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> [The] US government does not want any possibility of US citizens' data being in the hands of China. Yeah, except that any business can just buy that informat

> [The] US government does not want any possibility of US citizens' data being in the hands of China. Yeah, except that any business can just buy that information. I can buy your day-to-day movements for dirt cheap. I own a non-American company (though I'm still an American citizen, but that isn't a factor), and it is insanely cheap to get information about any American you want. Hell, BingBot will tell you all about me, what I do for a living and where I live. This is about China, but it is a stupid and pointless zero-point game. This bill would get shot down in 30s for being unconstitutional, especially if the company has an American LLC or corporation (making it a legal entity protected by the constitution). Further, you'd think congress would have learned from prohibition that banning something ... hmm, doesn't work? At all? How would you even enforce something like this, stop people randomly to violate their privacy further and search their phone? Will this be another thing to get arrested for when you have a 'broken tailight'?

yed 4y ago
The bill doesn't directly ban data sharing but instead focuses on foreign ownership in US companies. It would be enforced similar to anti-trust laws today, by preventing Chinese nationals from purchasing or having an ownership stake in certain large technology companies deemed a security risk. I don't like the bill because I think it's unnecessary but it has nothing to do with searching people's phones or regulating actual data in any way.
ddoolin 4y ago
TikTok disappearing from tens of millions of iPhones overnight (I have no idea about Androids) would probably work pretty well. If I had to guess, almost none of those people can jailbreak their iPhone to get it again, either. Your option would be to switch to Android and learn to sideload apps (which I think is pretty damn easy these days). The point is not to enforce against individual users, just to remove it from the main distribution channels.
- withinboredom 4y ago
  You can freely install apps on your iphone. All you need is an Apple computer. It only can be used for a week? before you have to install it again. I don't pay apple a dime and still develop software for iPhones occasionally without any issues. Also, websites are pretty powerful. Apple even allowed websites to send notifications now.
  - sebzim4500 4y ago
    If you believe that a significant portion of iOS users are going to set up an Apple development account and manually reinstall TikTok every week then I have a bridge to sell you. They will just switch to a different social network, which is equally destructive but not Chinese.
    - withinboredom 4y ago
      I didn’t do anything special. I just installed Xcode, and bam. Done. We ripped CDs so we didn’t have to buy them. Hell, we sat by boomboxes until the right song came on the radio just to push record on the tape player. Kids will do whatever it takes to get what they want. I’d buy that bridge.
      - belval 4y ago
        > I just installed Xcode I think you are overestimating the tech know-how of the average person and how driven the average teenager is. TikTok a year ago was pretty unique, but now you have YouTube Shorts and Instagram Reels. I'd bet a hard money that 99% of people will just switch to those in a heartbeat if TikTok was banned. > Kids will do whatever it takes to get what they want. I’d buy that bridge. What they want is cheap dopamine hit from the smartphone. It's really close to drugs, make heroin hard to get and people will go to an analog like fentanyl.
      - jrsj 4y ago
        Except a MacBook costs $1000+ when TikTok clones are free
- weard_beard 4y ago
  Did anyone else notice this bill includes a provision that requires the department of Commerce to inform the president Quiet partwhen wall street has made such a cockup of gamblingQuiet part that it becomes a national security risk and gives him the power to issue an Executive Order requiring the general investing public sell that particular stock so hedge funds can pay off their debt? S.686 https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/senate-bill/686 https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/senate-bill/686
  - atlasunshrugged 4y ago
    Which section is that in? I didn't read anything that way but maybe I need to re-read
    - weard_beard 4y ago
      Re-reading, I may be mistaken. S.686 is still in committee and it looks like S.1143 looks to have passed the Senate. I read an article this morning that suggested S.686 is meant to be a rider, can't find it now.
      - atlasunshrugged 4y ago
        Ah okay, thanks!
- mattmcknight 4y ago
  It has a website. I've used the website, never the app.
  - ddoolin 4y ago
    True, but those can also be banned (in a literal or practical sense).
    - imbnwa 4y ago
      Great Firewall of America
next_xibalba 4y ago
The federal government has many tools by which they could accomplish this ban. The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States has a long, successful history of forcing divestiture by foreign owners of domestic assets. Additionally, app stores and ISPs are a pretty obvious route for blocking 99% of U.S. users from circumventing the ban. Any users who are able to circumvent those measures will be using an app whose network effect has been destroyed.
Aunche 4y ago
Anyone can get your address and phone number from just about anywhere. What you can't purchase are the thousands of data points that Facebook or Google has about your habits, location, and preferences. That's their secret sauce after all.
- hgsgm 4y ago
  You can't get it from Google, but you can get it from other data harvesters and brokers with a different business model.
  - dotancohen 4y ago
    What keywords should I search for, for more information?
    - ipaddr 4y ago
      buy customer data Information isn't organized by your name but by your quadrant(s) you fall under
seaners 4y ago
Seems to be a suspicious number of people in this thread purposefully "point missing" and slinging whataboutisms instead of talking about what the CCP (specifically) can do with that type of information...
dan-robertson 4y ago
I don’t really know anything about buying data or whatever, but how would you actually go about buying my day-to-day movements and how much does it actually cost? I was always under the impression that when people say ‘Google collects all your data and sells it’, or whatever, they really mean that google sells ads which may be targeted based on the data they collect, and it’s only small companies with much less data who might sell it.
boopmaster 4y ago
I’m not sure which part of our national security surveillance state apparatus is endangered by foreign ownership, but I assume at face value that there is some very embarrassing facts that our local spooks are not keen to share with China. What does the great firewall of America look like, from the infrastructure & interface angle? Would we want to share that with China? Your Google searches and all your metadata that can likely be accessed with relative ease… is there a similar surveillance capability that we’d wish to share with China in how spooks make data requests? China has no jurisdiction over you… there’s no real punishing to relate to what you have viewed on TikTok, so why are your viewing habits a threat to national security? I don’t believe this to be a zero sum game. This is further extension of authoritarianism from a government that is terrified of anything short of pervasive colonoscopy-tier data collection.
- dsfyu404ed 4y ago
  >I’m not sure which part of our national security surveillance state apparatus is endangered by foreign ownership, The propaganda part. Remember a month ago when everyone's feed had a video in it from the TikTok CEO encouraging people to side with TikTok. They are scared shitless of not being mostly in control of that kind of power when applied to Americans. They are worried that the next Saddam is going to pay TikTok, or some future foreign competitor to torpedo whatever the next WMD lie is (and this will be done with Chinese blessing because that will be in their geopolitical interest). The possibility was easy to ignore back when all the social media giants were American and the feds had jurisdiction and soft power over them. Now there's a new entrant that China has jurisdiction and soft power over. They want the status quo back. Hence why all the bill language is mostly about preventing foreign ownership.
  - imbnwa 4y ago
    >Remember a month ago when everyone's feed had a video in it from the TikTok CEO encouraging people to side with TikTok. Remember how Elon makes it a point to stick himself into everybody's Twitter feed and even fired a guy for not maximizing this further?

yed 4y ago

The bill doesn't directly ban data sharing but instead focuses on foreign ownership in US companies. It would be enforced similar to anti-trust laws today, by preventing Chinese nationals from purchasing or having an ownership stake in certain large technology companies deemed a security risk. I don't like the bill because I think it's unnecessary but it has nothing to do with searching people's phones or regulating actual data in any way.

ddoolin 4y ago

TikTok disappearing from tens of millions of iPhones overnight (I have no idea about Androids) would probably work pretty well. If I had to guess, almost none of those people can jailbreak their iPhone to get it again, either. Your option would be to switch to Android and learn to sideload apps (which I think is pretty damn easy these days). The point is not to enforce against individual users, just to remove it from the main distribution channels.

withinboredom 4y ago
You can freely install apps on your iphone. All you need is an Apple computer. It only can be used for a week? before you have to install it again. I don't pay apple a dime and still develop software for iPhones occasionally without any issues. Also, websites are pretty powerful. Apple even allowed websites to send notifications now.
- sebzim4500 4y ago
  If you believe that a significant portion of iOS users are going to set up an Apple development account and manually reinstall TikTok every week then I have a bridge to sell you. They will just switch to a different social network, which is equally destructive but not Chinese.
  - withinboredom 4y ago
    I didn’t do anything special. I just installed Xcode, and bam. Done. We ripped CDs so we didn’t have to buy them. Hell, we sat by boomboxes until the right song came on the radio just to push record on the tape player. Kids will do whatever it takes to get what they want. I’d buy that bridge.
    - belval 4y ago
      > I just installed Xcode I think you are overestimating the tech know-how of the average person and how driven the average teenager is. TikTok a year ago was pretty unique, but now you have YouTube Shorts and Instagram Reels. I'd bet a hard money that 99% of people will just switch to those in a heartbeat if TikTok was banned. > Kids will do whatever it takes to get what they want. I’d buy that bridge. What they want is cheap dopamine hit from the smartphone. It's really close to drugs, make heroin hard to get and people will go to an analog like fentanyl.
    - jrsj 4y ago
      Except a MacBook costs $1000+ when TikTok clones are free
weard_beard 4y ago
Did anyone else notice this bill includes a provision that requires the department of Commerce to inform the president Quiet partwhen wall street has made such a cockup of gamblingQuiet part that it becomes a national security risk and gives him the power to issue an Executive Order requiring the general investing public sell that particular stock so hedge funds can pay off their debt? S.686 https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/senate-bill/686 https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/senate-bill/686
- atlasunshrugged 4y ago
  Which section is that in? I didn't read anything that way but maybe I need to re-read
  - weard_beard 4y ago
    Re-reading, I may be mistaken. S.686 is still in committee and it looks like S.1143 looks to have passed the Senate. I read an article this morning that suggested S.686 is meant to be a rider, can't find it now.
    - atlasunshrugged 4y ago
      Ah okay, thanks!
mattmcknight 4y ago
It has a website. I've used the website, never the app.
- ddoolin 4y ago
  True, but those can also be banned (in a literal or practical sense).
  - imbnwa 4y ago
    Great Firewall of America

next_xibalba 4y ago

The federal government has many tools by which they could accomplish this ban. The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States has a long, successful history of forcing divestiture by foreign owners of domestic assets. Additionally, app stores and ISPs are a pretty obvious route for blocking 99% of U.S. users from circumventing the ban. Any users who are able to circumvent those measures will be using an app whose network effect has been destroyed.

Aunche 4y ago

Anyone can get your address and phone number from just about anywhere. What you can't purchase are the thousands of data points that Facebook or Google has about your habits, location, and preferences. That's their secret sauce after all.

hgsgm 4y ago
You can't get it from Google, but you can get it from other data harvesters and brokers with a different business model.
- dotancohen 4y ago
  What keywords should I search for, for more information?
  - ipaddr 4y ago
    buy customer data Information isn't organized by your name but by your quadrant(s) you fall under

seaners 4y ago

Seems to be a suspicious number of people in this thread purposefully "point missing" and slinging whataboutisms instead of talking about what the CCP (specifically) can do with that type of information...

dan-robertson 4y ago

I don’t really know anything about buying data or whatever, but how would you actually go about buying my day-to-day movements and how much does it actually cost? I was always under the impression that when people say ‘Google collects all your data and sells it’, or whatever, they really mean that google sells ads which may be targeted based on the data they collect, and it’s only small companies with much less data who might sell it.

boopmaster 4y ago

I’m not sure which part of our national security surveillance state apparatus is endangered by foreign ownership, but I assume at face value that there is some very embarrassing facts that our local spooks are not keen to share with China. What does the great firewall of America look like, from the infrastructure & interface angle? Would we want to share that with China? Your Google searches and all your metadata that can likely be accessed with relative ease… is there a similar surveillance capability that we’d wish to share with China in how spooks make data requests? China has no jurisdiction over you… there’s no real punishing to relate to what you have viewed on TikTok, so why are your viewing habits a threat to national security? I don’t believe this to be a zero sum game. This is further extension of authoritarianism from a government that is terrified of anything short of pervasive colonoscopy-tier data collection.

dsfyu404ed 4y ago
>I’m not sure which part of our national security surveillance state apparatus is endangered by foreign ownership, The propaganda part. Remember a month ago when everyone's feed had a video in it from the TikTok CEO encouraging people to side with TikTok. They are scared shitless of not being mostly in control of that kind of power when applied to Americans. They are worried that the next Saddam is going to pay TikTok, or some future foreign competitor to torpedo whatever the next WMD lie is (and this will be done with Chinese blessing because that will be in their geopolitical interest). The possibility was easy to ignore back when all the social media giants were American and the feds had jurisdiction and soft power over them. Now there's a new entrant that China has jurisdiction and soft power over. They want the status quo back. Hence why all the bill language is mostly about preventing foreign ownership.
- imbnwa 4y ago
  >Remember a month ago when everyone's feed had a video in it from the TikTok CEO encouraging people to side with TikTok. Remember how Elon makes it a point to stick himself into everybody's Twitter feed and even fired a guy for not maximizing this further?