The differentiator here is national security, which raises an entirely different set of issues than the typical data collection and user privacy ones.
It's like the difference between sharing your bank password with your wife vs. some dude you aren't very friendly with who has a history of wire fraud. "Treat everyone the same" is not a workable policy.
Which means that all countries other than the US also should be banning Facebook, and most US companies. As Snowden showed, most of them have a history of wire fraud.
https://www.independent.ie/business/technology/ban-on-facebo...
https://news.yahoo.com/facebook-instagram-face-europe-ban-16...
If Facebook kept EU data subject data in the EU, or even if they use Standard Contractual Clauses to transfer it to different third countries without the same kind of problematic surveillance laws that the US has, there would be no issue.
We would be doing the same of course if we were not much weaker and if our products were actually used over there.
Also, don't be one sided on this. The EU countries also spy on the US.
I do not understand. What does a war has to do with the fact that countries spy on each other without rest? Merkel's phone was bugged by the US - not something nice you do to an ally, right? (https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-24690055)
> Also, don't be one sided on this. The EU countries also spy on the US.
I am not and this is exactly why I wrote the second sentence. Our capacities, unfortunately, are way lower.
> Which means that all countries other than the US also should be banning Facebook, and most US companies.
Like many sibling comments have already pointed out, many do.
But the answer to your statement is "no." You're trying to pull an oversimple rule out of a pithy comment and neglecting other important distinctions. It's not just a black/white distinction like foreign country vs. domestic, but more more nuanced one like enemy country vs adversary country vs neutral country vs allied country vs domestic. The answer to the question "should country X ban Facebook for national security reasons" will be different for different countries based on their context.
In case you hadn't heard (I presume you have, us being on HN and all), there is some movement within the EU towards that end
Facebook threatening to close their site in Europe because of regulations is not the same as EU banning them.
https://blog.simpleanalytics.com/eu-moving-closer-to-faceboo...
I dunno, "stopping data transfer" sounds like a ban by another name to me.
Judiciaries in multiple EU member states have judged Google to be breaching EU regulations (in regards to Google Analytics). That is not a ban; Google is welcome to do business in the EU if they observe EU laws and regulations.
If you assume equivalence between (1) Facebook and Tiktok and (2) the U.S. and China's data collection practices.
And I don't think those are equivalent, and therefore it's not necessary to treat the dissimilar cases the same.
If the FCC clarified their stance and highlighted very specific threats, I might be swayed but only if it was demonstrated that the US government isn't doing exactly the same thing.
All opaque data harvesting of public platforms, no matter who collects it, is bad.
Your example is garbage as well. In both situations you highlighted you have something that you don't have in face of data harvesting...choice. You can decide whether or not to give your banking password to a stranger or your wife. You usually have no choice when it comes to data harvesting...because usually the data is harvested out of the backdoor of a platform by selling it on.
Why do you believe this, and based on what evidence? By “anyone outside the US”, are you referring to the population of China? What US threats are you referring to, and why do you believe they’re worse in the US? While the US has ample room for improvement, as do all countries, there’s a fairly wide range of serious humanitarian issues that are documented and indexed by a large number of people globally, and there seems to be very little disagreement about how China compares to the US on various censorship and freedom rankings. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_freedom_indices
Apple's data in China is handled by China government affiliated entity https://technode.com/2018/01/10/apple-icloud-guizhou/ . China's typical play book in tech field is to have the original products banned and have their own copycat flourish.
They are already NOT playing fair.
> The US government is not your wife no matter where you live
You're missing the point by taking the analogy too literally.
Maybe the issue is abusive social networks hoovering up data with no controls and no regulation.
This is exactly right.
Because no one can hack Facebook and get that data anyway? hell, maybe they don't even need to
https://thefederalist.com/2021/07/09/teslas-struggle-in-chin...
First the PRC government made an exception for Tesla:
> To entice Tesla to China, the Chinese government agreed to let Tesla become the first non-Chinese auto company with a solely owned subsidiary in China.
Once Tesla was established in China, there was a faked scandal to discredit the company, supported by state media:
> In April, a Chinese Tesla owner’s video claiming “Tesla brakes fail” went viral in China and was viewed more than 200 million times. It is essential to know that sometimes the Chinese government pushes for or encourages such online outcries to achieve its political goals.
While the story was pushed by Xinhua, it turned out the actual brake failure was faked:
> https://driveteslacanada.ca/news/owner-fabricating-china-bra...
Around the same time, Chinese police were preferentially pulling over Teslas:
https://electrek.co/2021/04/23/tesla-owners-stopped-going-on...
Example with apple: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_of_the_iTunes_Sto...
In China, when the government asks a company to do something, the company has no choice. When was the last time you heard US companies follow arbitrary ask of US government?
See how Chinese censorship applies to mRNA vaccine conspiracy theories. A person that debunked them was banned from wechat.
Do you see western governments doing this?
My argument is about having the same rules for everyone. The argument about data collection and privacy is a good one. It's just completely dishonest and hypocritical and doesn't serve the end user any purpose if it doesn't apply to everyone and it just clearly doesn't.
In the US algorithms ban content, often by mistake. In China a political official or someone working for the government reviews the content personally. Big difference.
Also, who’s to judge that these poor algorithmic decisions are “mistakes” when only the companies are privy to the mechanics of the algorithm?
Different censorship, different disinformation - but we have that in the west as well. The EU is several steps ahead in this race thanks to their Digital Services Act (making it criminal to spread some information, and threatening service providers with million-Euro-fines if they don't delete quickly enough [as in: within hours]), but the US has its very own 'Disinformation Governance Board' located with DHS, which is in all but name a Ministry of Truth. You are supposed to use the Internet to earn money and consume and spend, not to question the narrative.
There are no good countries. All nation-states suck. Some are better at marketing their alleged superiority to their less-intelligent (and thanks to controlling the education system: kept less-intelligent) population through "patriotism", though.
Do you happen to have a decent source for that since it seems rather weird given China's gov stance on covid.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/vaccines-c...
To be clear, I'm not in favour of the Chinese regime but your particular point does still require a citation.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/vaccines-c...
I’ll find the wechat story when I’m more awake. ADV china covered it though.
No, because what you claimed requires substantiation. Please lets be calm about our discussion here.
> https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/vaccines-c...
> I’ll find the wechat story when I’m more awake. ADV china covered it though.
Thank you :)
The thing is, yes Facebook and Google's data collection is horrendous, but TikTok it literally on another level.
Quite a good explanation here:
https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/fxgi06/comment/fmuk...
These apps are hoovering crazy amount of information. They should be banned, universally. No matter which country they originate at. Giving politicians this kind of power over the population in a democratic society is a huge national security risk. No less than a foreign power having these capabilities.
https://www.reddit.com/r/tiktok_reversing/comments/i8gig3/be...
It's not much help to "ban TikTok" while the ad networks run wild. If we're going to be worried about China I doubt it'd be too much trouble for them to place a few engineers into ad networks and exfiltrate the data from there.
iOS has been quite good to me in this regard, although it still needs improvements (e.g. add a permission for accessing internet).
[1] https://www.aclu.org/news/privacy-technology/new-records-det...
*
- Phone hardware (cpu type, number of course, hardware ids, screen dimensions, dpi, memory usage, disk space, etc)
- Other apps you have installed (I've even seen some I've deleted show up in their analytics payload - maybe using as cached value?)
- Everything network-related (ip, local ip, router mac, your mac, wifi access point name)
- Whether or not you're rooted/jailbroken
- Some variants of the app had GPS pinging enabled at the time, roughly once every 30 seconds - this is enabled by default if you ever location-tag a post IIRC
- They set up a local proxy server on your device for "transcoding media", but that can be abused very easily as it has zero authentication
The scariest part of all of this is that much of the logging they're doing is remotely configurable, and unless you reverse every single one of their...
*
Not trying to be flippant, but that list just sounds like google play services to me. In fact, I assumed play services collects way more data.
Also, tiktok surely must be collecting some engagement / interaction analytics... That list doesn't seem complete or legitimate.
I would not think any of these points would be ok. You seem to argue that this is something "everyone does", that does not make it ok. I really thought we had gotten further in the privacy discussion.
[0] https://penetrum.com/tiktok/Penetrum_TikTok_Security_Analysi...
> Phone hardware (cpu type, number of course, hardware ids, screen dimensions, dpi, memory usage, disk space, etc)
> Other apps you have installed (I've even seen some I've deleted show up in their analytics payload - maybe using as cached value?)
> Everything network-related (ip, local ip, router mac, your mac, wifi access point name)
> Whether or not you're rooted/jailbroken
> Some variants of the app had GPS pinging enabled at the time, roughly once every 30 seconds - this is enabled by default if you ever location-tag a post IIRC
> They set up a local proxy server on your device for "transcoding media", but that can be abused very easily as it has zero authentication
Wait a minute - Why was Android or iPhone - built by West allows everything... Or if tiktok are the topdog in writing apps and FB missed out on writing these? Sour grapes?
The proxy server is disturbing if true. Only reason I could think of that being necessary would be to use customer devices to perform distributed transcoding of other people's videos. Can't imagine that being something Apple would allow.
The US government do not hold large corportations to account, quite the opposite. They put people in jail for successfully fighting them legally or turn a blind eye when whistleblowers are car bombed. They make deals with facebook and google for the data so they can say 'it's a private company and independent entity'.
China would likely be just as bad if they were as powerful, but from the point of view of most of the world they have stolen far less of our natural resources, killed/deposed far fewer of our democratically elected governments, bought up far less of our media and turned it into propaganda, spied on our citizens less, and abused treaty law to curtail our freedoms far less.
From the data listed, it's a lot but personally with the current state of mobile os computing none of this seems all that out of the ordinary, it's just what is the sad state of those platforms. This is why I think the data is being used as an excuse.
The problem with privacy law is that some foreign powers won't abide by the laws. It's not unlike violence- a country can try to make a global law saying "Nobody is allowed to have a military", but if they actually get rid of their military, they will just get taken over by a different country which does have a military.
Depends which nation you are in right?
The world isn't split into two: US or China.
I wonder if, for instance, Google an Meta are banned in China.
Data collection aside - relying on a single Appstore that is governed by US law is not acceptable.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/dec/11/french-officia...
https://phys.org/news/2018-05-german-spy-agency-tabs-interne...
https://www.thelocal.de/20200519/court-slams-german-spies-fo...
https://www.thetrumpet.com/17338-germany-can-legally-spy-on-...
https://www.rfi.fr/en/france/20210708-french-spy-agency-dgsi...
https://www.france24.com/en/20130704-france-uses-vast-electr...
If anything, given that the fines are largely based on scope of offense and capped at a percentage of turnover, the larger US companies have been getting off lightly compared to smaller companies given their settlements..
And while I do think that state agencies nowadays have crossed most lines of what may be be deemed acceptable it should still be clear that in some cases it's necessary for a government to have the authority to do things a normal citizen doesn't (eg you're not allowed to sentence people to jail, vigilantism etc).
Also one of the articles is actually about a German court striking down one of the surveillance tactics so this just sounds like whataboutism to defend one nation and bash another. Despite all its faults, concerning spying and data-collection, the EU is likely the smallest offender out of the big players in this world.
I'm sorry, was I the one that mentioned that the US is a hypocrite because the STATE spies on the internet? I think you're confusing my post with the one that I responded to.
>Despite all its faults, concerning spying and data-collection, the EU is likely the smallest offender out of the big players in this world.
So they're just small hypocrites instead of big ones?
>whataboutism to defend one nation and bash another
Who's defending who? If the US are hypocrites, then so are the EU. Both are spying hypocrites. The whataboutists are the ones that rush to defend Europe because they view it as a utopian ideal.
Here is another idea that could give users control about their data, and that could be more easily accepted by governments and companies.
All the data of user X living in country Y should be stored on a server handled by country Y. Moreover, add the following features:
- User X should be able to see all the people and companies that have access to his or her data.
- Country Y could put some tax on each request, that should cover at least the costs for maintening the servers.
This would give users more control about their data, and this would give countries more compensation on the monetizable data coming from its land.
The compensation would be a motivation for the governments to implement and maintain these servers.
Moreover, as opposed to a full ban on data collection, this approach might be accepted by companies since they would still be able to work with users data: just now they would need to pay for them and also they would need to let users know exactly who they sell the data to. In particular, if they sell the data to agressive ads companies, this would be known by the users and this could decrease their reputation.
From a technical point of view it seems doable and a service with similar features is already implemented in Estonia for example [1].
[1]: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12553-017-0195-1
Yes western governments are totally full of shit too, the proof of this is that Julian Assange is still being crucified for leaking information, for being a whistle blower.
We're all so trained to thinking the Government is ok now that it's really hard to know what to do about it.
That’s just not true. Many leakers and whistle blowers aren’t prosecuted every year.
Julian Assange is a pretty transparent Russian asset and has been for a number of years. There’s a reason he never leaks anything that is negative of Putin. Meanwhile if it’s anti-American he leaks it in full without taking any standard journalist precautions.
Of course he can pull the “I’m just a journalist bro” card, but the act is over and his time is up.
If it's true, what does saying it's anti-American mean? Would you rather be in the dark about shady shit your government is doing?
It's entirely possible that he just has better access to US sources than Russian ones.
Sure, as long as it’s accompanied by safe journalist practices (which it isn’t) and also calls out the shady shit of other, opposed, countries (which (which it doesn’t).
> It’s entirely possible that he just has better access to US sources than Russian ones.
That’s fine and possible, but even if that wasn’t the case - and he had access to Russian leaks but didn’t leak them - this is still exactly what he would say.
And it’s possible both are true - that he’s simply releasing what is given to him, and the Russian state saw this and took the opportunity to feed him information as a result. At that point, after he has continually irresponsibly released covert information from a hostile state, how is he any different in practice than an intentional hostile actor?
As consumers, we do have a horse in the race. I would cheer for the horse with fewer regulations, but that's just me...
0. https://www.kommersant.ru/doc/5458430 (Russian)
This is too simplistic. All systems of government are not equal. It’s disingenuous to claim otherwise.
.. are you sure about that? The argument is often made that the First Amendment (and the second amendment!) provide Americans (and not foreign nationals or companies operating within America) with a constitutional right to work against American national security.
Kettle. Pot.
Hell, even the Vietnamese don't hate on the US as much these days - even though they'd have every reason to.
The same rules mostly do get applied across the board, which is why this story is about some guy writing a letter to private companies asking them to please find TikTok in breach of those companies' terms of service.
He doesn't actually have sweeping powers of censorship that would allow him to just ban them on a whim, so he does the next best thing and raises his political profile so he might get considered for a more important job the next time his political party is in power.
I think it's unlikely that Apple or Google will find TikTok to be in breach of their terms, and even less likely that Americans will be completely banned from accessing TikTok.
I disagree, because this is a "both things can be true" situation. It's true that data collection is a problem inherently and it's true that China's unprecedented scale of use and abuse of data escalates the urgency of Tiktok's case in particular.
I also think as a practical matter, "we should apply this to all apps" has the functional effect of being a poison pill ensuring nothing gets done. I think we should accept imperfect forward iterations to improve security over poison pills.
Less free nations are worthy of special attention.
Furthermore the behavior of intelligence agencies sanctioned this kind of surveillance. Ironically the decreased trust will be vastly more relevant to lessened security than their surveillance attempts could ever make up for. So they failed their primary mission too. In a supposedly free country it is a strategy that only produces losers and there is not change in sight.
I kinda feel this way. On a national security level, China having everyone's data is absolutely a disaster.
But on a personal level - if I lived in the United States, I would rather the Chinese government surveil me than the US government.
China's big players from what I have seen have incompetent at even just advertising in the west. I remember reading an American study that went into this around the time these alerts around foreign misinformation started to get big. Turns out Russia is pretty damn good at it. The bit China tries is small and again incompetent (An example given was at small scale shelling out to buy popular content accounts and suddenly turning them from a volkswagen beetle account into a full on propaganda account only to get instabanned) and there's somehow a lot more anti china bots on twitter than pro. Having no horse in either place i'm not particularly outraged about the attempts especially considering the US does similar more effectively.
Now they manufacture practically everything: the computers that drive our lives, makeup that fancies our wives, widgets for all of our digits, and even some foods to feed our broods.
Why can’t China improve in other areas like influential advertising and media campaigns? Having more data from TikTok doesn’t hurt their chances.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/vaccines-c...
That's a matter of perspective. From the US perspective, it's much more problematic for an adversary to have information about their personnel.
Which shouldn’t be too big of a surprise I guess, especially since ‘national security risk’ almost always means ‘threat to gov’t security in practice’.
That won’t change unless there is some kind of disaster that makes it untenable. I mean, just look at Nuclear proliferation for a really clear example.
Eligible US Voters can elect a new US Government at various branches and change what US companies do with data through regulations/legislation.
Even that theoretical route is not possible when it comes to a foreign company. Therefore the FCC guy (who is theoretically beholden to US citizens, or wanting to be perceived that way, or wanting to do so for his buddies at Western tech companies) is making the recommendation.
It’s similar to the paradox of intolerance… the paradox of force. Should we live by the rules of fairness while others don’t? Should we expose ourselves to the same risks that others expose themselves just out of fairness?
Huawei went through basically the same thing when western chip companies and telcos were beat to market by nearly a year for 5G. Grinding the red scare axe to an audience of bought and paid for octogenarians is still a pretty good grift it seems.
The extent to which it's problematic depends on who's doing it, even if all cases are problematic.
All countries have primarily a duty to their citizens, and only then to foreign entities. Even though there are plenty of points of improvement the US can make here, accepting that at least some discrimination against external citizens or companies should happen seems to be an axiom of governmental organization.
I'm European btw and have a US-incorporated start-up.
There is no innate duty of a state to anyone, it's a function of the policies of the people we elect. In many peoples view laws should apply equally regardless of where you are from.
All people I know will treat their childred differently than random children on the playground, I'd imagine some analogy to this situation is not entirely lost on anyone.
There is no equivalence with western governments.
Very much this. As a European who doesn't intent to set a single foot in China, I'm much more comfortable at the thought of China having my data than my own government.
---
The US government is more ethical and more respectful of the rule of law and human rights than Russia or China.
Let me paste it in again, so we know it isn't a typo:
The US government is more ethical and more respectful of the rule of law and human rights than Russia or China.
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The US government is not perfect. Portions of the US government are a danger to the rights of some people, particularly civilians in the middle east. Regarding "cyber", it has several major stains on its history, including PRISM, XKeyscore, warrantless wiretapping, and the current president's support of the Clipper chip in the 90s.
I support privacy protections on mobile devices and mobile apps, and support in general stronger regulations against the collection of personal information by tech giants.
I resent Meta and Google for the amount of data they collect about me and everyone I know with any Android device/Meta app installed.
Every statement I have made can be made while non-hypocritically supporting the statement by the FCC regarding TikTok. It isn't just economic protectionism - it's national security. I don't think a Chinese politician or military official should have Facebook or Instagram installed on their mobile phone, either.
https://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2014/06/28/326453204/fa...
It's a numbers game. They have ~80,000,000 Americans tuned in. They can turn knobs when they need to alter US public opinion. A subtle shift of 80,000,000 people is big.
Many people also get their news from TikTok:
> TikTok, on the other hand, has seen a slight uptick in the portion of users who say they regularly get news on the site, rising from 22% to 29% in this period.
https://www.pewresearch.org/journalism/2021/09/20/news-consu...
> The problem should be that the data is collected and provided to the government whenever they want
Maybe in someone's ideal world that doesn't exist this could be the problem formulation. In real world, TikTok is not strictly under control of EUSIAN blob so it's a threat and it's natural for state to restrict its influence.
I don't think this is true. And I've run a privacy advocate organisation and I'm a complete Snowden fanboy. But if I had to choose between giving my data to the CCP or the American government, the choice is easy.
Even though a lot of data collection was done without warrants in the USA, there's been a lot of blowback, and there is still changing presidents/executive, changing representatives, and rule of law (not perfect, but still there).
On the other side you have a CCP rolling out social scoring, running concentration camps, etc etc.
It's just not the same. Let's not pretend it is somehow equivalent.
Was there? Who went to jail for it? Did anyone even get fired?
James Clapper lied to Congress[1] about data collection, the only reason we even know is a leaker who can never return to the US for his "crimes". Meanwhile Clapper served out the rest of Obama's presidency and now has a cushy job at CNN[2].
If this "blowback", accountability is dead.
[1] https://www.techdirt.com/2013/07/02/james-clapper-admits-he-...
[2] https://dailycaller.com/2019/08/23/cnn-msnbc-15-spooks-mccab...
The problem should be that the data is collected and provided to the government whenever they want - not that it's not the Chinese government. We had this discussion after the Snowden leaks and nothing changed whatsoever. Back then it was the US government and the US gov had the chance to change the rules so this could not happen. Now they're up in arms because other governments do the exact same thing. It's really annoying.
Ban every app that collects "problematic" user info. Make the collection itself illegal, give users control about their data but don't argue that the practice suddenly becomes problematic when others do it.