alt Hacker NewsTikTok Is Now Collecting More Data About Its Users
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Wired is inappropriately US-centric. This is "TikTok US", not TikTok.
CBS news is effectively state media after the Ellison acquisition and Weiss hire. TikTok's US operation won't be any different and rolling HBO/Time Warner/CNN et al into this will be even worse.
Tiktok became a bigger national security risk after being sold than it was before.
> TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC
First instinct is USDS stands for usds.gov and it literally turned into nationalized social media. Upon further research USDS is apparently short for U.S. Data Security. WTF is with this naming. Imagine TikTok DHS (Digital High School) JV.
For anyone confused, this only affects US users who's data is now handled by the new US entity.
Is there any way to use the international version of TikTok in the US?
But that's fine, right?
Because TikTok in the US is run by an American company now, right?
It was only a problem when TikTok was owned by a Chinese company, right?
Then, it was little more than a propaganda and surveillance platform for a hostile foreign government but now it's a propaganda and surveillance platform for a government that can actually harm you. But getting black-bagged by ICE or whatever other band of Christofascist moral police the next decade brings is a price worth paying to avoid the risk of indoctrinating the youth into Communism, right?
Right?
Remember when part of the argument to force a TikTok sale was protecting American's private data? Honestly, if I had to hand my personal data over to someone, I much rather give it to the nebulous "China" that people always fearmonger about than an American billionaire aligned with the current administration because the latter is much more likely to have avenues to use that data against me.
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I played with TikTok for a week or so. Every time I opened it, it was suggesting feeds featuring clearly mentally impaired people with large audiences throwing money at them for saying their name. It felt like a very concerted effort to dumb down the American population. You wouldn’t listen to these people for 10 seconds out in public. The fetal alcohol syndrome phenotype was widespread. The entire experience was disturbing, to be honest.
the solution to this is very obvious, but I know some folks won't cease using the product.
It's sort've cliche at this point but we got the worst of both Orwell and Huxley in that our super-invasive surveillance apparatus is also a super-addictive apparatus designed to hit all our evolutionary buttons like a slot machine.