Comment on On Friday SCOTUS Will Decide Whether TikTok Can Be Banned; We Told It The First Amendment Says No
spit_evil_olive_tips@beehaw.org 1 week agothe platform’s collection of user data
this “oh banning TikTok is good because TikTok collects a bunch of user data” talking point has hoodwinked a whole lot of tech-savvy, generally-left-of-center people who really should know better.
thought experiment: I go out and buy a brand-new phone. Apple or Android, it doesn’t matter.
I install some apps. let’s say TikTok, Facebook, and Twitter.
all of those apps use the platform APIs published by Apple or Google respectively.
all of them are equally capable of collecting user data.
TikTok is not unique or special in any way when it comes to data harvesting.
oh, except TikTok is owned by Ghyna, and everyone knows that Ghyna is evil and scary. surely that makes it different, right? US-based companies can harvest our data all they want, and sure maybe an EU-based company too. but Ghyna harvesting our data? that’s a bridge too far!
and that’s why we need to ban companies owned by Ghyna from harvesting our data!
here’s the problem with that. I install another app. I don’t like the stock Weather app that comes with my phone, so I install Totally Trustworthy Weather from a developer named Absolutely Not Spyware LLC.
that weather app needs location permissions, obviously. and network access. and to be allowed to run in the background constantly.
because it’s given permissions to run in the background, there’s a decent chance the weather app can actually collect more info about me than TikTok/Facebook/Twitter/etc.
but, why would a weather app collect data like that? what’s it going to do with it? it’s just a weather app, surely it doesn’t care, right?
wrong - it’s going to sell all the data it collects on me to a data broker.
(read Temptations of an open-source browser extension developer if you’re skeptical of how much money is thrown around in order to collect data of this sort)
if those nefarious people in Ghyna want data about you…they’ll just buy it from a data broker, the same way everyone else (including the FBI) does.
if Congress had passed some sort of GDPR-ish law, that applied across the board to all forms of data harvesting, I’d be all in favor of it. but obviously they’re never going to do that.
instead, what started out in 2020 as a “Ghyna bad” policy from Trump now has bipartisan support and people on the left defending it on data privacy grounds. we live in the stupidest goddamn timeline.
To me the issue is tik-tok could be used to sideload data gathering for China, such as government officials camera or microphone use, beyond the worry of poisoning our society with propaganda. There have already been binary apps with malicious backdoors. Compared to a weather app that may harvest location, contacts, etc, but most likely verifiable content.
But that’s why I don’t install garbage apps, run GrapheneOS and Linux to try to minimize data gleaning.
beyond the worry of poisoning our society with propaganda
lol it’s been poisoned since a bunch of slavemasters founded it.
tik-tok could be used to sideload data gathering for China, such as government officials camera or microphone use
but again - nothing about that is unique to TikTok.
do you think the federal government should force Apple and Google to ban the Twitter app, because of the risk that Elon Musk might use it to spy on politicians to get leverage for the 2026 midterms?
or, since Musk has said he’s starting to meddle in European politics as well - should the EU require Apple and Google to ban the Twitter app on European soil, out of a similar fear that the Twitter app could be used as spyware?
beyond the worry of poisoning our society with propaganda.
of the 3 apps that I mentioned - TikTok, Facebook, and Twitter - aren’t all 3 of them “poisoning our society with propaganda”?
why is TikTok singled out for the ban, do you think?
does it have anything to do with the long-standing right-wing grievance and fear and distrust towards Ghyna (or the “ChiComs”, if you prefer the pre-Trump right-wing nomenclature)?
because as far as I can tell, every argument about this ends up boiling down to “sure, lots of apps do it…but it’s uniquely bad when an app written by Chinese people do it”
The fear is because China is known to be a spy advesary, where as google and apple (operating from the USA) would really not need to spy on it’s own government. It is really no different than the Russian maintainers being kicked off the Linux kernel dev team as a security measure.
Umbrias@beehaw.org 1 week ago
the comment you are responding to pretty levelheadedly describes why they dont agree that it’s only tiktok bad and that being in favor of this being a 1st ammendment issue specifically could make every issue you bring up actively worse. it does not appear you are responding to them. the problem you are describing is real, there’s a substantial nationalism component to this and it’s bad when us companies do it as well. but you arent responding to their point about framing this as a 1st ammendment issue being problematic.
spit_evil_olive_tips@beehaw.org 1 week ago
I’ve posted previously about why “the federal government can require Apple and Google to remove apps it doesn’t like, and that has nothing to do with free speech” is a laughable position. I didn’t feel like rehashing it here.
Umbrias@beehaw.org 1 week ago
i think you need to do more to justify that this is viewpoint discrimination, “tiktok” does not appear to me to be a viewpoint. i think you have a stronger argument with saying it is the broader content based discrimination, though. however id still question if that’s true with respect to corporations hosting eachothers services. id say you have a stronger argument than viewpoint discrimination by saying it violates the first ammendment of the users of tiktok, personally, though the courts might disagree. i dont really care about apple and google’s right to free speech at anywhere near the level of individual humans.
spit_evil_olive_tips@beehaw.org 1 week ago
seriously? have you not paid attention to any of the arguments in favor of the ban that boil down to “it’s pushing evil Chinese Communist propaganda into the minds of our precious children”?
here’s the original bill - H.R.7521 - Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act.
it was introduced by Mike Gallagher (R-Wisconsin).
here’s a tweet of his from March:
and from November 2023, in a Fox News appearance:
the advocates for the ban have been very clear, from the start, that they believe TikTok has a viewpoint - specifically that it’s controlled or influenced by the Chinese Communist Party. and they want to discriminate against that viewpoint.
have you read the bill? the actual law, not news articles or summaries of it?
I linked it in this comment. go read it, it’s short, and not terrible as far as legalese goes.
the gist of it is that the law makes it illegal to run an app store (or anything that looks like an app store) that offers downloads of the TikTok app.
so the two big obvious targets of the law are Apple and Google…but it applies equally to everyone. F-Droid could violate it, in theory, by hosting the APK for download through their servers.
or for example, say the ban took effect, and TikTok gets removed from app stores. some tech-savvy high school kid knows how to copy the APK from their Android phone before it gets deleted, and shows their friends how to sideload it onto their phones.
then a bunch of other people ask for it too, so this kid uploads it to some filesharing service, passes around the link, and eventually it gets around to 100 other classmates.
that high school kid has violated the TikTok ban. the federal government can levy a fine against them of half a million dollars ($5,000 per user who downloaded it)
does that satisfy your desire to have the ban infringe on the free speech of “real” people, and not just Apple and Google?