I mean, you can buy that information for 'practically free' (amortized per person), you don't need an app for that.

It's not just the data, it's bidirectional. The concern is that by adjusting the algorithm they can influence the population (e.g. to make math and science perceived as uncool). Not sure how seriously to take that but in principle it seems like a large vulnerability that is challenging to close off without actions like what we're seeing.

> Not sure how seriously to take that

I can help with that: not seriously at all. Calling someone a nerd has been a thing for the better part of a century. How long has TikTok been around?

It's a fair bit more complicated than that. They could choose to show all of the "you're a nerd!" videos to youths in other nations and all of the "look at what I did using science and engineering!" videos to youths in their own nation. It might be considered that such a move would put them in a more competitive position years to decades down the line.

Please tell me where I can purchase information about the sexual preferences of Republican politicians and leading religious figures. I... have... reasons.

I’m sure you could run some targeted ads on pornhub and figure it out.

Please provide me a dataset I can buy that has video feeds, so I can do facial recognition, as well as deep behavioural insights.

There are webcam feeds all over the earth, most can be found by just scanning ip addresses. There are even websites dedicated to finding them. You’d probably have a better dataset than TikTok simply because it is more realistic. The best part: it is free.

No you said a comparable dataset to TikTok was commercially available.

Few random webcams which would be illegal to take video from is not substantive and does not provide any insight into their interests, likes etc.

The whole issue with TikTok is that the Chinese government is able to personally identify people who disagree with them.

I’m not in the business of selling datasets. But it also sounds like you don’t know what problem you’re actually trying to solve yet. That’s a problem I can help you with.

FWIW, that data is being stored on Oracle servers in the US, with provisions on how it can be accessed as part of some of the agreements reached under Trump.

But according to leaked audio from more than 80 internal TikTok meetings, China-based employees of ByteDance have repeatedly accessed nonpublic data about US TikTok users [1]

It is irrelevant if the data is stored in the US if Chinese government have tools they can use to search for dissidents, journalists etc

[1] https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/emilybakerwhite/tiktok-...

There are people who look at crime statistics to figure out how likely they are to get murdered based on their circumstances and optimize that, and there are people who watch the news.

There are people who look at data to determine how likely they were to die from covid vs. the risk and effectiveness of a vaccine authorized for emergency use, and there are people who watch the news.

You can't have a good argument with people who watch the news because they get convinced of their position emotionally through anecdotes that the news focuses on, not data. You end up arguing with that person's emotional reaction to anecdotes. It's never a good idea to criticize another person's emotions if you expect to remain friends with them or not get flagged on HN.

> b) There is zero appetite from the GOP for gun control. Until that changes the status quo persists.

There have been many years of Democratic control where they didn't prioritize gun control. The status quo persists for some other reasons, not just the GOP bogeyman.

Just like legalizing abortion, the Dems haven't wanted to touch guns (ostensibly) because it radicalizes the other side.

It also doesn’t accomplish anything since any laws of any substance are guaranteed to be struck down by what has become a hopelessly partisan SCOTUS.

I have some hope that a more creative approach to the gun situation would help. The typical blue state approach of "ban everything, except allow a select few people to pay thousands of dollars for a license" definitely won't work. At the same time, the NFA has held up for a very long time and there haven't been any challenges to it yet despite the reputation of today's Supreme Court.

There is always something similar to Texas’ creative approach to solving the abortion situation—outsourcing the trampling of rights to citizens via civil lawsuits. Though I have a sneaking suspicion that SCOTUS would have a change of heart about intervening in such a situation.

They could target an Ammendment, which would seem the proper path to me. And they don't necessarily need to codify abortion; they just need to define Person.