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Wouldn't it be more accurate to say that TikTok is banned on government-owned devices? The nuance matters; there's a significant difference between banning the

Wouldn't it be more accurate to say that TikTok is banned on government-owned devices? The nuance matters; there's a significant difference between banning the app on government devices and extending that ban to personal devices owned by employees. The headline suggests a more extensive ban, but it's specifically about government-owned devices. Furthermore, I'm puzzled as to why TikTok would be on government-issued devices in the first place. Shouldn't a standard MDM block non-essential apps by default? Why would they need TikTok on work devices, aside from perhaps a PR representative with an official presence there?

hgsgm 3y ago
The common sense interpretation is that the rule applies to work devices.
jahsome 3y ago
For precisely the reasons you listed, this entire article, but especially the headline, are safely labeled click bait. Everything about it is technically accurate but it's carefully designed to be misleading so passersby think "that can't be right" and click to seek more, or worse, become furious and click to figure out who is responsible. There's also the knock on effect of someone seeing the headline in one of their various feeds, and forming an opinion one way or another, without having clicked at all.
- asu_thomas 3y ago
  "Clicks" are not the purpose. Advertising is. It's ad-bait.
  - xeromal 3y ago
    Click-bait is the common term though so it's stuck around.
  - batch12 3y ago
    The title is the bait to get you to click through to the article. Without the click, there are no ads. So clickbait seems apt. Edit: reworded for clarity
- karaterobot 3y ago
  Probably clickbait, but increasingly I wonder whether things like this can be chalked up to the fact that most online publications are pretty much amateur hours these days. They might have just genuinely not thought about the difference, or picked up on it. Saying it's clickbait implies a level of sophistication I'm no longer sure most newsrooms possess. If it were only that the headlines were misleading, I'd say it was an irresponsible editorial policy, but you see so many basic mistakes in the copy as well that, at the very least, it would have to be a combination of bad ethics and incompetence.
  - jahsome 3y ago
    Most of the time I'd agree with you. But this is the Engadget. They're just too successful/savvy and established for this particular instance not to be deliberate. There is a lot of truth in much of what you said, but headlines specifically aren't really a product of the newsgathering process. They're kind of a microcosm of journalism and treated completely differently than the rest of the article for a variety of reasons, historical and modern. More to the point, in the admittedly small number of newsrooms I've been in, the headlines were hand crafted by fairly senior editors. In any case, the truth is probably somewhere between disingenuous and negligent, but the outcome is the same: more traffic.
madrox 3y ago
The industry has evolved toward blacklisting over whitelisting on devices. It reduces IT burden significantly should problems arise, and you should index toward trusting people to do the right thing. Overall, this approach is better. When I started in engineering back in 2000, it was still a debate as to whether developers should have admin on their own machine.
- throwaway3618 3y ago
  Expect this to debate to come back with the growth of cloud-based IDEs
- geraldwhen 3y ago
  Oh it’s still a debate. IT would have it so you can’t install brew if they had their way.
  - NegativeK 3y ago
    We in cybersecurity know that you need to have brew/pip/npm/whatever installed and you need admin access, but it still absolutely _horrifies_ us. Treating a dev box as anything other than a permanently compromised piece of hardware is a recipe for disaster, and that applies to our machines where we have to run those tools.
    - devnullbrain 3y ago
      For us, it feels like our development is a loathed distraction from your quest to implement the platonic ideal of a secure machine, free from any indulgences like networking, external drives, and a fan given the chance to wind-down between the anti-virus stomping on the CPU. I particularly like joining a new company and being expected to write and memorise several distinct, secure passwords before having the computing and network freedom to use a password manager. Having to tell my new manager I forgot my password is a riot.
      - NegativeK 3y ago
Arrath 3y ago
> Furthermore, I'm puzzled as to why TikTok would be on government-issued devices in the first place. Shouldn't a standard MDM block non-essential apps by default? This has been my question every time one of these articles about another entity banning TikTok comes up. My locked down corpo-phone only whitelists like a dozen apps for me to choose to install, largely online banking apps for the big guys, not a single social media style app.
alexjplant 3y ago
> Furthermore, I'm puzzled as to why TikTok would be on government-issued devices in the first place. Shouldn't a standard MDM block non-essential apps by default? Why would they need TikTok on work devices, aside from perhaps a PR representative with an official presence there? Government-owned != government-administered. I'd imagine that in many cases petty cash or OpEx allocated on a program/office/business unit basis is spent indiscriminately at the end of the fiscal year to avoid losing it in the next one. Since the equipment is purchased with a credit card and goes through Accounting (who probably doesn't have the wherewithal or care to tell the IT department about the iPad line item on that Best Buy receipt) it isn't CapEx and therefore escapes the IT department's line-of sight. These devices probably then get used as an end-run around draconian IT restrictions at work and/or as de-facto personal devices for the employee and their family (the latter of which is probably justified by the employee's belief that this is a "perk" that compensates for their low compensation or reward for some perceived moral good that arises from their work). I'm speaking completely hypothetically, of course, and personally don't think this is appropriate. I bought a refurbished iPad with my own money last year for use exclusively at band practice.
- adolph 3y ago
  MDM might be of two tiers, where those distributed by IT are full MDM and those under a "bring your own" policy have more limited access (i.e. email/calendar/contacts only). For example the iPhone issued to me as a "pager" doesn't even have the camera app.
dzhiurgis 3y ago
> Why would they need TikTok on work devices Because it's an information source..? Just about every other media app copied the format, but they won't be able to copy content.
- theultdev 3y ago
  there's no government employee that needs information from TikTok to do their job
  - Zak 3y ago
    Someone who's in a communications or social media position likely does, and they should have a dedicated device purely for that function.
    - DrThunder 3y ago
      They don't. There was a time when government eschewed social media entirely even though it was available. They're not private businesses and I see no reason for them to be using social media in any official capacity. There are plenty of ways to communicate with your voter base that doesn't involve Twitter battles or ridiculous Facebook propaganda posts.
      - Dan_Sylveste 3y ago
        Also government usage of social media aids the flow of misinformation, by blending info from trusted providers (the govt, in theory, lol) with info from untrusted providers. There's a reason the .gov domain exists.
  - whycome 3y ago
    That’s like saying they don’t need ears. It’s a place to see what people are talking about. It’s a place to see how people are talking. It’s a place to gauge responses to certain events. It’s increasingly a place to see news happen before it is shared via any other medium. You go where the people are, you don’t tell them where to go and then get upset when they’re not there.
Spooky23 3y ago
It wasn’t. It’s a knee jerk because of the legislative grandstanding on the topic. Once South Dakota banned it, a gotcha question for a leader is “why do you allow Chinese spies to steal government data?” It’s stupid and performative, but that’s how it works.
NegativeK 3y ago
> Shouldn't a standard MDM block non-essential apps by default? Yes. But there are some (big) assumptions here: * The MDM (or EDR for desktops) is well managed. * People with admin access aren't circumventing it.
georgeplusplus 3y ago
A lot of government workers use their issued phones as their full time phone for personal use and they do not lock down those phones to the extent you suggest. I can’t speak for New York city government specifically but the phones work ecosystem is locked behind an app similar to a Microsoft 365 login
ecf 3y ago
You can’t expect journalists to not make up clickbait headlines. This is 2023, and we’ve seen what they did with LK-99. Perhaps a controversial opinion but I can’t wait for an LLM that directly feeds off of the source: like AP news, or Arvix, and automatically provides an RSS feed of non-clickbait headlines with substantive articles if I decide it’s worth reading. I cannot wait to get this profession out of my life, and I will happily pay to make it happen.

hgsgm 3y ago

The common sense interpretation is that the rule applies to work devices.

jahsome 3y ago

For precisely the reasons you listed, this entire article, but especially the headline, are safely labeled click bait. Everything about it is technically accurate but it's carefully designed to be misleading so passersby think "that can't be right" and click to seek more, or worse, become furious and click to figure out who is responsible. There's also the knock on effect of someone seeing the headline in one of their various feeds, and forming an opinion one way or another, without having clicked at all.

asu_thomas 3y ago
"Clicks" are not the purpose. Advertising is. It's ad-bait.
- xeromal 3y ago
  Click-bait is the common term though so it's stuck around.
- batch12 3y ago
  The title is the bait to get you to click through to the article. Without the click, there are no ads. So clickbait seems apt. Edit: reworded for clarity
karaterobot 3y ago
Probably clickbait, but increasingly I wonder whether things like this can be chalked up to the fact that most online publications are pretty much amateur hours these days. They might have just genuinely not thought about the difference, or picked up on it. Saying it's clickbait implies a level of sophistication I'm no longer sure most newsrooms possess. If it were only that the headlines were misleading, I'd say it was an irresponsible editorial policy, but you see so many basic mistakes in the copy as well that, at the very least, it would have to be a combination of bad ethics and incompetence.
- jahsome 3y ago
  Most of the time I'd agree with you. But this is the Engadget. They're just too successful/savvy and established for this particular instance not to be deliberate. There is a lot of truth in much of what you said, but headlines specifically aren't really a product of the newsgathering process. They're kind of a microcosm of journalism and treated completely differently than the rest of the article for a variety of reasons, historical and modern. More to the point, in the admittedly small number of newsrooms I've been in, the headlines were hand crafted by fairly senior editors. In any case, the truth is probably somewhere between disingenuous and negligent, but the outcome is the same: more traffic.

madrox 3y ago

The industry has evolved toward blacklisting over whitelisting on devices. It reduces IT burden significantly should problems arise, and you should index toward trusting people to do the right thing. Overall, this approach is better. When I started in engineering back in 2000, it was still a debate as to whether developers should have admin on their own machine.

throwaway3618 3y ago
Expect this to debate to come back with the growth of cloud-based IDEs
geraldwhen 3y ago
Oh it’s still a debate. IT would have it so you can’t install brew if they had their way.
- NegativeK 3y ago
  We in cybersecurity know that you need to have brew/pip/npm/whatever installed and you need admin access, but it still absolutely _horrifies_ us. Treating a dev box as anything other than a permanently compromised piece of hardware is a recipe for disaster, and that applies to our machines where we have to run those tools.
  - devnullbrain 3y ago
    For us, it feels like our development is a loathed distraction from your quest to implement the platonic ideal of a secure machine, free from any indulgences like networking, external drives, and a fan given the chance to wind-down between the anti-virus stomping on the CPU. I particularly like joining a new company and being expected to write and memorise several distinct, secure passwords before having the computing and network freedom to use a password manager. Having to tell my new manager I forgot my password is a riot.
    - NegativeK 3y ago

Arrath 3y ago

> Furthermore, I'm puzzled as to why TikTok would be on government-issued devices in the first place. Shouldn't a standard MDM block non-essential apps by default? This has been my question every time one of these articles about another entity banning TikTok comes up. My locked down corpo-phone only whitelists like a dozen apps for me to choose to install, largely online banking apps for the big guys, not a single social media style app.

alexjplant 3y ago

> Furthermore, I'm puzzled as to why TikTok would be on government-issued devices in the first place. Shouldn't a standard MDM block non-essential apps by default? Why would they need TikTok on work devices, aside from perhaps a PR representative with an official presence there? Government-owned != government-administered. I'd imagine that in many cases petty cash or OpEx allocated on a program/office/business unit basis is spent indiscriminately at the end of the fiscal year to avoid losing it in the next one. Since the equipment is purchased with a credit card and goes through Accounting (who probably doesn't have the wherewithal or care to tell the IT department about the iPad line item on that Best Buy receipt) it isn't CapEx and therefore escapes the IT department's line-of sight. These devices probably then get used as an end-run around draconian IT restrictions at work and/or as de-facto personal devices for the employee and their family (the latter of which is probably justified by the employee's belief that this is a "perk" that compensates for their low compensation or reward for some perceived moral good that arises from their work). I'm speaking completely hypothetically, of course, and personally don't think this is appropriate. I bought a refurbished iPad with my own money last year for use exclusively at band practice.

adolph 3y ago
MDM might be of two tiers, where those distributed by IT are full MDM and those under a "bring your own" policy have more limited access (i.e. email/calendar/contacts only). For example the iPhone issued to me as a "pager" doesn't even have the camera app.

dzhiurgis 3y ago

> Why would they need TikTok on work devices Because it's an information source..? Just about every other media app copied the format, but they won't be able to copy content.

theultdev 3y ago
there's no government employee that needs information from TikTok to do their job
- Zak 3y ago
  Someone who's in a communications or social media position likely does, and they should have a dedicated device purely for that function.
  - DrThunder 3y ago
    They don't. There was a time when government eschewed social media entirely even though it was available. They're not private businesses and I see no reason for them to be using social media in any official capacity. There are plenty of ways to communicate with your voter base that doesn't involve Twitter battles or ridiculous Facebook propaganda posts.
    - Dan_Sylveste 3y ago
      Also government usage of social media aids the flow of misinformation, by blending info from trusted providers (the govt, in theory, lol) with info from untrusted providers. There's a reason the .gov domain exists.
- whycome 3y ago
  That’s like saying they don’t need ears. It’s a place to see what people are talking about. It’s a place to see how people are talking. It’s a place to gauge responses to certain events. It’s increasingly a place to see news happen before it is shared via any other medium. You go where the people are, you don’t tell them where to go and then get upset when they’re not there.

Spooky23 3y ago

It wasn’t. It’s a knee jerk because of the legislative grandstanding on the topic. Once South Dakota banned it, a gotcha question for a leader is “why do you allow Chinese spies to steal government data?” It’s stupid and performative, but that’s how it works.

NegativeK 3y ago

> Shouldn't a standard MDM block non-essential apps by default? Yes. But there are some (big) assumptions here: * The MDM (or EDR for desktops) is well managed. * People with admin access aren't circumventing it.

georgeplusplus 3y ago

A lot of government workers use their issued phones as their full time phone for personal use and they do not lock down those phones to the extent you suggest. I can’t speak for New York city government specifically but the phones work ecosystem is locked behind an app similar to a Microsoft 365 login

ecf 3y ago

You can’t expect journalists to not make up clickbait headlines. This is 2023, and we’ve seen what they did with LK-99. Perhaps a controversial opinion but I can’t wait for an LLM that directly feeds off of the source: like AP news, or Arvix, and automatically provides an RSS feed of non-clickbait headlines with substantive articles if I decide it’s worth reading. I cannot wait to get this profession out of my life, and I will happily pay to make it happen.