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0wed12 t1_iu8d1zq wrote

Reply to comment by -Bluedreams in Pressure mounts for regulators to investigate TikTok over potential 'Big Brother-type surveillance' after reports of plans to track Americans' locations by Lahampsink

From a non-american PoV, what's the difference between TikTok and Apple or Google who have their own privacy issues and have been caught selling your datas to the highest bidder?

americans are so conditionned to scapegoat their own problems to another country while their own privacy is as solid as a broken glass.

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5474524 t1_iu94gus wrote

Because I'd rather have an American tech company own all of my personal and sensitive data than an antagonistic, Russia/North Korea/Iran-aligned country that we could potentially go to war with within the next century. In the United States, tech companies are privately-owned and largely answer to themselves, only really answering to the United States when they're up to some shady shit - if that. In China, companies are effectively treated as a branch of the CCP at the end of the day. They aren't independent companies in the traditional sense. If the CCP wants information, these companies will gladly hand it over, because it would be against the law not to. You can't point at Apple and say "this company IS the United States government", but you can do that to a Chinese-owned company and be right about it.

The terrorism implications with the latter are scary as shit. It's not just browsing history and harmless data, it's the profile that you can put together of people using that data to allow you to eventually connect the dots to the truly dangerous information, like social security numbers, passwords, medical data, financial information, et cetera. If you have the personal information of every citizen of a foreign country, and you're able to build enough of a profile off of provided information that you can do some truly dangerous things with it, then you effectively have that country by the balls - it just becomes a matter of when/if you squeeze.

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seattlesk8er t1_iua3jzm wrote

That American tech company is going to sell your data to the highest bidder.

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brienzee t1_iubtmmt wrote

People don’t get the fact that all this info is already openly available to China through American companies. People don’t give a shit about their data they just wanna push China is bad. I’m not saying China is good or bad but most people’s argument against tiltok is pretty disingenuous just parroting American propaganda, TikTok is bad because it takes away market share from all the American companies that want your data, end of story.

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benito_fusilloni t1_iubw6ej wrote

People also don’t understand that China doesn’t give two shits about them and is too busy lifting their citizens out of poverty to care about the doom scrolling of the average American plummeting towards poverty.

America will sell it any way they can though.

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RealPain43 t1_iubzfgy wrote

What could be harmless to you now could be dangerous to you in the distant future. We already see how old Tweets get people into trouble. You might not be a person in power now but 10 years down the line you might have some successful position and if your location data was showing you hanging out on street corners in red light districts back when you were younger then that could be used to frame you by bad actors.

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asdfafdsg t1_iu8yqu1 wrote

There is none. Now watch the downvotes roll in from xenophobic idiots with a black and white view of the world

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benito_fusilloni t1_iubw9sq wrote

They don’t even have black and white views because that would still require them to form opinions. Their views are skewed red white and blue.

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