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 🤔

Wait…how tf is it spyware?? Like how do you know that? Also what information is it stealing that companies like meta are not? But mostly the first question because politicians keep claiming that it’s spyware without actually telling us how it’s spyware.

[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."

EDIT: 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.

Sorry for putting my two cents in but I definitely agree with you

I actually remembered while reading this that back in 2020 the CEO of tik tok or something was in front of a senate or council and they're asking a lot of kind of dumb questions because I don't think the council knew What technical questions to ask. And the internet kind of made a big joke about it because we were all on lockdown and nothing else to do. The idea of some old politician getting confused about apps connecting to your Wi-Fi router was funny to everyone

But looking through some of these articles and reading about the amount of security breaches and permissions you have to allow tik tok. Also the sheer amount data mining they're doing and selling back to everyone. It's very obvious that that senator was probably trying to ask something else, but just didn't know the actual technical words for it. This isn't new the North American governments have not been a fan of TikTok for a long time now and there's definitely a lot of reason for it