ... also to obfuscate who endusers are we also need a tor router like ecosystem ... until these layers become available everyone is simply rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic of mass surveillance

moreorless 6y ago

I recall reading somewhere: In China, you can change the policies, but you can't change the party. In America, you can change the parties, but you cannot change the policy.

beaunative 6y ago

TikTok is a company, and has many competitors, there would not be any issue for anyone to develop a tiktok copycat. Why should it be banned under a free market? Plenty of silicon valley leadership have their political allegiance. Why would that be a problem for the users?