'Is TikTok a Chinese Cambridge Analytica Data Bomb Waiting to Explode?' (qz.com) 73
CBS News calls TikTok "the first major contender since Snapchat to possibly disrupt a market dominated by social media behemoth Facebook.
"The mere three-year-old startup even comes with a history of data-privacy controversies." Created by China start-up ByteDance in 2016, TikTok has already been downloaded over 1 billion times globally, surpassing both Facebook and Instagram in app installs last year, according to analytics site Sensor Tower.... It's also more than just a plucky tech start-up. ByteDance, which owns TikTok, is the single largest start-up in the world, surpassing Uber in valuation with $78 billion. It has funding from some of the world's highest-profile investors, including Japanese conglomerate SoftBank (also an investor in Uber). However, TikTok has already come under fire from government regulators and parents for data-privacy concerns and what some critics call predatory practices on the app regarding children. And additional concerns were raised this week by data rights advocate David Carroll, an associate professor of media design whose 2017 lawsuit against Cambridge Analytica indirectly led to a January criminal conviction of the administrators of Cambridge Analytica in the UK. If the cataclysmic scandal taught us anything, it was that some of the secrets of the data trade wars are buried in the fine print no one reads. In preparation for when my kids begin asking about the hugely popular lip-sync app TikTok, I dug into its privacy policy and its recent revisions. If you joined TikTok before 2019, what I found should worry you... Having learned the crucial lesson of data sovereignty through my experiences with Facebook's favorite democracy-destabilizing personality quiz, I'm now hyper-sensitized to the question of where our personal data ends up... I did the thing that almost no one does: I read their privacy policy. I was alarmed to see this section, which in late 2018 stated that TikTok user data may be transferred to China.
This discovery leads him to one inevitable question. "Is TikTok a Chinese Cambridge Analytica data bomb waiting to explode?"
"The mere three-year-old startup even comes with a history of data-privacy controversies." Created by China start-up ByteDance in 2016, TikTok has already been downloaded over 1 billion times globally, surpassing both Facebook and Instagram in app installs last year, according to analytics site Sensor Tower.... It's also more than just a plucky tech start-up. ByteDance, which owns TikTok, is the single largest start-up in the world, surpassing Uber in valuation with $78 billion. It has funding from some of the world's highest-profile investors, including Japanese conglomerate SoftBank (also an investor in Uber). However, TikTok has already come under fire from government regulators and parents for data-privacy concerns and what some critics call predatory practices on the app regarding children. And additional concerns were raised this week by data rights advocate David Carroll, an associate professor of media design whose 2017 lawsuit against Cambridge Analytica indirectly led to a January criminal conviction of the administrators of Cambridge Analytica in the UK. If the cataclysmic scandal taught us anything, it was that some of the secrets of the data trade wars are buried in the fine print no one reads. In preparation for when my kids begin asking about the hugely popular lip-sync app TikTok, I dug into its privacy policy and its recent revisions. If you joined TikTok before 2019, what I found should worry you... Having learned the crucial lesson of data sovereignty through my experiences with Facebook's favorite democracy-destabilizing personality quiz, I'm now hyper-sensitized to the question of where our personal data ends up... I did the thing that almost no one does: I read their privacy policy. I was alarmed to see this section, which in late 2018 stated that TikTok user data may be transferred to China.
This discovery leads him to one inevitable question. "Is TikTok a Chinese Cambridge Analytica data bomb waiting to explode?"
What is TikTok? (Score:3)
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... never heard about it before...
The sound you hear just before the mouse runs up the clock
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It's an app that lets you record 15 second video clips and share them.
So as per Betterage, the answer to this question is "no". Because as shiity as TikTok is, they don't collect anything like the amount of data that Facebook does and don't have the kind of interaction options that allowes CA to abuse Facebook users and in cheat in the Brexit referendum.
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Something like it already existed, but with less time for clips... this thing will soon die, I think...
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This is the reason the other one died...
Re: What is TikTok? (Score:1)
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To exit the EU.
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"Because as shiity as TikTok is, they don't collect anything like"
I highly doubt it. It's the international version of Douyin which is used as part of their social credit system. It's all the Party's data.
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It's like Elvis. It's corrupting the youth. Plus it might be Chinese. That's all you need to know.
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Well, go to youtube and use the search terms Elvis and kpop.
TikTok is nothing like Asian Elvis.
what did you expect ? (Score:3)
Facebook in one of the most "free" countries in the west, fucked us all
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Betteridge's law of headlines says (Score:2)
No.
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aaaargh! my arm! (Score:2)
It's being twisted by social media companies to make me give up all my private information to them! Owwwwwww!
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Don't worry. If you don't give them some pieces of information, your friends will fill it in for you. And if you don't create an account, it will be inferred by mining your friend's phones!
Don't use it, and dump Facebook, Twitter, etc. now (Score:5, Insightful)
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Says the man posting on one of the granddaddies of social media...
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You must be new here. Clearly Slashdot is antisocial media.
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Don't tell us what we are, who do you think you are?
Do you have any idea how many blades of grass you've tarnished?
We don't have baby pictures around here. We have anime girls. Cat memes. AI pop idols. Goats. Men in beards. We're not allowed to body shame them anymore. But they like the goats. And we have hot grits.
We know that explosions don't make sound in space, neverminding that they actually do because the explosion provides an expanding shell of gas that will ping your hull. We know that words only ha
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You forgot /. :P 4 me, I socialize more online than in person because of my multiple disabilities. :(
Beware of buzzword villainy (Score:1)
I guess we should be afraid?
In addition to the Chinese bogeymen and the Cambridge Analytical hedgemon, we should also fear TikTok might be a tool of Satan and the Illuminati and the crypto-Nazis. Only storytime villains would operate something so insidious.
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Bogeymen I can handle. Same for Satan and the Illuminati.
But that doesn't change what the Great Firewall is.
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Your data can always be weaponized (Score:3)
In China the government can get it's paws on any collected data. In the West that's outsourced to corporations, and the government can get it as well. In either case there is not much you can do.
Does it make any difference if Tik-Toc is an undercover scheme to gather data? No. It gathers information on users and therefore it is a threat. Intent is not relevant.
Your only defense is to not register for anything ever. If they don't have your information it can't be misused. You have been warned.
All of these companies sell your data (Score:1)
This is small potatoes stuff compared to the other tools used to oppress the middle class. I'm reminded of this [xkcd.com]. Elites primarily use bigotry/racism to divide the working class against itself (skin color in America, caste in India, religion in China and my personal favorite Jobs [wikipedia.org] in Japan. They use various voter suppression techniques like disproportionately [youtube.com] criminalizing [leafly.com] certain types of drugs and then taking away [politifact.com] voting rights [brennancenter.org] from people convicted of a crime.
There are mu
Bombs can be too smart (Score:2)
Doolittle: Hello, Bomb? Are you with me?
Bomb #20: Of course.
Doolittle: Are you willing to entertain a few concepts?
Bomb #20: I am always receptive to suggestions.
Doolittle: Fine. Think about this then. How do you know you exist?
Bomb #20: Well, of course I exist.
Doolittle: But how do you know you exist?
Bomb #20: It is intuitively obvious.
Doolittle: Intuition is no proof. What concrete evidence do you have that you exist?
Bomb #20: Hmmmm... well... I think, therefore I am.
Doolittle: That's good. That's very g
Nobody cared until it was used against them (Score:2)
Nobody gave a rats ass about Facebook personal data until they had the perception that it was being used against them. I dare say that had the Clinton campaign done the same thing (and they probably did but poorly) and won the election (they didn't), nobody would have said a word about it. Because they couldn't believe (and still can't) that Trump won, now they are pissed that somebody used a political tool in a way they didn't intend and more importantly foresee. What this should tell you is that the DN
Re: Nobody cared until it was used against them (Score:1)
Obama literally did exactly the same thing in 2012, and it was hailed by leftists and the media as wildly innovative and brilliant!
It's fucking hilarious watching these morons eat themselves. Facebook is full of leftists who are now hand-wringing themselves into a white guilt stupor, sure that they must destroy it from the inside.
Meanwhile, Trump is going to win again, because his victory had nothing to do with Facebook or Cambridge Analytica. All of the data pulled from that was also openly for sale by Fac