"I personally have nothing to hide so I don't have a problem with intrusive surveillance" is not a nuclear or even hot take, in fact it's about the lukewarmest take I can think of.

You missed all the nuance. I have heard that argument thousands of times and i disagree with it. What I'm saying here is that long term, wider surveillance implications are the threat and they're happening in all countries. A random Chinese data mining app is irrelevant and individuals are still safe to use it. Probably only matters to people here because of the country of origin, and not the broader implications, otherwise we'd have this discussion about Linkedin too.

given how downvoted the parent comment got after just a few minutes of being in the positive, I would definitely count it as a pretty hot take.

> Your data and life are not special in any way. The government will never be interested in finding out about you, and if they really wanted to they could do it with ease, and definitely don't need an app to do it

And yet your data is valuable enough for multiple billion and trillion dollar companies to build massive infrastructure and markets to siphon your data away from you and sell it to the highest bidder.

We live in an unprecedented time where true mass surveillance is not only nearly free, it turns a profit. It costs a fraction of cent to record, transcribe and store the data you produce, so why not collect it? It's just a rounding error on some government agency's balance sheet.

The infrastructure is there. The data markets are there. The value of your data is there.

But most importantly, the evidence is there. In the last 20 years, governments have been caught using technology and private data to propagandize, suppress, persecute, blackmail, kill and even round people up into camps, like China does with its Uygher population[1].

Yes, you don't need an app to do this if you're a domestic government collecting your own citizens' data. But you might want an app if you're a government or business collecting data on foreign users.

Economic and military espionage and sabotage are incredibly valuable. If I was a nation-state, yes, I would like to have my app on foreign government workers' phones, the phones of foreign military members, the phones of professionals in competitive industries, the phones of family of friends of all of those people, and so on.

[1] https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/muslims-...

That is in aggregate. Your data alone is worth maybe 0.1 cents. I just want people to know that they don't have to feel forced to make any personal choices about the apps they use, because they will not come after an average individual. It is your government's responsibility to protect the country from mass surveillance, not silly individualistic boycotts (at least, it should be that way).

Data might be bought and sold in aggregate when it comes to advertisers, but the data itself is rarely anonymized. There is ample evidence of, and case law that points to, governments using personal data and technology to spy, gather evidence, entrap, blackmail, etc.

Also, "don't worry, your personal data is being mined among millions of others' data to destabilize your society" isn't exactly comforting, either.

It's less of a matter of "I don't want the government to spy on me, the individual with a banal life" than a matter of "I don't want the government to spy on us, a society".

For instance, having a FB account enables FB to spy on non-FB users via shadow account - they will create shadow accounts based on faces they don't recognize in photos, and shadow friend profiles based on numbers stored in my phone.

A more insidious situation is that TikTok enables Bytedance (read: the CCP) to monitor political dissent and potentially shape cultural zeitgeist via content recommendation [1]

Many content recommendation algorithms use some sort of collaborative filtering algorithm, where if the system lacks data on one user's preferences they can infer it given a sufficient number of users with overlapping preferences and attributes [2]. So even though my data and life are not special, it does enable the government to find out more about people they are interested in.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/sep/25/revealed-... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collaborative_filtering

I agree this is a problem. I just don't think the app should be banned and I don't want people to tell me to stop using it (granted no one here did). At the end of the day a gigantic systemic failure in both countries is not going to be solved by one country banning one app, and one ceo of that one app trying to 'do the right thing'.

The problem is that, for the last few decades, all the information that could possibly be known about you is already known and your own country can and will use it against you. Why am I to be worried about a toy?

For me it’s less about privacy concerns and more about not wanting to support an oppressive regime. Whether that be through financial boycotts or in the case of TikTok, through my data, which will help them perfect their products and give them a competitive edge which ultimately gives them more leverage to enact more oppressive and anti-democratic campaigns.

Seems like you’re misunderstanding the threat. You hinted at it with the collective for policing and advertising purposes. Handing over a picture of American life down to the individuals to the CCP gives them enormous power to create tailored disinformation campaigns that sow dissent, in addition to being a kind of real time probe into the mindsets of a foreign population. The culture wars that Trump tripled down on have partially been a product of foreign interference to create the seeds which the domestic audience happily latches onto and grows to division and in-fighting. Then there the issue that while you personally may have a boring life doesn’t mean that everyone does, and being able to harvest location at minimum from a variety of targets arbitrarily is a big coup for a foreign intelligence agency. These are just some of the possibilities.