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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.
The essay goes on to list reasons why a TikTok ban by Congress would be ineffective, pointing out:
Right now, there's nothing to stop Americans' data from ending up overseas. We've seen plenty of instances—from Zoom to Clubhouse to others—where data about Americans collected by US companies ends up in China, not by accident but because of how those companies managed their data. And the Chinese government regularly steals data from US organizations for its own use: Equifax, Marriott Hotels, and the Office of Personnel Management are examples.
If we want to get serious about protecting national security, we have to get serious about data privacy. Today, data surveillance is the business model of the Internet. Our personal lives have turned into data; it's not possible to block it at our national borders. Our data has no nationality, no cost to copy, and, currently, little legal protection. Like water, it finds every crack and flows to every low place. TikTok won't be the last app or service from abroad that becomes popular, and it is distressingly ordinary in terms of how much it spies on us. Personal privacy is now a matter of national security. That needs to be part of any debate about banning TikTok.
Previously:
- Decades-old Law Forms Biggest Obstacle to Nationwide TikTok Ban, Lawmaker Says
- TikTok Would be Banned From US "for Good" Under Bipartisan Bill
- South Dakota Bans Government Employees From Using TikTok
(Score: 5, Insightful) by GlennC on Thursday March 02, @02:06PM (2 children)
Nothing that Bruce or I or anyone else can say will change anyone's minds.
None of the Powers That Be will allow the kind of privacy or security necessary to prevent our personal data from being slurped up, catalogued, monetized and eventually used against us.
This is the beginning of the end of an era. It was fun while it lasted.
I invite any evidence to the contrary.
Sorry folks...the world is bigger and more varied than you want it to be. Deal with it.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Sjolfr on Thursday March 02, @03:42PM
I think that banning software is a bad precedent in general. Times change, though, and software is more and more often being weaponized. So software really should be seen just like any other commodity that gets traded internationally. If we put sanctions on a country it should include their software; just like not allowing spy/weather balloons in our airspace.
Personally I geoblock the IP ranges of the countries that I don't want to do business with. It's not perfect, but it's a good start. Perhaps ISPs could offer that service to individual customers to enable or disable.
Well, stop using the technology that they gather info from that can not be secured from them. Not practical I know, but it is an answer. The fact that we can choose to not engage is encouraging; hopefully we will never be required to have a phone (tracking device) on our person. While it is an end of an era I don't think it's just the end. It's the beginning of a new era where we have the chance to point ourselves in a better direction. All of these concerns are in the news quite often. ID theft and so on is on everyone's minds. Maybe we should take the opportunity to get more and more people on the side of data privacy across the board.
There are loads of encryption tools that one can leverage but most people don't want to go through that hassle. Private companies are releasing apps/tools to achieve more and more privacy. Apple started the ball rolling with phone/tablet privacy. DuckDuckGo picked up the baton and so have other 'security' driven companies. I really wish phone companies like Librem were a real option for most people, just not yet. Still, the fact that we can transfer phone numbers to whatever SIM we want is a positive note. Some folks just have a google voice number and forgo a phone entirely. Lots of older folks simply have a land-line.
Proton, and few others, have email covered. Dropbox bought a smaller company in order to leverage their encryption at rest technology. Encryption tech, like pgp/gpg, is the same as it ever was. I really wish that, instead of banning particular software, our leaders would point everyone in the direction of secure technologies. There is no technical reason why we all can't have end-to-end encryption in all of our communications tech; phone calls, emails, web browsing, the list goes on. Yet, our government and service providers continue to expose us all because big business likes stealing our data and because big government likes spying on us.
Some large percentage of code out there includes opensource sofware. I know that some people think this is a problem but it really isn't. The challenge of keeping code secure is omnipresent regardless of what platform you use (but especially within the Microsoft ecosystem because, well, it's windows ... viruses and all). Opensource means that we can see what it is instead of trusting someone else to tell us 100% of the facts (which they never do). Opensource also means that it will easier to replace unsupported code or code that has issues. Whereas closed source code is oftentimes harder to get rid of.
(Score: 3, Informative) by RS3 on Thursday March 02, @08:29PM
They can't disallow it- they're doing it too.