Should TikTok Be Banned in the US?

[John Cuthber]

TBH, when I first saw this topic I didn't pay much attention. I don't use it and I'm not in the USA so a ban wouldn't make any difference to me.
I assume I'm not the only one

But the subject also got flagged by the IT security people at work so I was paid to look at it
They posted a link to this
https://www.theregister.com/2023/03/27/china_crisis_is_a_tiktoking/

and the problem isn't really Tiktok it's scarier than that.
The article is worth a read.

[npts2020]

11 hours ago, John Cuthber said:

and the problem isn't really Tiktok it's scarier than that.

The American "security" state doesn't like competition. The fact that agencies like DHS or DoJ (CIA doesn't bother with legalities) have to go through the court part of the government isn't much different from China. AFAIK the FISA court (the one that deals with secret type stuff) has never turned down a request for a warrant.

[StringJunky]

Quote

“It is a case of ‘rules for thee but not for me,'” Asher Wolf, a tech researcher and privacy advocate based in Melbourne, Australia, told Al Jazeera.

“So the noise the Americans are making about TikTok must be seen less as a sincere desire to protect citizens from surveillance and influence operations, and more as an attempt to ring-fence and consolidate national control over social media,” Wolf added.

https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2023/3/28/bid-to-ban-tiktok-raises-hypocrisy-charge-amid-global-spying

I'm inclined to think this. I'm also beginning to think the US needs whacking down some and geopolitical advantages from the internet spread more evenly. Social media dominance  needs to be diluted and Tiktok is good for that. We don't want the US to become tyrants, which comes with a dominant position.

Edited March 29, 2023 by StringJunky

[StringJunky]

Quote

US says China may spy with TikTok. It uses Google to spy globally

Lawmakers’ push to ban the app comes as they mull extending powers that force tech firms to facilitate mass snooping for the United States.

Taipei, Taiwan – During a five-hour grilling of the chief executive of TikTok last week, United States lawmakers railed against the possibility of China using the wildly popular, partly Chinese-owned app to spy on Americans.

They did not mention how the US government itself uses US tech companies that effectively control the global internet to spy on everyone else.

The hypocrisy is rather galling in its attitude on this matter. The biggest threat to non-US citizens personal privacy is the US.

[John Cuthber]

8 hours ago, npts2020 said:

The American "security" state doesn't like competition. The fact that agencies like DHS or DoJ (CIA doesn't bother with legalities) have to go through the court part of the government isn't much different from China. AFAIK the FISA court (the one that deals with secret type stuff) has never turned down a request for a warrant.

American agencies may well break the law to get hold of data.
Chinese ones don't need to because the law gives them the right to.

Do you understand the difference?

5 hours ago, StringJunky said:

. We don't want the US to become tyrants, which comes with a dominant position.

Wrong tense, but that doesn't detract from the Chinese govt being worse.

[npts2020]

13 hours ago, John Cuthber said:

American agencies may well break the law to get hold of data.
Chinese ones don't need to because the law gives them the right to.

Do you understand the difference?

There is only a difference if the laws are actually enforced

[iNow]

22 minutes ago, npts2020 said:

There is only a difference if the laws are actually enforced

Not entirely true. Humans tend to self-enforce when they see a risk of potential punishment for a behavior. 

[npts2020]

14 minutes ago, iNow said:

Not entirely true. Humans tend to self-enforce when they see a risk of potential punishment for a behavior. 

You are talking about normal people, though, not the megalomaniacs and psychopaths that run things.

[iNow]

Most people are normal people. It’s sort of embedded right there in the word itself. Normal. 

[StringJunky]

Rand Paul's blocked it. I agree. 

Quote

WASHINGTON, March 29 (Reuters) - U.S. Republican Senator Rand Paul on Wednesday blocked a bid to fast-track a ban of popular Chinese-owned social media app TikTok, which more than 150 million Americans use, citing concerns about free speech and uneven treatment of social media companies.

"I think we should beware of those who use fear to coax Americans to relinquish our liberties," Paul said on the Senate floor. "Every accusation of data gathering that has been attributed to TikTok could also be attributed to domestic big tech companies."

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/republican-senator-rand-paul-opposes-tiktok-ban-push-congress-2023-03-29/

 

[Sensei]

Paraphrasing it:

Quote

Should [any app] Be Banned in the US?

 

If the application records your videos, photos, selfies, it can immediately knows who you are (e.g. it can search in an external database with faces e.g. Facebook, old Google+ or Twitter etc.) and your family and friends. USA-IT companies do/did it all the time ("automatic photo tagging")

https://www.wired.com/story/facebook-drops-facial-recognition-tag-people-photos/

From 2010 to 2021 is 11 years.. Enough to gather their data even for external FB user.

 

If the app shows things the user has clicked on, then after a while it knows which topics people are interested in (clicked) and which are not (skipped).

 

If the application connects to the Internet then it knows your IP address, the less valuable/precise IPv4 and perhaps the more valuable/precise IPv6. Any application owner that connects to the Internet has server logs..

Public static IPs used by dedicated servers have well-know exact locations to within a few meters i.e. you go to McD, KFC, PizzaHut, and connect to their free open hotspot and (other) companies could know you're at the restaurant.

 

If the app knows which WiFi SSID/ESSID you are connected to, it knows your almost exact location on the world map.

Google is trying to fight it (so they are the only ones who know, which you can check in your Google Account). You can explore how this works for developers (they need to find a new workaround in newer versions of Android): https://stackoverflow.com/questions/21391395/get-ssid-when-wifi-is-connected

Older Androids let the app know the phone's IMEI, as well as the phone number. Newer versions return nulls. So companies have to force the user to give them the phone number, and then it is verified by SMS.. 2FA even gave them a good excuse to do it all day.

 

When I started writing scripts in Python in March, Google started showing ads like "40k per month salary in your city" and similar ads with jobs..

Should we ban Google?

 

I haven't seen any report clearly (to the developer) showing evidence of malfunctioning apps from TikTok, Huawei or any other Chinese company's app where they downloaded more data than US companies IT..

Any application that executes code it just downloaded from the Internet can do bad things, but it won't be detected for a long as the target (the person being attacked) is identified and the special code is uploaded only for this person. It can take minutes, seconds, milliseconds for this code to be on the device.. and then it is wiped out by itself..

Malicious applications that have built-in malicious behavior are much easier to identify without any doubt. Developer can decode it and tell what code is doing or pass it through soapbox to see malicious behavior.

An application that identifies person by person and has an auto-update function must have an infrastructure that allows their programmers-hackers to inject malicious code into only one exact person in the world..

[TheVat]

10 hours ago, StringJunky said:

Rand Paul's blocked it. I agree. 

 

It's a very peculiar sort of day when I agree with Rand Paul, but this seems to be one.  The US congress won't have the guts to legislate much across-the-board limit on data gathering - we are, functionally, a plutocracy.  And our personal information has become a huge commodity.  

I have no social media or google account (and block any record of searches), and use duckduckgo and protonmail for some activity, and keep no cookies, cache, passwords, etc, so surveillance isn't a personal worry. TikTok I've only ever guest-browsed.  @John Cuthber posted article seems to give us fair warning.  But it's not us who needs that warning, and the demographic that does is likely inclined to ignore such warnings.

As it happens, I've heard the "I'm not that interesting" argument from one young TikTok user.  Her position is "I don't care if China knows I bought six bottles of cranberry juice from a web store."  Many her age don't realize there's the potential to know quite a bit more than just buying habits.   

 

[iNow]

Here's another take I find compelling:

 

https://www.vice.com/en/article/4a3ddb/restrict-act-insanely-broad-ban-tiktok-vpns

Quote

The RESTRICT Act, a proposed piece of legislation which provides one way the government might ban TikTok, contains “insanely broad” language and could lead to other apps or communications services with connections to foreign countries being banned in the U.S., multiple digital rights experts told Motherboard.

The bill could have implications not just for social networks, but potentially security tools such as virtual private networks (VPNs) that consumers use to encrypt and route their traffic, one said. Although the intention of the bill is to target apps or services that pose a threat to national security, these critics worry it may have much wider implications for the First Amendment…

Under the RESTRICT Act, the Department of Commerce would identify information and communications technology products that a foreign adversary has any interest in, or poses an unacceptable risk to national security, the announcement reads. The bill only applies to technology linked to a “foreign adversary.” Those countries include China (as well as Hong Kong); Cuba; Iran; North Korea; Russia, and Venezuela.

The bill’s language includes vague terms such as “desktop applications,” “mobile applications,” “gaming applications,” “payment applications,” and “web-based applications.” It also targets applicable software that has more than 1 million users in the U.S.

 

[slcpOCD]

It depends on the reason. If it's true that TikTok algorithm changes not by the user preference but by the corporate's political agenda it should be carefully investigated, it is a fact that social media highly affects our psychology and perception on world thus it can be tagged as a threat if all the allegations are correct, also data is a huge issue there. It is not a secret that U.S government has a specific program to process data in a way to create a pre-emptive security (which the United Kingdom holds an access to a degree) but some branches of government pursue a better transparent path to inform public, Fusion Centers could be an example to a degree, however overseeing Chinese government's activities on harvesting and processing data is almost impossible so I would lean on banning the app. 

Edited April 19, 2023 by slcpOCD
missing word

[CharonY]

9 minutes ago, slcpOCD said:

It depends on the reason. If it's true that TikTok algorithm changes not by the user preference but by the corporate's political agenda 

I am not sure whether user preference is a any better, though. User engagement is the business model for almost all social media, so things that provoke and outrage are high on the list of content being pushed. These alone are enough to destabilize and radicalize, without the need of an external agenda.

[slcpOCD]

2 hours ago, CharonY said:

I am not sure whether user preference is a any better, though. User engagement is the business model for almost all social media, so things that provoke and outrage are high on the list of content being pushed. These alone are enough to destabilize and radicalize, without the need of an external agenda.

I read an article that claimed developers change the algorithm by region to promote different content, how the subject of topics change by giving the example of Chinese and American contents and claiming that the <woke> is not only an internal but also external pushed wave. 

[CharonY]

I am not sure which article you are referring, to regardless of whether there are specific pushes, the general system nudges folks toward polarization in a self-perpetuating manner. The flavor of the week can change, but that does not change the system as a whole.

Here is an article on that topic https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article/radical-ideas-social-media-algorithms/

Here is a paper outlining how social media algorithms limit exposure to information to users:

Levy, Ro'ee. 2021. "Social Media, News Consumption, and Polarization: Evidence from a Field Experiment." American Economic Review, 111 (3): 831-70.DOI: 10.1257/aer.20191777

 

And another specifically talking about polarization. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2021.07.013

In other words, conflict and polarization are in-built into the system. While actors can manipulate certain messages, it works based on the already manipulative backbone of the system. 

Quote

This article reviews the empirical evidence on the relationship between social media and political polarization. We argue that social media shapes polarization through the following social, cognitive, and technological processes: partisan selection, message content, and platform design and algorithms.

The papers might not be freely available, though.

Also, due to the way social media works, it is difficult to really separate external from organic interactions to some degree. There is a whole system of influences whose role is basically doing barely disguised commercials and it is easy to assume that political influencing is part of the game, too. Of course, for a given country one  might complain about undue influences originating elsewhere, but in an increasing globalized world and especially on the internet borders do not mean much. There are folks in different countries demanding "first amendment" rights, for example. 

Conversely, in the USA the GOP has weaponized the concept of wokeness, which originally referred to the awareness of systemic injustice. So even if external actors are pushing this conflict, it is not as if it was designed by foreign entities. 

The clearest and most obvious issue is probably data harvesting and use. But then the horse appears to have left the barn, and established its own ranch with blackjack and hookers and its own megacorporation (though I acknowledge that its abuse by an authoritarian state is more worrisome than by a company- at this point at least) .