Sounds like a last ditch effort to prevent the app from getting banned in several countries. I have two takes, one it's very admirable for a company to release its algorithms and drive more transparency and I think it will help the public trust ByteDance more.
The other take is much more cynical. When they finally release the algorithm how will we know that's the whole story? I'm sure researchers will have to formally verify it somehow (not an expert here so I'm speculating). Also this does nothing to actually prevent them from further abusing user data. Seems like this release is just a red herring that diverts attention from the other shady stuff they are doing.
The truth may be some combination of the two - it's certainly arguable that more transparent social network algorithms could be in everyone's interests; it's also true that TikTok would like to find ways to compete with Facebook, and increasing access to their source code may be part of their approach.
Attempting to take a global view, the ability for users themselves to scrutinize source code could be particularly important if & when subsets of them encounter bugs or get stuck in software that increasingly mediates conversations and real-world interactions.
In any case, as you say, source code is only part of the equation when we're determining how trustworthy the companies we deal with are.
As it happens, Facebook mentioned some of their contributions to the open source community as part of their testimony[1] to the Antitrust committee hearing today:
"We actively contribute to the open-source community. ... I believe sharing our intellectual property this way helps the entire ecosystem move forward and develop new products."
The TikTok Transparency Center[2] announced by the CEO does not yet include access to source code, as far as I can tell, although it does mention it.
Exactly, but all that has gone out the window when it comes to Chinese companies.
The US has waged an aggressive campaign to destroy Huawei - pressuring governments around the world to ban use of their equipment and threatening Huawei's suppliers with sanctions (even its non-US suppliers) - based on completely unsupported claims of surveillance. The message to China is: we want you to open your market to our high-tech products, but you're not allowed to develop your own high-tech products, much less sell them abroad. The US was fine with China being a platform for low-wage labor for Western companies, but the US not okay with the existence of a peer-level competitor on the world stage.
Trump's impulsive tendencies make this even more dangerous. The closing of the Houston consulate was a dramatic step. The possible cutting off of diplomatic relations between the world's two largest powers is extremely alarming. As the election gets closer, however, I fear we'll see more such abrupt actions, especially if Trump's poll numbers continue to slump.
Uhm, how you even come up with this conclusions ?? China was throwing away so many US companies. Stole so many IP with no trials or fines for that.
US didn't protect their interests for years. Any other normal country would protect their businesses years ago.
This pressure is very soft and kind comparing how China treat any other foreign company not only US.
The IP theft claims are massively played up. American companies did business in China because it made them money, even despite possible IP theft or IP transfer agreements.
The US has protected its interests just fine in China. Its companies have made massive profits off of Chinese labor and in the Chinese market. In order to join the WHO, an institution created largely by the US, China underwent all sorts of business-friendly reforms, including privatizing parts of the economy, lowering tariffs, and establishing IP protections. Enforcement of IP rights has increased dramatically over the past decade, by the way.
> This pressure is very soft and kind comparing how China treat any other foreign company not only US.
China isn't going around the world trying to force foreign companies to stop doing business with American companies. The US' actions against Chinese companies are far more extreme than the other way around.
IP theft seems to be a massively overhyped claim, and I do think that isn't the real driving force behind US policy. It is not as if IP theft has suddenly soared into an unbearable level as to force US to act suddenly. WTO surely has frameworks to handle such issues, but it is US who seems to find them inconvenient and is trying to seek unilateral means.
Even for example closing the Houston counsulate has been done on vague reasons, the US government should be transparent in explaining the specific reasons behind the action to the US public and the press, which hasn't been done till now.
Seen in light with other recent actions like sanctioning of companies working on the Nordstrom2 pipeline etc, US surely is acting up the role of international bully in recent days.
This is no where near the message. The message is, the wealthy of the US have exploited China for low wage labor (also high quality production) and we need to stop allowing that to happen and bring that back to the US. Competition is the foundation of the US ethos and if that becomes obviously lopsided there needs to be a correction
> When they finally release the algorithm how will we know that's the whole story?
Censorship by moderators are beyond the algorithms. Their algorithms and moderators censored Tiananmen Square, Tibetan independence, Falun Gong [0], Uighur sympathizer [1], Hong Kong protests [2], and (as another commenter points out) the ugly, poor, or disabled [3].
Their moderation guidelines banned contents “endangering national security” or deemed “uglification or distortion of local or other countries’ history” [4].
There's also a section on censorship in the middle of that FA. My younger brother who does lots of TikTok says that he doesn't see anything about China, good or bad; but he has seen plenty of the stereotypical Chinese anti-USA stuff (coverage on riots, unrest, etc.). But of course that could just be because he doesn't care about China and doesn't view Chinese stuff on TikTok. Anyway, we can't tell anything unless the moderation process and decisions are also made public.
As something of an outsider (being from West Africa), the extent of the panic over TikTok is more than a little amusing to me. I understand how it might be different for an American citizen, but to me much of it frankly sounds like one third party trying to paint another as the devil incarnate over much the same practices. Plus unlike many American data farms masquerading as services, TikTok does actually provide me with a measurably positive experience as a content consumer; a feed that contains fresh, relatively non-gamified content that I actually want to see.
I just treat the platform like I treat the likes of Facebook. Accessed only through the web in a sandbox, etc.
This is clearly over more than TikTok, it's just the most convenient target.
I can see both sides. The US doesn't want Chinese tech because China won't allow US tech. That's really what it boils down to. And I can't really blame the US for it because China has locked out US tech companies for decades.
Exactly. And it would be nice if people were just upfront about that instead of making it out to be a one-sided moral quandary.
I don't have a dog in the two countries' tech tussle and so I'm bemused at the expectation that I should take a side (it's also interesting that many people that I've spoken to don't recognise that using US tech is picking a side).
>> The US doesn't want Chinese tech because China won't allow US tech. That's really what it boils down to. And I can't really blame the US for it because China has locked out US tech companies for decades.
> Exactly. And it would be nice if people were just upfront about that instead of making it out to be a one-sided moral quandary.
Eh, not so exactly. You're talking as if "people" were hiding their true movies, but the reality we're not talking about a monolithic entity and different people have different motives. Some people think the way the GP describes, others think differently. What is true is that many of those different lines of thinking are starting to converge on the same kinds of responses.
Didn't the US have that entire thing with PRISM/the NSA?
Ah, I forget, it's the US so its own surveillance programs are obviously above board and only used for good. The leader of the free world or some such.
>> The american government isn't using the data to openly oppress entire groups of people though.
> Didn't the US have that entire thing with PRISM/the NSA?
You can possess a gun, you can use that gun to kill someone in self defense, or you can use the gun to kill some innocent person. All those things are very different in important ways, even though they involve guns. It's true that US has surveillance and propaganda capabilities, but just noting that doesn't show equivalence to China in the areas that really matter.
I consider things like the deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians in the Middle East or the treatment of children in US border camps to be "areas that really matter". For some very strange reason, most Americans I have spoken to find it unreasonable to treat companies like, say, Github or Microsoft with the same level of vitriol that is currently being leveled at TikTok for being affiliated however tenuously with the CCP.
My career would pretty much be a non-starter if I refused to use such companies' services for just as solid (if not more solid) ideological reasons as the ones that are apparently driving y'all to approve of bans/other boycotts of TikTok. As a pretty much neutral third party I've come to the quite logical conclusion that the outrage is largely hypocritical theatre and is thus not really much of my concern.
(It is worth nothing that there are Americans who for instance pressure Github to drop their ICE contract. As far as I can see they're a minority without the influence to make a difference.)
> For some very strange reason, most Americans I have spoken to find it unreasonable to treat companies like, say, Github or Microsoft with the same level of vitriol that is currently being leveled at TikTok for being affiliated however tenuously with the CCP.
> Communist Party cadres have filled meeting halls around China to hear a somber, secretive warning issued by senior leaders. Power could escape their grip, they have been told, unless the party eradicates seven subversive currents coursing through Chinese society.
> These seven perils were enumerated in a memo, referred to as Document No. 9, that bears the unmistakable imprimatur of Xi Jinping, China’s new top leader. The first was “Western constitutional democracy”; others included promoting “universal values” of human rights, Western-inspired notions of media independence and civic participation, ardently pro-market “neo-liberalism,” and “nihilist” criticisms of the party’s traumatic past.
Add to that practices like the Xinjiang cultural destruction/forced labor camps, the dystopian nightmare of what's happening in Hong Kong, and a domestic surveillance apparatus that makes the people who complain about Stingrays look like whiny babies, which all show that it's not just talk.
The US and Western companies like Microsoft definitely have issues, but they don't hold a candle to the CCP's.
And I wouldn't count TikTok/ByteDance's affiliation with the CCP as "tenuous." How much power to say "no" do you think they have?
America's involvement in the Middle East and Afghanistan are "not just talk". Drone strikes are not just talk. Its treatment of undocumented immigrant children at its borders is not just talk. Pointing as many fingers as you can at China does not erase America's own atrocities - what, exactly, does the civilian death toll from America's manufactured conflicts struggle to hold a candle to? How, exactly, is the violent approach that the US has taken to the protests currently going on within its borders so much less of a dystopian nightmare than in Hong Kong?
> And I wouldn't count TikTok/ByteDance's affiliation with the CCP as "tenuous."
Github clearly, demonstrably, directly supports ICE's operations with its contract services.
Microsoft clearly, demonstrably, directly supports the US military's operations with its contract services.
What clear, demonstrable, direct support does TikTok give the CCP that I can point to as a reason why I disdain it, the way I can point to Github's ICE contract or Microsoft's JEDI contract? I would actually be quite interested in evidence of such a thing.
Why am I expected to swallow my revulsion for the American war machine and use Github's or Microsoft's services, but not do the same for TikTok?
> How much power to say "no" to them do you think they have?
This...is not the gotcha that you might think it is. Even if they're implicated in harm, ByteDance at least has the dubious excuse of being compelled to do so by the state. Github, Microsoft and co voluntarily choose to (and even compete to!) be a part of the American state's apparatus of violence because of money of all things - that really, really does not translate into me having more respect and/or trust for them than for ByteDance.
> America's involvement in the Middle East and Afghanistan are "not just talk".
Huh? I didn't say that. I thought it was pretty clear when I said "talk" I was referring to Document Number 9.
> How, exactly, is the violent approach that the US has taken to the protests currently going on within its borders so much less of a dystopian nightmare than in Hong Kong?
Because the dystopian part is the sense that the curtain is coming down there and it's all over, not anything to do with the quantity of bullets or tear gas. What's going on in the US feels more like a step on the long, dirty road of making progress. It was good that the police acted against protesters the way they did, because that behavior wasn't new, and it reinforced the protester's points and lead to a tipping point in public opinion.
> What clear, demonstrable, direct support does TikTok give the CCP that I can point to as a reason why I disdain it, the way I can point to Github's ICE contract or Microsoft's JEDI contract? I would actually be quite interested in evidence of such a thing....
> This...is not the gotcha that you might think it is. Even if they're implicated in harm, ByteDance at least has the dubious excuse of being compelled to do so by the state.
ByteDance's willingness or unwillingness is not my actual concern, and I honestly don't really care about that. What I do care about is the fact that they're under the control of an organization where Document Number 9 reflects official policy goals, and TikTok's popularity gives that organization potential capabilities here that it shouldn't have.
This thread will 100% devolve into a binary USA v. China worldview clusterf*ck. im going to try to use less emotion but that might be impossible.
--
these are disingenuous comparisons - or maybe truly I simply can't comprehend such a fundamentally different worldview but I hope not
Chinese tech companies at best have competing allegiance and at worst are indistinguishable from CCP in goals
Trying to compare the violations of privacy the US has unfortunately perpetrated against us, the citizens to the actions and goals of CCP/Xi is dishonest
both in the goals of the espionage both states carry out and in terms of the fundamentally inseparable CCP control of corporations to achieve state (and a single increasingly dictatorial leaders' [1]) goals.
Douyin and other Chinese tech companies actively:
- facilitate an ongoing genocide [2]
- carry out state sponsored corporate espionage and forced tech transfers for the direct benefit of CCP via an inseparable government/corporate relationship [3]
- suppress and spy on their citizens with the goal of elevating Xi and the CCP, silencing dissent, and controlling over 1 billion people in a way that is fundamentally incongruous with 'western values' and not remotely comparable to the goals of US Government surveillance however misguided [4, 5]
I do understand how it might be a "disingenuous comparison" to you as an American citizen who primarily thinks of your government according to its internal policies (and even those raise quite a lot of eyebrows). But as a third party that's spent all of my life witnessing (for instance) the death toll of US foreign policy, my fundamentally different world view is that the mouth preaches while the hands feed poison. Why should I take up arms for one brand of poison over the other?
Facebook ran an experiment several years ago where they injected either positive or negative posts into people’s timeline to see if they could alter their emotions similar to if they were with happy or sad people in person.
Seeing posts on Facebook is going to change your behavior on Facebook, whether Facebook studies the relationship or not. Paying attention to that effect isn't sinister.
Is it not? They had to apologise and it got them into quite a bit of heat with an ethics department... Interested to know how it's irrelevant or a mischaracterisation!
Hacker News is for technical people. They know this is bullshit. Its not their algo that means anything. Its the data collection and sending it to China/Singapore that is the problem.
- Bytedance's global TikTok app is based out of datacenters in Singapore.
- Bytedance's Chinese Toutiao app is based out of datacenters in China.
Bytedance itself is a Cayman company, so in regards to the Chinese National Intelligence law, TikTok technically isn't required to share data with China nor am I aware of any evidence that they actually do (despite the memes).
> TikTok technically isn't required to share data with China
That can change in a few months. China is drafting Data Security Law whose “broad scope and extraterritorial reach pose particular risks for foreign companies as well as media organizations and their personnel. Most importantly, the Draft Law grants sweeping power in the name of national security to relevant Chinese government officials to access the data itself and regulate (including the powers to prosecute and investigate) data controllers regardless of whether they are located inside or outside China.” [0]
China also just implemented National Security Law in Hong Kong that is also extraterritorial and requires hosting service to provide information to China, regardless of where they are located [1].
Which, if passed, applies to all tech companies in China, including Apple and Amazon (who do comply with the Chinese National Intelligence law already).
ByteDance is legally domiciled in the Cayman islands but it's physical headquarters are in Beijing and it is very much a Chinese company, with its own internal CCP committee.
Which doesn't matter, because Chinese National Intelligence law only applies to subsidiaries that are in-country, not buildings in Beijing and not parent companies in the Caymans. Bytedance has a CCP committee for Toutiao, their in-China subsidiary.
It's same reason why Apple only shares personal user information with the Chinese government about it's Chinese customers, and not Apple's global customers.
Well, that is really strange because I'm fairly sure data centers are distributed around the world instead of being centered in Singapore. APAC peering and bandwidth costs are extremely high compared to EU/NA.
Singapore is ethnically Chinese and historically there have been some cracks. There are some University affiliations with China and Chinese employers in Singapore.
Death of Shane Todd is popular conspiracy theory. You can look it up. There is a very startling difference in the behavior of the suicide note if you look at it carefully.
At the end of the day, if the data doesn't need to be in Singapore, it shouldn't go there. If it does, you know they are up to no good, but don't necessarily understand what they are upto.
I could see a malicious recommendation algorithm being a large problem, but even if that did exist there is no way they would show that. By malicious, I mean one that identifies content and then recommends it in a way that would achieve a goal people would not support TikTok openly supporting. The simplest is if it automatically ranked content as pro or anti China and used that to influence the recommendations, so for two similar pieces of content with regards to what the user has indicated they want to see, the more pro-china one would be shown. A small bias would be hard to detect and wouldn't achieve much for any given person, but given tens of millions of users over a few years and it would cause a noticeable shift. Other options include slightly promoting content that would cause a social/moral decay in targeted countries. Examples of that would include a slight favoritism to content that promotes violence as a means for conflict resolution or a disregard of a users age when deciding to show or allow for upload more purient content. Once again, almost no impact on a single user, but potentially enough to cause a social shift.
That's not to say any of this is happening. I was just coming up with hypothetical ways an intelligent enough recommendation/moderation algorithm could be harmful even without the whole data collection aspect.
Exactly, it's not about relevancy of content, is what it's being done with the data.
I mean unless they are trying to pull the hook of "no you can see we don't give any benefit to pro-ccp/china/anti-western content, so this can't be a ccp propaganda machine!"
We know there's propaganda there, it's on every social media.
The problem is what's being harvested and shared with the CCP.
There may be concerns that TikTok's algorithms manipulate content to push certain trends and control public opinion so hypothetically there could be value in releasing the algorithms. They could also just as easily lie and leave out important sections. At this point there is no point except for empty posturing because no one will trust anything they release.
Color me pessimistic, but it's obviously not going to be the entire picture. This explanation is going to live that sort of vague truth/lie land that the majority of news today exists.
It will instill confidence amongst less tech-savvy people, by "putting it out there" that TikTok is actually magnanimous in releasing it's secret sauce.
If by some magic they do release the real thing, it will be gamed so quickly that it will be rendered moot.
If I were them, I would do the second. That way you'll release the truth (at that time) and reap the benefits of good PR.
Like you I doubt they will release the entire thing. I think this is more of a marketing stunt than an actual drive for more trust. Less tech savvy users will see this as "transparency" and that will drive more trust.
The thing is, once tiktok has captured enough of the userbase, there may be no necessity of protecting the secret sauce. If coke release their formula, coke would still remain dominant even if exact duplicates were pushed by startup cola factories.
Will he also accept that TikTok instructed moderators to "suppress posts created by users deemed too ugly, poor, or disabled for the platform"[1]?
There are already enough forces at play which feeds on inequality, hate, scarcity etc. making life miserable for the majority of human population, forces which we may have already lost the battle with; let's not give in to new ones just for the sake of entertainment.
This seems like a smokescreen for the actual problem, which isn't the algorithms(I don't think anyone has said the algorithms are the problem), but the fact that their app is effectively spyware.
It remains to be seen what "data flows" actually means. That term is used again in the article but it doesn't sound like it explicitly refers to how TikTok acts like a surveillence tool. Maybe it will, but this is political theater. If they were run by people who actually cared, they wouldn't have gotten to this point in the first place.
> TikTok will launch a Transparency and Accountability Center in Los Angeles for moderation and data practices that will house all of its data flows and code moving forward.
Sounds pretty ambiguous. Like I said, remains to be seen.
These aren't friendly people. Their app not only harvests an assload of your data but has also been shown to be full of vulnerabilities. I'm not just going to take their word for it that making everything "open" is going to show that they've made things right.
If I ran TikTok, I'd pull off a stunt like this to fool technically illiterate politicians to get them off my back.
It's quite possible TikTok will go down the path of promising the moon regarding self-regulation and accountability just until the immediate threat from regulators subsides. This appears to be a trend among companies to stave off regulation while in the public consciousness, then remaining largely unaccountable to these toothless accountability committees when the news cycle inevitably moves on.
I'm pretty curious about this as well. I read an article a few weeks ago where some developer went into how TikTok is "worse" but nothing stuck with me about it but it was posted here. It's been mentioned a few times that the real problem is the data collected is sent back to China and Singapore but again I'm not entirely sure how that's "worse" than having it given/sold to companies and governments outside of Asia.
I don't think it's about whether or not it is worse than FB etc. I don't think it is..it's about who it reports to and what their motivations are. If FB was reporting to an openly authoritarian and hostile regime...we would probably having this conversation about them. (and currently we sort of are actually given our govt issues)
What is your source for saying that? And what is your definition of spyware?
I don't use TikTok, Facebook, nor Instagram. But I don't get how TikTok is different than the other two? I don't call Facebook a spyware but I don't use it for the very similar reasons that I don't use TikTok and Instagram.
Assuming their recommendation system is structured in the same manner as the feed ranking system at FB [1], I'm assuming this means they will be publishing their value models (easily interpretable by anyone), and not their probability models (black boxes, even to them). In other words, we'd be able to see that they value P(click) 2.5 times more than P(comment), but won't tell you how they actually predict clicks or comments.
This feels pretty meaningless to me, since knowing that they are ranking something highly because you are likely to click on it seems fine until you find out that the reason you are likely to click on it is that it is a viral hoax.
Are we worry about fab or google because of their ranking system? What tik tok can do is they can change the flip to send info over to their choices. That is the same as 5G. It is not what it does today but it can do on the next software or firmware upgrade will. The regime is so different it is a war our there already. Just you cannot see gunshot in software. But you can see casualties at least like HONG kong.
This instantly reminded me of the classic magician misdirection engine. Get people looking at the fake algo's while the real damaging stuff stays hidden from view.
This could be the right step towards algorithm transparency. It is critical in the information age we're in, while Facebook is promoting alt-right conspiracies, and YouTube is feeding flat-earthers.
Yes. There are more technical issues to resolve. (e.g., How do we verify the algorithm they present is the actual algorithm they use?) Perhaps third party audit, APIs for third parties to test the algorithm? We need constructive criticism than cynicism.
I see another problem, and that is the one where they dump a model on the internet somewhere and whenever something goes wrong shrug their shoulders and say "well, that is what the model gave us…we don't know why; you can see for yourself how we didn't bias anything".
I wonder what revealing how the algorithm works will impact content creators? We have entire industries built on poking at Google Search and Instagram to build exposure.
My prediction is that this levels the playing field, but doesn't solve the problem of people gaming algorithms to do what they want. The less shrouded the algorithm, the less snake oil that can be sold which is probably for the best.
I was an elected 2008 Hillary Clinton DNC delegate and have ran numerous campaigns for the Democrats. I also work in tech.
Twitter supports Democrats.
If you study the trending tweets, those that tend to easily trend favor Democrat issues, ideas and movements. Comments on object news articles promote Democratic comments over conservative commenters.
Looking deeper, if you study campaign contributions by the staff of Twitter, its at North Korean levels (95% Democratic Party vs 5% All others) of popular support.
How is this level of political support different than TikTok's support for the CCP?
How are the design patterns and motivations of TikTok worse than twitter?
Couldn't the userbase be more to blame than Twitter?
Pew Research says that "Twitter users [are] more likely to be Democrats" [1]. Also, 80% of all Tweets mentioning national politics were apparently made by users who "strongly disapprove" of Trump [2]. That provides a potential explanation for why comments and trending tweets may "favor Democrat issues" -- supposing that even is the case.
I can't seem to find any reputable articles or evidence regarding the "trending tweets" political breakdown and "campaign contributions by the staff of Twitter" -- could we be pointed to some sources?
Tiktok CEO, management and employees are all Americans. Their office is in California. There are now a few hundreds American employees at tiktok. If Chinese government control them or forcing them to hand over American data, they would have came out by then. You think that no one would have said anything? No one in China office can touch tiktok's code and user data. How is that ccp or government controlled?
Putting politics aside, Twitter's app is purportedly very clean compared to TikTok. Just type in "tiktok spyware" in your search engine of choice and see what comes up. There's plenty of mainstream articles about how TikTok aggressively spies on and fingerprints the user.
You mean to argue Twitter that revised it's rules specifically to justify not taking action for Donald Trump’s flagrant, serial violations of the then-current rules is an organ of the Democratic Party?
Yeah, no.
An opportunist that sticks it's thumb in the wind and leans where the political momentum appears to be at the moment while deliberately maximizing engagement by courting and accelerating controversy, sure. A party organ of the Democratic Party? Not even close.
I was an elected 2008 Hillary Clinton DNC delegate and have ran numerous campaigns for the Democrats. I also work in tech. Twitter supports Democrats.
This is a legitimate comparison.
If you study the trending tweets, those that tend to easily trend favor Democrat issues, ideas and movements. Comments on object news articles promote Democratic comments over conservative commenters.
Looking deeper, if you study campaign contributions by the staff of Twitter, its at North Korean levels (95% Democratic Party vs 5% All others) of popular support.
How is this level of political support different than TikTok's support for the CCP?
If I made a comment like that Dang would have words with me. How does this move the conversations forward? I made a comparison with the political platform of two popular social media platforms. What do you think in regards to this issue?
I don't agree Jack Dorsey thinks this way. I believe Facebook is bias towards dollars, Jack strikes me as an ideologue and someone that really believes in his personal impact
Revealing how an algorithm works only provides a false sense of understanding/security. At any time, the algorithm can be modified. Further, mechanisms will be needed to ensure that the published algorithms are actually the deployed algorithms. There is such a thing as lying and deception. It’s naive to believe that billion dollar companies are honest.
I've met Kevin Mayer and have two friends (one a roommate) who worked closely with him. There are some people who operate in life like an automaton or an NPC. They're completely ambivalent to principles so everything is relative. It's easy to justify leaving Disney as their COO to go work for a Chinese controlled company -- all you have to do is -want- to rationalize it.
We are at war and data collection and social media influence serves as the ammunition and propaganda. If Bytedance is a truly innocent third party, then they completely misread the situation when they spent billions of dollars to expand outside of China and this amounts to a business failing.
The more likely situation is that the CCP is intimately involved in Bytedance's data collection, what becomes trending, what videos get promoted, etc. They crossed the proverbial line and now they are punished for it a la ZTE, Huawei, etc.
You can say goodbye to any Chinese, Russian, etc. app ever taking off in the "West" in the future. Scrutiny will be ever more stringent as the war continues.
The West isn't uniform on this at all. Eastern Europe and up to Greece and Italy have taken a fairly conciliatory stance on China, in particular the latter which joined OBOR. Western Europe is more mixed but still I very much doubt you'll see a TikTok ban in Germany (and neither a Huawei one), and even in the UK I'm not sure if we'll see a software ban.
I think it's more likely we'll see a differentiated response. Strongest in the US and Australia maybe Japan (although that's an unclear case as well), and mixed to not at all in Europe.
On the global stage in general the situation is very different and for that reason alone China's global expansion has made sense. The few billion dollars they've invested in the US have given them extremely valuable knowledge.
Honestly, do we really need to consider TikTok's rebuttals about them basically being spyware? Sure, they spy for the CCP, but Facebook spies for the highest bidder. Not sure what's worse at this point to be honest.
And I'm not leaving Facebook, Google, Instagram, or these other services out of this either. You can tout "AI" and "Machine Learning" all you want, "We want to give you the best content", etc., it's all BS. Stop it.
Unfortunately, they won't stop it, because most folks simply _do_ _not_ _care_ about TikTok being spyware, including _most_ if not _all_ the people that I know (and yes, including developers, scientists, semi-high-ranking government employees, etc.)
I have a nuclear take, as someone who still uses TikTok: Your data and life are not special in any way. The government will never be interested in finding out about you, and if they really wanted to they could do it with ease, and definitely don't need an app to do it. This is serious in terms of larger scale surveillance implications, but then that's not really a reason to stop using TikTok for individual purposes is it? We've seen people become presidents even after their entire dirty past was revealed. I literally do not care if a random Chinese employee knows everything about my life.
You're welcome to feel differently, I never force these opinions on other people. Yet everyone seems to want to tell me I'm crazy. Yeah, I'm the crazy one, not the guy who thinks the government is interested in him as an individual rather than a collective for policing and advertising purposes, which by the way has already been going on for decades.
"I personally have nothing to hide so I don't have a problem with intrusive surveillance" is not a nuclear or even hot take, in fact it's about the lukewarmest take I can think of.
You missed all the nuance. I have heard that argument thousands of times and i disagree with it. What I'm saying here is that long term, wider surveillance implications are the threat and they're happening in all countries. A random Chinese data mining app is irrelevant and individuals are still safe to use it. Probably only matters to people here because of the country of origin, and not the broader implications, otherwise we'd have this discussion about Linkedin too.
> Your data and life are not special in any way. The government will never be interested in finding out about you, and if they really wanted to they could do it with ease, and definitely don't need an app to do it
And yet your data is valuable enough for multiple billion and trillion dollar companies to build massive infrastructure and markets to siphon your data away from you and sell it to the highest bidder.
We live in an unprecedented time where true mass surveillance is not only nearly free, it turns a profit. It costs a fraction of cent to record, transcribe and store the data you produce, so why not collect it? It's just a rounding error on some government agency's balance sheet.
The infrastructure is there. The data markets are there. The value of your data is there.
But most importantly, the evidence is there. In the last 20 years, governments have been caught using technology and private data to propagandize, suppress, persecute, blackmail, kill and even round people up into camps, like China does with its Uygher population[1].
Yes, you don't need an app to do this if you're a domestic government collecting your own citizens' data. But you might want an app if you're a government or business collecting data on foreign users.
Economic and military espionage and sabotage are incredibly valuable. If I was a nation-state, yes, I would like to have my app on foreign government workers' phones, the phones of foreign military members, the phones of professionals in competitive industries, the phones of family of friends of all of those people, and so on.
That is in aggregate. Your data alone is worth maybe 0.1 cents. I just want people to know that they don't have to feel forced to make any personal choices about the apps they use, because they will not come after an average individual. It is your government's responsibility to protect the country from mass surveillance, not silly individualistic boycotts (at least, it should be that way).
Data might be bought and sold in aggregate when it comes to advertisers, but the data itself is rarely anonymized. There is ample evidence of, and case law that points to, governments using personal data and technology to spy, gather evidence, entrap, blackmail, etc.
Also, "don't worry, your personal data is being mined among millions of others' data to destabilize your society" isn't exactly comforting, either.
It's less of a matter of "I don't want the government to spy on me, the individual with a banal life" than a matter of "I don't want the government to spy on us, a society".
For instance, having a FB account enables FB to spy on non-FB users via shadow account - they will create shadow accounts based on faces they don't recognize in photos, and shadow friend profiles based on numbers stored in my phone.
A more insidious situation is that TikTok enables Bytedance (read: the CCP) to monitor political dissent and potentially shape cultural zeitgeist via content recommendation [1]
Many content recommendation algorithms use some sort of collaborative filtering algorithm, where if the system lacks data on one user's preferences they can infer it given a sufficient number of users with overlapping preferences and attributes [2]. So even though my data and life are not special, it does enable the government to find out more about people they are interested in.
I agree this is a problem. I just don't think the app should be banned and I don't want people to tell me to stop using it (granted no one here did). At the end of the day a gigantic systemic failure in both countries is not going to be solved by one country banning one app, and one ceo of that one app trying to 'do the right thing'.
The problem is that, for the last few decades, all the information that could possibly be known about you is already known and your own country can and will use it against you. Why am I to be worried about a toy?
For me it’s less about privacy concerns and more about not wanting to support an oppressive regime. Whether that be through financial boycotts or in the case of TikTok, through my data, which will help them perfect their products and give them a competitive edge which ultimately gives them more leverage to enact more oppressive and anti-democratic campaigns.
Seems like you’re misunderstanding the threat. You hinted at it with the collective for policing and advertising purposes. Handing over a picture of American life down to the individuals to the CCP gives them enormous power to create tailored disinformation campaigns that sow dissent, in addition to being a kind of real time probe into the mindsets of a foreign population. The culture wars that Trump tripled down on have partially been a product of foreign interference to create the seeds which the domestic audience happily latches onto and grows to division and in-fighting. Then there the issue that while you personally may have a boring life doesn’t mean that everyone does, and being able to harvest location at minimum from a variety of targets arbitrarily is a big coup for a foreign intelligence agency. These are just some of the possibilities.
The other take is much more cynical. When they finally release the algorithm how will we know that's the whole story? I'm sure researchers will have to formally verify it somehow (not an expert here so I'm speculating). Also this does nothing to actually prevent them from further abusing user data. Seems like this release is just a red herring that diverts attention from the other shady stuff they are doing.