[HN Gopher] TikTok accused of covert plot to track specific US c...
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TikTok accused of covert plot to track specific US citizens' every
move
Author : LinuxBender
Score : 147 points
Date : 2022-10-22 21:59 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theregister.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theregister.com)
| nimbius wrote:
| s/tiktok/uber/g
|
| we literally have american companies that have been caught doing
| this with impunity.
| [deleted]
| maxbond wrote:
| Original source:
|
| https://www.forbes.com/sites/emilybaker-white/2022/10/20/tik...
|
| Personally I'm reserving judgement until this is confirmed by
| other news sources, because the details seem sparse, the motives
| unclear, and I don't hold Forbes in a high regard
| journalistically (though this is at least a staff writer, and not
| a contributor, so presumably there's more editorial oversight).
| My intuition is that there's a 55% chance this story is true, and
| a 45% chance it's incorrect or overstated.
| twtw99 wrote:
| Can we all please stick to the topic of the post here? That
| Tiktok is a threat to the society especially when a foreign
| company with questionable ethical and moral practices is in
| charge of American teen data.
|
| If you want to discuss how western companies also collect the
| data, then go make a different post and discuss there? The false
| equivalence by comparing Tiktok to other tech companies ruins any
| discussions we could have here.
| Gwypaas wrote:
| Implement American like GDPR and bring the hammer down. That's
| the beauty of applying it equally to all actors. The consumers
| win.
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| For those going, "well, what is the Chinese government going to
| do, compared to Facebook?" Or saying, well, Facebook does the
| same thing right?
|
| Well... potentially kidnap you and bring you to China, if you
| don't comply. They supposedly "convinced" 230,000 Chinese
| nationals from April 2021 to July 2022 to "voluntarily" return to
| China to face criminal charges, complete with over 54
| "international police stations" and a new law, going into effect
| this December, claiming extraterritorial authority over their
| "citizens" for certain crimes.
|
| This, along with other incidents, show that China is more than
| willing to harass people outside their country, at a minimum.
|
| https://safeguarddefenders.com/en/blog/230000-policing-expan...
| waffleiron wrote:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extraordinary_rendition
|
| It's not China doing this I am afraid of, as a citizen of a
| third party country.
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| Extraordinary rendition is still a legal procedure, done in
| courts from both countries.
|
| China's alleged activities do not even talk or rely on
| authority from their own courts, let alone another country's.
| waffleiron wrote:
| Thats not true, read the Abu Omar case. This was not done
| legally using the courts of both countries.
| stormbrew wrote:
| You seem to be confusing extradition and extraordinary
| rendition? The former is a legal process built on treaties.
| The latter is a euphamism for a kind of government
| kidnapping to circumvent legal restrictions, hence the
| "extraordinary."
| mgraczyk wrote:
| 230000 > ~5
| waffleiron wrote:
| Those 230000 were Chinese citizens, please read my comment
| again. I am neither American of Chinese.
| aresant wrote:
| What the "TikTok is just doing what other social media companies
| are doing" response misses is that US platforms are under the
| purview of US law and US government.
|
| The US govt's extensive monitoring and archiving of its own
| citizens + foreign citizens information is widely known at this
| point.
|
| This is a source of wide consternation for other foreign
| governments because the monitoring is a tremendous asset for US
| domestic and foreign intelligence, defense, and cyber warfare
| which is of course why China has banned many of these US
| services.
|
| Meanwhile TikTok has grown like a weed in the US and several
| times the so called "firewall" supposed to keep the US version of
| TikTok separate had been demonstrably proven to be effectively
| non existent.
|
| And considering the scale of election meddling, astroturfing, and
| psy ops that take place on US platforms - that both private
| industry and govt have failed to contain - the US intelligence
| community and govt likely well understands the threat of their
| unofficial, global arch rival owning the fastest growing new
| social media platform.
|
| I would love to know what the intelligence community is doing
| behind closed doors at this point but they must have balanced
| TikTok as an asset vs liability given the obvious threat it poses
| to the US' near ubiquitous control of global social media.
| javajosh wrote:
| The rugged digital individual needs Little Snitch for Android
| quite urgently. In fact, I think that's something Google can and
| should include in the very next Android revision. It would be a
| loud and clear statement in favor of security and privacy in a
| distinctly Android (vs Apple) way - it's more open, more
| information, and more on you to do the right thing (but I do
| support Apple-esque default rules).
|
| While I think the best reason to care is because of privacy and
| security, there's also a more concrete argument in favor of
| _preventing theft_. Every network call that is not in service to
| the user is theft of precious battery and bandwidth resources.
|
| Right now it's not a free market because people just don't know
| the price they are paying. It would be great to surface that
| price and give alternative apps and services a chance to win
| based on substantive differences, and not just on superficial
| things. (The only app that has succeeded on this basis is, to my
| knowledge, Signal. But Google would immediately alter the entire
| marketplace for the better by building Android Snitch into the
| next version of Android).
| friedman23 wrote:
| Everyone that is trying to justify this by whataboutism, you are
| defending a regime that is know for going into foreign countries
| to kidnap and arrest individuals extrajudicially. The people that
| will suffer are Chinese citizens trying to escape the grip of
| authoritarianism.
|
| The term for people that defend authoritarians this way is
| "useful idiot".
| diimdeep wrote:
| Understandable.
|
| The State of Democracy in the United States 2021-12-05 - Ministry
| of Foreign Affairs, the People's Republic of China
| https://www.fmprc.gov.cn/mfa_eng/zxxx_662805/202112/t2021120...
| dantetheinferno wrote:
| I'm pretty anti-TikTok - but shouldn't we have some evidence - or
| any knowledge of who this material came from - before trusting a
| reporter from Forbes?
|
| I read through the article - but I couldn't find any details on
| the source this reporter is citing. Worryingly - the author "held
| policy positions at Facebook and Spotify." Instagram is a major
| competitor to TikTok - so conflict of interest is pretty strong.
|
| As other posters pointed out - every major company tracks people.
| We've known about this type of behaviour for decades from big
| tech.
| leoszliard wrote:
| rvz wrote:
| TikTok is no different to Facebook (Meta) and as Facebook has
| already been fined in the billions by the FTC over this, the same
| should also happen to TikTok and repeat offenders should also be
| fined in the tens of billions of dollars.
| jasmer wrote:
| I'm a bit dismayed at the attempts at moral equivalence here.
|
| An imperial, totalitarian regime which currently imprisons
| people for being of a specific ethnicity (or any arbitrary
| reason), and has no measure of a proper judicial system,
| tracking citizens of other nations for purposes of pursuing
| their power - _is not the same thing as_ - Facebook making it
| possible for advertisers to target groups of people with
| 'interests'.
|
| Meta can be fined for shenanigans (which FYI mostly do not
| cause direct harm), and of course - we need better regulations.
|
| But the issue of TikTok is one of national (frankly
| international) security, and it's on an entirely different
| level.
| mgraczyk wrote:
| When was Meta fined for secretly building a system to track the
| whereabouts of specific individuals?
|
| You may be thinking of Lundy et al v. Meta Platforms, in which
| they were not fined but agreed to a civil settlement and denied
| they were doing what was claimed. In that cases, it wasn't even
| alleged that they were trying to make the locations of specific
| individuals available for human analysis.
| rvz wrote:
| > When was Meta fined for secretly building a system to track
| the whereabouts of specific individuals?
|
| Meta was fined for violating consumer privacy for years,
| which TikTok has already been doing themselves; but as you
| can already see they have become even worse than Facebook.
|
| > You may be thinking of Lundy et al v. Meta Platforms,
|
| You see, even when Meta didn't get fined for that, perhaps
| it's about time for TikTok to get fined in the billions for
| violating consumer's privacy in the US and repeated offences
| should be in the tens of billions of dollars to discourage
| such activity in the US?
| friedman23 wrote:
| rvz wrote:
| > You are being purposefully obtuse or dishonest. You did
| not answer his question, and you know you did not answer
| his question.
|
| ???
|
| I really hope you have read what I said before
| commenting.
|
| > Stop being a shill for authoritarian governments. If
| you really cared about privacy you would advocate banning
| tiktok and banning facebook. Not this whataboutism
| nonsense.
|
| Who shilling what? I already said I want BOTH of them to
| be fined in the billions?
|
| Since I already disagreed with the spying and privacy
| violations from what both Facebook and TikTok has done
| for years. I'd also be in favour of banning all of them
| if possible. But in the US and given the FTC has given a
| multi billion dollar fine to Facebook, I'm sure you would
| want TikTok to have the exact same treatment of a giant
| fine since they are operating in the US? No?
|
| It's not _' whataboutsism'_ as I've already agreed with
| the parent comment.
| friedman23 wrote:
| > I really hope you have read what I said before
| commenting.
|
| The comment was about specific individuals being
| targeted. Are there any reports of Facebook targeting
| specific individuals?
| mgraczyk wrote:
| Ok but you said "Facebook has been fined over this". You
| admit that's a false claim?
|
| Tiktok and Facebook both should be fined for violating the
| law when there is sufficient evidence that the violation
| happened. We don't need to make up stories about Facebook
| to justify investigations into either.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| And yet Facebook is still going (just like their competitors),
| so clearly the fines weren't enough.
| eloff wrote:
| TikTok is very different because the CPP has leverage over them
| and can force them to do things we in the West would find
| abhorent. That's not to find Western companies or governments
| innocent, because they are not, but the magnitude of the
| problem matters.
| thelittleone wrote:
| Perhaps true that CCP would use this in a more abhorrent way,
| but let's not forget PRISM [1] and also the eliptic curve /
| NSA / RSA fiasco [2]. One could argue these target state
| level targets or terrorists, but who really knows.
|
| [1]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM
|
| [2]https://blog.cloudflare.com/how-the-nsa-may-have-put-a-
| backd...
| tonetheman wrote:
| This just in: Google/Apple/Facebook and every other company on
| the internet is doing the same thing.
| jamiequint wrote:
| Sounds like you (also) have a fundamental misunderstanding of
| the goals of advertisers versus the goals of state
| governments.
| palata wrote:
| Because you think that the US government does not benefit
| from all that data going through US companies like
| Facebook/Apple/Google?
|
| More privacy w.r.t. those wouldn't hurt non-US countries, I
| would say.
| dontbenebby wrote:
| >TikTok is no different to Facebook (Meta)
|
| Tik Tok exists as a corporation for people to "do business in
| China" AKA be paid vast sums of money for knowledge and skills
| that would be treason or whatever to otherwise transfer.
|
| At least Facebook people keep up appearances -- pretend to be a
| capitalist, then shun any regulations or taxes that
| differentiate capitalism from oligarchy.
|
| (And Federal Trade Commission is a joke, it's a known thing
| they can often do one test case when a behavior is being done
| in parallel across industry by many actors.)
| ldjkfkdsjnv wrote:
| jamiequint wrote:
| This is the most confused comment I've ever read. What are you
| even talking about? What metric did you think that a company
| whose goal is to make money was going to optimize on? What
| metric do you think TikTok is optimizing on (hint: it's not
| "grassroots content" whatever that means)
| ldjkfkdsjnv wrote:
| TikTok lets regular people create content, and then shows it
| to other regular people. As basic as that sounds, FB/Google
| have all sorts of manipulation behind the scenes that stops
| that from occurring at the same scale. And so TikTok exploded
| because people could actually communicate in an organic way
| through video media.
| jamiequint wrote:
| Uhhhh.... do you know anything about Douyin? Yet you're
| convinced that somehow the TikTok feed is not manipulated?
| ldjkfkdsjnv wrote:
| I'm a daily user of all platforms and have worked at two
| FAANGs as an engineer on ML platforms. I know exactly how
| these things work
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| > They prioritize profit and censorship over engaging grass
| roots content.
|
| you seriously think tiktok is prioritizing grass roots content
| and not siphoning off massive amounts of data for profit?
| ldjkfkdsjnv wrote:
| TikTok exploded precisely because they let regular people
| create content, and then showed it to other regular people.
| Ofcourse they are making cash. FB basically stopped showing
| regular people's content, and constrained it to
| accounts/topics that were attractive to advertisers. There's
| a huge difference. They got caught with their pants down.
| dang wrote:
| _ByteDance planned to use TikTok to surveil specific American
| citizens_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33280176 - Oct
| 2022 (204 comments)
| passion__desire wrote:
| Instagram is waiting for the opportunity if and when US bans
| TikTok like India did.
| [deleted]
| zeofig wrote:
| I'm sure they will use our data more responsible than a semi-
| hostile foreign government...
| pupppet wrote:
| Ban TikTok. It's ridiculous that everyone seems to be okay with
| China banning US apps but we allow their apps here.
| doublepg23 wrote:
| I'm imaging a future where people are using Tor to access the
| hot new TikToks.
| mkl95 wrote:
| TikTor considered harmful (2028)
| duxup wrote:
| All that will happen is you get local clones... not a bad
| thing IMO.
| wongarsu wrote:
| Depending on what you view on TikTok, the international
| cross-cultural aspect can be a big draw of TikTok. Local
| clones wouldn't be able to replicate that, so I wouldn't be
| surprised if a sizable minority uses VPNs or Tor or
| whatever to keep access to the original.
| josh_carterPDX wrote:
| Just makes no sense that this app has been given so much leeway
| here in the states when it has been proven time and time again
| that the Chinese government is using TikTok as a way to track
| US citizens and to influence our young people.
|
| Also, Douyin (owned by the same company as TikTok) focuses on
| education in China while TikTok promotes the dumbest videos in
| the states. As the article below so eloquently articulates,
| "TikTok is making you dumb."
|
| https://www.opindia.com/2022/07/tiktok-china-engineering-oth...
| wongarsu wrote:
| Is "influencing young people" not covered under freedom of
| speech? Sure, freedom of speech has limits on harmful speech
| and such, but I think outlawing something on the basis that
| it's intended to dumb people down would be an interesting
| case with potentially far-reaching consequences.
| titanomachy wrote:
| Pretty sloppy journalism, if you can even call it that. They
| don't make any effort to verify the core claim of Chinese and
| US TikTok having different types of content. They don't even
| cite a primary source, only secondary ones like Tucker
| Carlson.
| pddpro wrote:
| India already did it. At that time I thought that it was
| outrageous but now I'm forced to reconsider.
| HWR_14 wrote:
| As I understand it, the military banned TikTok a while ago.
| tsol wrote:
| We almost did. And while I didn't agree with the man that did
| that on most other issues, this was one issue he was right on.
| Unfortunately at that point there was a knee-jerk reaction to
| everything he did and the ban was successfully stopped.
| Forge36 wrote:
| I suspect those who can do not understand the risk.
| justsomehnguy wrote:
| It's more likely what those who can don't use TikTok. Or
| smartphones. Or computers. Ever.
| goodluckchuck wrote:
| I suspect those who can do understand the risk, and are
| attempting to sabotage the nation. However, I conceded that
| in terms of results, the two are functionally equivalent.
| [deleted]
| mkl95 wrote:
| There has been enough evidence to ban TikTok for years. I can't
| think of any reason it hasn't happened yet other than politics.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| "An eye for an eye makes the whole world go blind"
|
| We're trying to do better than them, not follow their example!
| cocacola1 wrote:
| Seven Psychopaths on an Eye for an Eye:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HxaTb4GdX18
| azinman2 wrote:
| Not a game to play when it comes to asymmetric business and
| trade relationships. You're "better" until you're irrelevant
| and have no industry left.
| soheil wrote:
| I think the point being made is that this is not just about
| business and trade relations, it's also about freedom of
| ideas, expression and censorship.
| soheil wrote:
| Agreed. Really disturbing to read comments like that at the
| top of this thread. Who cares if China bans US apps, we're
| not China so why should we ban theirs?
| mrbombastic wrote:
| Did this just disappear off the front page? I refreshed and it is
| totally gone after being the top story.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| I'm glad that the Western spyware industry is finally seeing some
| competition. Hopefully this will raise concerns that will end up
| outlawing _all_ spyware, regardless of origin.
| jamiequint wrote:
| Sounds like you have a fundamental misunderstanding of the
| goals of advertisers versus the goals of state governments.
| wongarsu wrote:
| The Snowden leaks were nearly a decade ago, but I have
| serious doubts that it has gotten any better since then. The
| data hoarding for advertisements is just the cherry on top
| that makes this data more widely available.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| The problem is that advertisers are ultimately vulnerable to
| governments, not to mention not really incentivised to resist
| them.
|
| In the end, governments just outsource their spying to
| advertisers (without even having to pay for the service) and
| can "ask nicely" for any data they need.
| [deleted]
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| I am also accusing Facebook, Apple, and Google of the same thing.
| Can we add them to this inquiry please?
| azinman2 wrote:
| Whataboutism is always strong on HN whenever there's any
| critique of anything Chinese.
| izacus wrote:
| It's because we prefer actual privacy applying to everyone
| instead of xenophobic hypocrisy.
|
| Put a stop to this - for everyone.
| friedman23 wrote:
| No, it's because there are a bunch of Chinese nationalists
| working in tech.
|
| Your comment reminds me of critiques of Russophobia. Turns
| out in hindsight Russophobia was completely warranted.
| _trampeltier wrote:
| What do you think how I feel as european guy with the US spy
| industry.
| [deleted]
| rightbyte wrote:
| "Whataboutism" is such a silly word to deflect hypocrisy. You
| can't take concerns about TikTok seriusly from politicians
| etc that are fine with e.g. Facebook.
| ImPostingOnHN wrote:
| we can look into that next, best to stay focused on the
| original focus instead of getting distracted
| masswerk wrote:
| Well, they have been in the focus for several years, now, so
| shouldn't we settle this first? ;-)
| edmundsauto wrote:
| Facebook, at least, is under FTC consent order and has very
| strict reporting and compliance requirements. I agree the the
| US needs similar controls over all major data generation
| schemes - at least w/ FAANGs, the jurisdiction is available.
| With TikTok, there is no leverage.
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