So these two provisions caught my eye; under the draft agreement, executive branch agencies (the article gives the example of the DOJ or DOD) would have the ability to (among other things)
Examine TikTok’s U.S. facilities, records, equipment and servers with minimal or no notice,
In some circumstances, require ByteDance to temporarily stop TikTok from functioning in the United States.
In the case of the former, would that include user data? Given the general US gov approach to digital privacy I assume so, and granting yourself the power to do the things you’re afraid China is doing seems appropriately ironic for us.
As far as the latter, I wonder how broadly “some circumstances” is defined. If the language is broad enough, that would open the door to de facto censorship if a certain trend or info around a certain event is spreading on the site right as the government magically decides it needs to pause TikTok due to, “uh, terrorism or something, don’t worry about it.”
I’m also curious how durable this agreement would be. How hard would it be for the next administration to decide to pitch a fit and renegotiate or throw out the deal pending a new, even harsher agreement?
It would seem to me that this is pretty nakedly an assertion of power over an entity based outside the US, and not an agreement meant to protect US citizens in any meaningful way. I think any defense of this agreement as a way to protect privacy or mental health or whatever won’t be able to honestly reconcile with the fact that these exact same concerns exist with domestic social media companies
So basically, the US government doesn’t actually mind all the creepy data harvesting; it just minds not getting a spot at the trough. Typical.
I mean, it’s not just because it’s outside the US. It’s because ByteDance is legally required to collect and hand over data to the Chinese government. And it’s well beyond what any other social media app does plus unnecessary for the functionality of the app. This is not about xenophobia. This is legit about trying to stop the Chinese government from spying on US citizens who are too ignorant to realize what that app is. They just care about stupid videos.
Edit: for example, if you’re on a government network, there’s a good chance half your calls to GitHub hosted content will timeout with no response. Why? Because GitHub has load balances that direct traffic occasionally through a server hosted under Chinese jurisdiction. That route is explicitly blocked so any time your request gets sent there, it simply fails. China is not a trusted foreign government under US law. And the Chinese government found a novel way to legally spy on the United States and the citizenry are too stupid to prevent it so the government is trying to fix it without calling the public a bunch of idiots like they are.
But even if you grant the two premises there, that TikTok’s data collection is beyond that of other apps, and that said data is given to the PRC to access, this draft agreement’s solution to those problems is “let us access that collected data instead of them”. It implements measures that would affect future changes to TOS and policies, but I don’t see anything about scaling back what’s collected now. From what I can tell, this is just trying to replace who’s steering the ship. If the solution that “stops the Chinese government from spying on US citizens” just changes the government that’s doing the spying, I don’t see how that helps said US citizens in any way. The CPC isn’t the one who can put me on a no-fly list on a whim.
That’s my fundamental issue with this, as well as the relevant proposed legislation; it’s not a good-faith attempt to protect US citizens.
I’m pretty sure access to records doesn’t mean business data. It’s more likely business records. The US government wouldn’t be able to efficiently go through that data anyway. Big Data doesn’t work that way.
It’s like saying you’re going to copy YouTube videos as they’re uploaded.
Because GitHub has load balances that direct traffic occasionally through a server hosted under Chinese jurisdiction.
Where the hell did you get that from? Do you have a source for that?
The US government as I work for them. The IP in question is blocked for that reason.
Edit: Slack was also intermittent a few years back due to the same kind of situation. China owns a decent amount of internet infrastructure. It’s fine for normal traffic as TLS and the like is enough for the average person, but the US government doesn’t risk it on their administrative or development networks.
And it’s well beyond what any other social media app does plus unnecessary for the functionality of the app.
I’ll need to rewatch this to remember the specifics, but this privacy YouTuber named Rob Braxman did a comparison of the permissions and terms from Tik Tok and other social media apps, and Tik Tok came out quite favourably: https://youtu.be/VIakTNOhNSE
Chinese government spying or interference in the algorithm is probably real, but it’s still a far superior product at the end of the day, which tells you something about how bad the competition is. To compare Tik Tok to Instagram reels is completely absurd.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/VIakTNOhNSE
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
I love that you’re just cool with an oppositional government spying because you like the pretty videos. Please, tell me more intelligent things.
And please, where did I mention Reels? And what makes it a far superior product behind marketing? What can TikTok do that any other can’t?
Great response. Definitely I want to continue the discussion.
Examine TikTok’s U.S. facilities, records, equipment and servers with minimal or no notice,
not related. But this kind of reminds me of https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2257 specifically:
© Any person to whom subsection (a) applies shall maintain the records required by this section at his business premises, or at such other place as the Attorney General may by regulation prescribe and shall make such records available to the Attorney General for inspection at all reasonable times.
So, at least it’s nothing new. there’s precedence for it in existing law.
and granting yourself the power to do the things you’re afraid China is doing seems appropriately ironic for us.
I’m so glad to hear some of you are self aware.
Can we literally just fix the fucking climate and stop spam callers.
One of these is far more important than the other
Spam callers killed my family.
A family of spam callers killed me.
It could happen to any of us
Equally important but not with the same degree of urgency.
It’s gotten to the point where if I see a story in Forbes, I just automatically assume that the reality is the opposite.
unprecedented control over essential functions that it does not have over any other major free speech platform
The US government has claimed for itself the authority to eavesdrop on any and all internet communication inside the United States, alter the plotlines of TV and movies, and (if you accept that Trump can speak for the US government) pull the FCC licenses of news networks that report news the president doesn’t like. Nothing in what’s proposed on Tiktok comes close to any of that along any of those axes; it’s factually wrong to say it’s “unprecedented.” I actually don’t agree with any of those things, but putting what they now want to do in Tiktok beyond any of those categories of behavior is a gross exaggeration.
Ama Adams, a managing partner and CFIUS expert at Ropes & Gray, said that some of the government powers in the draft agreement were somewhat typical — including the right to inspect a company’s facilities and materials, and the use of a third-party monitor.
Yep.
But “setting up a structure that has allegiance to the United States — I’ve never seen language, per se, to that extent.”
Fair enough, but this only came about because Tiktok clearly has allegiance to a conflicting foreign power. Facebook and Google aren’t required to have allegiance to the United States because they’re allowed to do their own thing, because they seem like they’re doing their own thing and that’s fine under our system. This is like saying “No one else has to go on house arrest; it’s unfair to single me out like this” after you robbed a liquor store.
These provisions seem designed to address fears — expressed by the Biden Administration, the Trump Administration, and legislators in both parties — that TikTok’s foreign ownership and control threaten U.S. national security.
Incorrect. This is designed to address “fears” that Tiktok functions explicitly as a surveillance tool for the Chinese government. It is required to do so by Chinese law, and contains features which are highly unusual which appear designed to spy on its users. That’s above and beyond even the extremely invasive data-collection which most other social media apps also do (scanning your contacts, doing facial recognition on you, listening to your microphone, etc). I think it’s fair to say that gathering that level of data on millions of individual people and then handing the information to the Chinese government on demand is a unique and dangerous capability which should be addressed in some fashion.
There actually are technologies (e.g. routers) where simply the “ownership and control” is an issue, and maybe those should be treated as a bigger deal than they are, but that’s not this.
That would raise serious concerns about the government’s ability to censor or distort what people are saying or watching on TikTok.
Bro, you are lying. Again, they’re actually fine with doing that in some other platforms, which I don’t agree with either, but that very clearly isn’t this. Forbes is only saying that this is the issue to try to distort the facts in order to oppose putting Tiktok under this kind of control. Why Forbes is lying in this specific manner I have no idea, but I’m genuinely very curious why they are.
Etc. etc.
So… Now Tiktok gets to be a surveillance tool for the US government like every other major social media? Wonderful.
Why are you reacting this way to laws which seem very specifically aimed at curbing (or attempting to curb) the use of Tiktok for Chinese surveillance? If the US government was demanding that Tiktok install a keylogger and provide the data to it, that would justify what you’re saying. But, as I keep repeatedly saying with sourcing, it’s the opposite. Do you have an argument for why this represents any kind of US surveillance, beyond just repeating the assertion?
Edit: Let me ask in a little more distilled form. Why, if the US government wanted to use Tiktok for surveillance, would they keep attempting to ban it from various classes of people’s phones, and keep talking about banning it from everybody’s? That seems counterproductive to the surveillance mission, no?
The US has consensual access to pretty much every major player in the social media marketplace (as we know from the Snowden leaks)… Except TikTok.
Until TikTok opens itself up to US surveillance, they should be banning it to push users towards platforms that the US does have access to. Watch them roll back the bans if these policies actually get implemented.
The US has consensual access to pretty much every major player in the social media marketplace
I believe this to be true, yes. (It’s acknowledged that they have access through subpeonas, and personally I think they have active spy operations in pretty much every major internet community including Tiktok. They have active spy operations in actively hostile foreign governments, and compared to that, getting clandestine access to a large internet community is child’s play.)
(as we know from the Snowden leaks)
What part of the Snowden leaks? The big things I’m aware of Snowden revealing were massive efforts to capture and store phone and backbone raw-packet data, partial compromise of TLS, and another massive effort at compromising email. Then there were some other more minor specifically targeted things, but I didn’t see any social media in those. Can you send me a source on this?
Until TikTok opens itself up to US surveillance
I think I spent a pretty good length of time documentation and explaining why I think that these rules do not represent opening up Tiktok to US surveillance. Y’all keep repeating that these new rules represent opening up Tiktok to US surveillance, and then riffing on from there the further conclusions. If you want to talk to me about this, can you back it up a little and say why you think these specific rules represent surveillance?
E.g. the NSA (according to rumor) installed their hardware decades ago at some AT&T backbone sites, with consent of AT&T. When Verizon later became a major player, they tapped into major Verizon backbones, without the consent of Verizon (as was leaked by Snowden.) Both of those are surveillance. What they didn’t do was get involved in AT&T’s terms of service, ask for the right to veto hiring certain executives, conduct audits and assessments of AT&T’s operations… because that’s unnecessary if what you want to do is surveillance. You just surveil. Why, then, are you saying that when the US wants to do those things to Tiktok, that represents some kind of surveillance?
Literally the entire PRISM operation? It gathered internet traffic from all major US tech companies and could pretty much access any data those companies had on you.
The US can’t really force a foreign entity to comply, so this is the next best thing. If anything, it means that TikTok’s systems are so robust that US alphabet agencies haven’t found an easy way in yet.
Literally the entire PRISM operation? It gathered internet traffic from all major US tech companies and could pretty much access any data those companies had on you.
So, I just looked this up. I honestly had some of the details of it wrong in my memory (I remembered it as pretty much only backbone packet eavesdropping, with FISA warrants for a company’s internal data as a separate thing, but Snowden describes those two things as working hand in hand under PRISM which I guess makes sense.)
Are you saying that TikTok U.S. Data Security Inc. is currently exempt from FISA warrants? If a FISA court issues a legally binding request to USDS for internal data, USDS tells them to get lost? If that’s what you’re saying, which part of these proposed regulations is going to change that?
That’s what keeps blowing my mind about this – the US loves doing surveillance on people’s internet stuff, I’ll agree with you 100% on that, and that that’s in general a bad thing. But, as far as I can tell, opposing these particular regulations because you’re opposed to the US doing that genuinely just makes no sense.
If you said that Project Texas was a cover for US surveillance, that would actually make some sense, since that was what put US Tiktok operations physically and corporate-structure-wise more within the US hence subject to US courts and physical spying. But that already happened. Forbes is writing this article pretending that now that they’ve seen the new regulations, they’re a shocking overreach expanding US surveillance, and I honestly just don’t see anything in the new regulations that would justify that statement.
Let me ask something else: Are all these countries also singling out Tiktok for this same type of treatment out of this same desire to surveil Tiktok users?
None of those countries have negotiated with TikTok for a plan of operations: they’ve been following guidelines shared by US intelligence… Are you at all surprised by their behaviour?
It’s like them saying “listen, we love authoritarian governance. Wanna have some of this TikTok bussy?” And then flaunts it’s ass while winking and throwing kisses. Republicans be all sweaty, losening their ties, licking their lips…
If you don’t post subversive messages, they won’t be taken down. Get with the program.
DO NOT BE SUBVERSIVE, FELLOW CITIZEN
What’s considered “subversive” could be very broad.
This is a warning. This post violates the terms of service and has been taken down. Repeated violations of the terms of service will result in forfeiture of your account.
I think they’re making a pointed joke
This will destroy what we love about TikTok. The ability to get silenced news stories out that the established press either refuse to report on, or serve to hide or water down the narrative. The train derailment, the Alabama waterfront brawl, news on terrible legislative happenings, the ability to coordinate flashmob style protests.
They do this, we will NEED a replacement. I refuse to go back to navigating this political landscape blindly.
i can’t tell if this is a joke or not.
It could be a Chinabot. At a certain point on Lemmy I realized that there are quite a few bots or bot-like users here that will just fire-and-forget some statement that’s (1) psychologically persuasive (2) vaguely plausible if you don’t scrutinize it, and (3) in support of some point of view that a state actor wants people to have. Then, they’ll never respond again.
Maybe I’m being cynical and this person will be open to a back and forth with some kind of justification or something, but my money’s against it. The “destroy what we love about Tiktok” was the giveaway for me. Again I could be wrong, but that’s generally not how real human people phrase things.
I’m guessing people aren’t interacting with you because your tone makes it clear you aren’t looking for a conversation. Not everyone that disagrees with you is a bot. You’re type of “debating” is draining, don’t be a dick in how you ask and maybe people will be more open to explaining their position. Not everything is a fight.
Yeah, I think you’re right in this instance. I looked back at my comments here and I was definitely a dick.
IDK, I’ve become sort of embittered talking with people on lemmy.world. I think my comment history overall can speak for itself in terms of whether I’m looking for a conversation or an argument most of the time… but I’ve also had many interactions where it’s very clear the other people are simply not operating on a level of “let’s talk about it because we’re both interested in the truth.” I’ve noticed that over time I’ve tended more and more towards jumping to the conclusion that the person I’m talking to is not operating in good faith.
That’s not to excuse this instance. You’re honestly 100% right, and even my “polite” initial message in this case is basically looking for a fight, which isn’t helpful whether I’m right or wrong. IDK, maybe the answer is for me to go to some community where I won’t need to feel this cynicism at people I’m talking to right out of the gate. I don’t think me being embittered when talking to anyone is good for anything, no.
Not. If you TikTok you know
Can you give some examples from the last month or two of these silenced news stories, please (what aspect of it was reported on Tiktok that wasn’t in the establishment press)? I see your list, but I could list about ten stories on each from the established press I think, so it’s tough to tell what information it is that you’re saying you’re dependent on Tiktok to get.
Edit: No response, which was what I expected. I believe this person is lying with the aim of influencing people’s opinion; i.e. they don’t actually value the ability to get news from Tiktok with any specifics that they can talk any further about, but they just crafted that opinion to put out there to create the perception that “people” think Tiktok is a good thing. The silence, when asked for simple details about what they said they believed, is generally a tell (not just that their opinion on the matter is one I disagree with, but that their whole claim to have the opinion in the first place is just some bullshit they fabricated.)
Because I’m busy with family. I don’t owe you a same day report. Ffs, go pound sand until I have time for your shit.
You don’t owe me anything, now or later. You did make time to lay out what we love about Tiktok within a few minutes of the first post, so I had some follow-up questions. If you think my message is worth spending the time to address, feel free to respond, but not’s okay too. I feel like I already pretty much said what I have to say on it.
Genuinely. The chinese government uses algorithms and active moderation to make sure their tiktok is not nearly as wild as ours.
This is missing some pretty important context, in that CPC policy is generally more restrictive around social media and youth usage. This is a country that has legal limits on the amount of time minors can play video games (and I know that’s not unique to China). If you’re making the point, in good faith, that China has identified some specific evil in regards to TikTok, it’s not enough to merely show that they have restrictions on it; you would also need to show how this differs from the way they treat Weibo, bilibili, etc.
My ignorance has been proven! I’m very vaguely aware of all of this.
TikTok is and always has been hot garbage, so I can see why kids would enjoy it.
kids today and their trash. *shakes head bemusedly*
Ha. TikTok is heavily censored by the Chinese government. It also is a mass data collection beyond any other social media app, well beyond anything that serves the company. Its essentially spying on you. ByteDance is effectively also owned by the Chinese Government. It’s not a privately owned app.
There is a replacement. You’re probably on most of them. It just won’t be short form video.
Dude I’ve never even been on TikTok’s site. I have TikTok blocked with my PiHole and I know about those events. That you believe you can only get these stories on TikTok means you’re playing directly into their hands.
considering Elon is killing twitter, I don’t think that’s a viable option. Every assemble…to Mastodon and our savior of decentralized social media!
