On the other hand, the same cannot be said about your own government. They collect data on you and your fellow citizens and they use it. And they can mess up your life much more than what China will ever do. One recent example: the worry over period tracking apps and the recent decisions of the US Supreme Court. Those apps are a weapon against citizens who, until yesterday, were not doing anything illegal.
All tracking is bad, and the FCC should do something about it all.
Did we already forget about political interference by "enemies of the West"? I mean, not just brazen election / referendum interference, but driving political narratives to stoke up internal conflicts? That is usually achieved by funding political extremists, but controlling the feed algorithm will work even better.
This isn't just a US problem either, other western countries have also been affected.
At least our own governments have some accountability to us. Foreign governments don't even have that, so I'm ok with them being the first ones to give up the tools of influence. Of course I would prefer if such tools did not exist at all, but it will be a while until we get there.
https://www.nytimes.com/video/world/asia/100000008314175/chi...
Warrants are at will? Nope.
https://policies.google.com/terms/information-requests
"In all cases: Issue a subpoena to compel disclosure of basic subscriber registration information and certain IP addresses
In criminal cases:
Get a court order to compel disclosure of non-content records, such as the To, From, CC, BCC, and Timestamp fields in emails
Get a search warrant to compel disclosure of the content of communications, such as email messages, documents, and photos"
Some 3rd parties require warrants. I tend to think that this is the rule rather than the exception.
Edward Snowden and the FISA court say hello.
Says NSA.
partially true but fodder for schizophrenics and compulsive obsessions.. A truer picture is harder to convey in a few sentences.. however as a US citizen I believe that an uneasy truce has been established via law in the USA since inception, between those casually referred to as "Law and Order" who genuinely believe that governance means record keeping and monitoring, and others who do not. Unfortunately for the "others" that includes genuinely bad actors who seek to use rights to evade detection, or those too stupid or simple to think about these things at all. Meanwhile, the Net has given magnificent, grandiose power to build and use surveillance, which they have done. ill wind blows
Though, fair, that's a glorious and highly theoretical future :P
Antitrust regulation is to prevent an Apple+Google duopoly (or cartel) from having this power. This is nothing about the FCC.
The point is, without antitrust regulation, the FCC only has to go through two giant corporations.
After trust busting Apple and Google, we would theoretically have many more competing stores. The FCC would have to then ask each individual store for a takedown, perhaps even across different legal jurisdictions (read: outside of the USA) and therefore be unable to take down TikTok in such a centralized fashion
I'd like to se a source on this. I don't think different political ideologies imply adversarial intentions. China has been as friendly to the west as it can be while still protecting its own cultural and economic interests.
If western leaders would stop seeing China as the enemy and instead as a partner we would see a rise in infrastructure and economic opportunity globally.
China is not trying to do global charity work, they have their own motives as well. They are also not the devil incarnate. I would argue that their intentions in foreign policy are still _generally_ more morally palpable than most western nations.
https://stratechery.com/2020/the-tiktok-war/
China has stated in multiple occasions that the ideologies of the west are a threat to the country and that they will actively work against them.
Get real. It's a worldview, not a scientific fact.
You can agree or disagree, but finding one source that supports or opposes that worldview is not going to make any difference.
Your source could be human conflict for all of recorded history.
It's not primarily ideological, it's geopolitical realism. They are a growing economic and military power in a different geographic sphere, competing over global influence and power. The history of civilization is conflict over scarce resources, space, and power. China is a cohesive ethnic and political collective and nation that exists separate from the US, it's government and citizens.
Of course there is and will always be room for co-operation in many areas; economic trade is a big one. But conflict over competing interests is a fact of life and where that comes into conflict global adversaries and enemies are created.
"Morality" is not a good metric to guide geopolitics, where material national interests and power dictate more than anything.
Can you compare the human conflict for all of recorded history between China and the US (+Europeans who influenced the US)?
Can you help me understand the logic of "generally more morally palpable than most western nations?" When I look at China's global activities, I see lots of IP theft, aggressive trade deals, debt diplomacy, investing in infrastructure yes... but then bringing in their own people to staff the projects (I saw this firsthand last year doing work in both Kenya and Cameroon and traveling through Uganda), bullying governments and organizations to toe the CCP party line (e.g. Houston Rockets), taking over Hong Kong and shutting down the free media there, basically paying off Muslim nations to keep them quiet regarding the Uyghur genocide.... and this is just off the top of my head!
I'm not implying you're doing it, but whenever I hear people defend China, they always use the word "culture" to defend totalitarianism/communism, as if they're part of Chinese culture.
Instead of being xenophobic we can be privacy focused.
Many millions of people follow his words & think it still relevant today.
He also had a special way of recognizing & calling out hyprocrisy.
It's kinda like the FDA earlier this year declining to approve a covid-19 vaccine not because it was ineffective (it wasn't!) or because it was dangerous (it wasn't!) but because they thought that saying that one brand was OK for kids but the other wasn't (yet) would be confusing and send a bad "message". The FDA's job is to help us identify what pharmaceuticals are safe and effective, not to worry about messaging.
If anything, TikTok is a national resource as at least you know that the propaganda bias will be towards whatever the PRC wants. Facebook will sell itself to anyone - KGB, prostate pills, whatever.
And if they want your kids to smash up their schools, does it help you with your geopolitical battles to know that's what 'they' want? Or would it be more helpful if that didn't happen?
Is it? I feel like it is an adversary of the Western governments. I don't feel like they are my adversaries. We could be friends if our governments wanted to.
If you’re a citizen of the US or Europe, the Chinese government is most definitely your enemy.
It's not like they became an adversary overnight, China's economic success was predominantly sponsored by the West; Their abysmal human rights regulations were favorable for Nike to Apple for employing child labor and they in-turn used that economic growth to increase their defense budget 6-fold in just two decades.
Of course autocracies and democracies would be adversaries; But the sabre-rattling without holding the West's capitalist interest in China accountable seems disingenuous(In general, not your comment).
Now if you bring up US political spectrums, whataboutism is highly effective.
TikTok stores data on US soil. That's part of the deal brokered by the self-claimed best deal maker Mr. Trump.
If there is unauthorized data access from inside China, then that's an issue to be investigated.
So, where is the evidence of the large-scale data access from inside China to TikTok data?
> “Everything is seen in China,” said a member of TikTok’s Trust and Safety department in a September 2021 meeting. In another September meeting, a director referred to one Beijing-based engineer as a “Master Admin” who “has access to everything.” (While many employees introduced themselves by name and title in the recordings, BuzzFeed News is not naming anyone to protect their privacy.)
A US companies' internal employees were conflated to China? And who the hell allows TikTok to operate in US in the first place. If someone working at MSFT has access to MSFT's China user data, is that a problem?
TikTok collects data for an adversary at scale. Many complain that the US does the same but that doesn't change the fact that I live in the US. The Chinese government is an adversary of the West whether we like it or not.
With that said- It's pretty telling that the FCC only needs to go to Apple and Google. It would be really nice to have some antitrust regulation so that the FCC doesn't have this power.