Nothing like the people on this website that don’t know anything about the TikTok “ban” and the fact that it’s idk…….. Chinese spyware and idk if yall know this but the US isn’t exactly friends with China but oh no that could never be a conflict of interest
Like I KNOW you’re all zoomers and don’t have the attention span for it but I am begging yall to read an article and not get all of your information from 15 second videos
We’re not all zoomers some of us just aren’t American and don’t give a fuck about your dumpster fire of a government
Then this post was obviously not aimed at you but yet you’re here 🤔
This is a bill to broadly ban any app that is owned by a company seen as running counter to US interests which will likely be sold to some politically connected asshole in the US, for instance Steve mnuchin is putting together a group of investors to buy it now
All social media is Spyware lol and Google is probably one of the worst offenders by far since their Spyware reaches beyond social media into like email services and shit.
I'd love to take down all these privacy invading companies and hold the multiple governments that support and benefit from them to account, but thus bill is not the way to do that. It's an attempt to assert stronger government control over who can own a social media platform with little restrictions due to the fact that alot of anti government organizing happens on these sites, pro Palestine content post Oct 7th has been explicitly cited by multiple house members as tgeyr reason for voting fir this bill, which was previously unpopular and unlikely to pass until politicians and pundits started going around saying that 'pro-Hamas propaganda' on tiktok was brainwashing our teens to think that Oct 7 never happened or something. This is a Both Sides of the Aisle thing too. "Theat to National Security" here is just a code for We Want to Control The Narrative
[grabs you by the fucking hair] [sighs for 10,000 years] Okay. Let’s talk about this.
To start off, the Chinese government has a habit and history of having back doors into a lot of products made by companies that have their home there. For example, Huawei, a company known for phones and servers was discovered a a few years back to have been putting gov. back doors into server chips used by American companies. Under heavy suspicion by American companies and others for having backdoor in their systems after various security flaws were found.
On top of that, most analysis of the app itself have set off quite a few red flags, such as requiring way more security permissions than it should need, their Terms of Service requiring you to allow them to “build a full profile,” on you including who you interact with and every bit of info about you, and IIRC was found to be uploading keystrokes or copied clipboard data at frequent intervals, which is a great way to get someone’s passwords and/or other sensitive data.
So we’re at the point of “it’s doing a lot of weird shit that it shouldn’t be, but we can’t prove it’s doing anything malicious with it… yet.”
AND. FUCKING CHRIST. Because I’m seeing it here a lot I’m going to clear this up. No, this is not the same thing as Google, Instagram, Facebook, etc. in the US. Here in the US (and most western countries) we not only have privacy laws that protect us from certain breaches, but more importantly the government and company are two separate entities, and are even frequently at each-other’s throats. While all those companies certainly collect data, they are not responsible for handing it directly to their government outside of official process such as warrants and subpoenas. In China it’s the opposite, companies over a certain size are required to by law to allow the government to access and have direct control over large sections of the companies operations. The problem worsens when we remember that China isn’t really the best of friends with a lot of western nations, and giving them specifically control over what large numbers of western people (especially youth) see and interact with is not great for national security. Should you still always keep privacy in mind with the western companies? Absolutely, but the two issues are worlds apart.