Comment by ethbr1 11 hours ago
That's a convenient fig leaf.
There are 2 separate problems:
- Lack of US privacy legislation
- Security-sensitive systems and infrastructure owned by competitor nations
PS: Curious how many total comments there are on this article. Either everyone is 3x as likely to comment on it as usual or something else is different. Ijs.
Forcing TikTok to divest from mainland Chinese control absolutely solves the second, in TikTok's case.
That there exist other problems is not a justification for inaction on this particular problem.
If you consider TikTok a “Security-sensitive system” that seems to be such a broad category as to be useless. I guess we should stop using any and all Chinese produced software systems then? Which isn’t an unreasonable opinion but again it feels like a different conversation than “ban TikTok”.
You don't consider a massively deployed app, on a majority of mobile devices, via which blackmailable individual profiles can be assembled "security-sensitive"?
I'd absolutely consider Meta to be security sensitive. And Microsoft. And Google. And Netflix.
Except they've just spun up different apps accessing the same data, and also people are flocking to alternatives even more connected to China's Intel apparatus than TikTok allegedly was, because fundamentally a shit ton of Americans don't trust their government. And IMO, they're right not to.
We could shut all of this shit down if we actually wanted to, but that means going after American companies too, which they won't. They want to have the cake and eat it too: outlaw foreign spying on American users without outlawing domestic spying on American users. They want to make it so China can't do exactly what social media et al does in America, to Americans. Americans are not stupid: they are perceiving this. They know they are being manipulated, perhaps by China, perhaps by the U.S., definitely by dozens if not hundreds of private enterprises, likely all fucking three.
On one hand, the American government's priority is the security of America and her citizens, but on the other, we have an entire segment of the economy now utterly dependent on being able to violate citizen's privacy at will and at scale. Surveillance capitalism and foreign surveillance are effectively interoperable. You can't kill one without killing the other.
Edit: And even more on the personal front, for your every day Joe: this is completely stake-less. "Oh China is spying on me!" big fucking deal. The NSA was caught spying on us decades ago, and by all accounts, they still are. Google AdSense probably knows my resting heart rate and rectal measurements that it will use to try and sell me the new flavor of Oreo. We accept as a given that our privacy is basically long gone, not only did that boat leave the pier, it sailed to the mid-Atlantic, sunk, and a bunch of billionaires imploded trying to check out the wreckage in a poorly made submarine. I don't fucking care if China is spying on me too, that's just a fact of my online existence.
Privacy legislation only works because companies have to worry about whistleblowers leaking violations to the media, which would cause them to be fined. China can disappear any whistleblowers and has full control over their media. If CCP compromising TikTok is proven despite this, then it's over for TikTok anyways and fines are irrelevant.
> Either everyone is 3x as likely to comment on it as usual or something else is different. Ijs.
Or maybe this story is hugely relevant to a lot more people than your average story? I find it hard to believe china is waging a huge phsyop on HN
The “it cant happen to here” is strong in America. I saw a guy videotaping the palisades fire instead of packing and vacating. People thinks it only happens in the movies but on my time on earth reality is far stranger than fiction
HN is absolutely a tiny unknown forum. To my understanding, it has around 5 million or so uniques monthly. By contrast, Instagram has 2 billion registered active users, and it’s only the 4th most popular
But neither of those problems are addressed by a TikTok ban. If privacy legislation was enacted and it banned TikTok as a result the conversation would be very different.