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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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  • (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?

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  • (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.

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