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posted by janrinok on Friday December 02 2022, @10:17PM   Printer-friendly
from the privacy-theater dept.

South Dakota Bans Government Employees From Using TikTok. The Countless Other Apps And Services That Hoover Up And Sell Sensitive Data Are Fine, Though:

South Dakota Bans Government Employees From Using TikTok. The Countless Other Apps And Services That Hoover Up And Sell Sensitive Data Are Fine, Though

South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem put on a bit of a performance this week by announcing that the state would be banning government employees from installing TikTok on their phones. The effort, according to the Governor, is supposed to counter the national security risk of TikTok sharing consumer data with the Chinese government:

"South Dakota will have no part in the intelligence gathering operations of nations who hate us," said Governor Kristi Noem. "The Chinese Communist Party uses information that it gathers on TikTok to manipulate the American people, and they gather data off the devices that access the platform."

Of course, this being the post-truth era, the fact that there's no actual evidence that China has even been able to exploit TikTok to manipulate Americans at any meaningful scale is just... not mentioned.

Fears that Chinese-based TikTok owner ByteDance could share U.S. consumer data with the Chinese government are at least based on reality. But as we've noted a few times now, the hyperbolic bloviation by many TikTok hysterics on the right (FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr comes quickly to mind) isn't occurring in good faith, and their solution (ban TikTok) doesn't address the actual underlying issue.

As in, the policymakers freaking out about the Chinese potentially getting access to TikTok user data are the exact same people who've fought tooth and nail against the U.S. having even a baseline privacy law for the Internet era. These are the exact same folks that created a data broker privacy hellscape completely free of accountability, and advocated for the dismantling of most, if not all, regulatory oversight of the sector. The result: just an endless parade of scandals, hacks, and breaches.

Now those exact same folks are breathlessly concerned when just one of countless bad actors (China) abuse a zero-accountability privacy hellscape they themselves helped to create.


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Banning TikTok 19 comments

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2023/02/banning-tiktok.html

Congress is currently debating bills that would ban TikTok in the United States. We are here as technologists to tell you that this is a terrible idea and the side effects would be intolerable. Details matter. There are several ways Congress might ban TikTok, each with different efficacies and side effects. In the end, all the effective ones would destroy the free Internet as we know it:

There's no doubt that TikTok and ByteDance, the company that owns it, are shady. They, like most large corporations in China, operate at the pleasure of the Chinese government. They collect extreme levels of information about users. But they're not alone: Many apps you use do the same, including Facebook and Instagram, along with seemingly innocuous apps that have no need for the data. Your data is bought and sold by data brokers you've never heard of who have few scruples about where the data ends up. They have digital dossiers on most people in the United States.

If we want to address the real problem, we need to enact serious privacy laws, not security theater, to stop our data from being collected, analyzed, and sold—by anyone. Such laws would protect us in the long term, and not just from the app of the week. They would also prevent data breaches and ransomware attacks from spilling our data out into the digital underworld, including hacker message boards and chat servers, hostile state actors, and outside hacker groups. And, most importantly, they would be compatible with our bedrock values of free speech and commerce, which Congress's current strategies are not.

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  • (Score: 2) by Frosty Piss on Friday December 02 2022, @10:38PM (2 children)

    by Frosty Piss (4971) on Friday December 02 2022, @10:38PM (#1280969)

    They might be able to do it with Work Phones (and in my opinion it's a good idea), but I don't think it will fly with personal phones.

    • (Score: 2) by Spamalope on Friday December 02 2022, @11:17PM

      by Spamalope (5233) on Friday December 02 2022, @11:17PM (#1280970) Homepage

      Yep. This is a ban on Tictok where you shouldn't have any of its competitors either...
      --
      Politicians should grandstand differently though:
      China; we'll consider allowing Tictok when you do! End the ban on Tictok use within China!
      Clearly China is so concerned they've banned the app.
      --

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 03 2022, @12:19AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 03 2022, @12:19AM (#1280973)

      I would assume this is work-phones. That said for many people they are probably more or less interchangeable. Could it change for your private phone? For most of the employees probably not, but if you hold some kind of job with a security clearance running unapproved apps could be frowned upon and have consequences.

  • (Score: 2) by Spamalope on Friday December 02 2022, @11:43PM (3 children)

    by Spamalope (5233) on Friday December 02 2022, @11:43PM (#1280972) Homepage

    Do we have a credible explanation of why China bans the app?

    • (Score: 2, Informative) by linuxrocks123 on Saturday December 03 2022, @03:40AM (1 child)

      by linuxrocks123 (2557) on Saturday December 03 2022, @03:40AM (#1280980) Journal

      They ban Google, Facebook, Twitter, Wikipedia, and almost all Western news websites. Since their Google ban extends to Google Play, all their Android phones are bastardized creations that use a third party app store.

      Of course they ban TikTok. Yeah, the company is Chinese, but China has its head so far up its own ass that it would be completely impossible to run a social media website that Westerners would want to use and that China would allow its subjects to use. So, ByteDance chose to make TikTok part of the free Internet and to create a clone called Douyin for the shitty censored Chinese Internet, which is quickly becoming just a bigger version of Kwangmyong.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 03 2022, @04:03AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 03 2022, @04:03AM (#1280984)

        and to create a clone called Douyin

        1) Douyin was before TikTok
        2) TikTok is not really a clone of Douyin.

    • (Score: 3, Informative) by canopic jug on Sunday December 04 2022, @08:25AM

      by canopic jug (3949) Subscriber Badge on Sunday December 04 2022, @08:25AM (#1281107) Journal

      China doesn't ban the app. It just has a completely different one for domestic use.

      There are two versions of TikTok, one for domestic use and one to wage war [cbsnews.com] on the other nations' youths. The domestic version limits access by kids to no more than 40 minutes per day and even then they only have access to educational material like science experiment videos, "history" videos, and such. The export version, which is what kids in the EU and the US are exposed to, not only has no time limit but is designed for maximum engagement (addiction) [nih.gov] in addition to content which is time wasting at best and, more often, destructive to physical and/or mental heath [washingtonpost.com]. CBS used the metaphors of spinach versus opium.

      Yeah, WWIII has been going at a slow burn for a while now. It's just that most individuals are too caught up in its tools to notice and even most of those that do kind of notice remain in denial about the nature of the "apps" on their and their kids smartphones.

      --
      Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 03 2022, @04:58PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 03 2022, @04:58PM (#1281028)
    No really, tell us how you feel. Don’t hide behind that journalistic impartiality.
  • (Score: 2) by Username on Sunday December 04 2022, @09:57AM (1 child)

    by Username (4557) on Sunday December 04 2022, @09:57AM (#1281112)

    I would rather have american companies spying on our politicians instead of chinese ones.

    Leftist website taking a shot at a republican, who would have thought. They'd probably throw a russa,russa,russa fit if a politician installed and used the russian VK app, though.

    • (Score: 2) by canopic jug on Monday December 05 2022, @04:44AM

      by canopic jug (3949) Subscriber Badge on Monday December 05 2022, @04:44AM (#1281220) Journal

      Well, even though Bytedance is up front about being a surveillance and propaganda company, very few of the articles covering it or TikTok ever mention that fact. It's almost like a quick skim through social media is what passes for journalism these days.

      --
      Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
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