Beamer wrote on Mar 31, 2023, 14:45:

Mr. Tact wrote on Mar 31, 2023, 14:41:
So, it is okay for every American company to track the living shit out of us, but if someone outside the US is going to do, that is when we need to be concerned? Got it. I'm being somewhat sarcastic -- basically any app capable of tracking the device should not be allowed on a government owned device unless it has been vetted. But if idiot Americans wants to give up their information, who are we to stop them?

I don't quite think this is "much ado about nothing", there is a very small kernel of legitimate concern -- but the coverage has blown things way out of proportion.

Again, I don't pay attention to coverage, and read my edit.

Like I've said a few times on this topic - my issue is never privacy, but the algorithms, and how algorithms have radicalized and divided. Meta does this. YouTube does this. Twitter does this. Virtually all social media does this.

The difference with TikTok is that TikTok is significantly more used and influential amongst teenagers and people under 24, to a degree I think many here really underestimate (your average HSer spends more time on TikTok than all other social outlets combined), that there's actually even less oversight, and that China has ownership and the one thing I trust less than corporations looking to make a buck is a foreign government looking to make a buck.

I think the root cause is the algorithms, and I think we need a solution for them. But, in the short term, TikTok is much more detrimental to us than the others are due to scale and ownership. Scope does matter. People accuse Twitter or Facebook of having a bias against Trump for banning him for doing something that a random account with 5 followers also does, without considering that the scale and scope matter as much as the crime. Someone with 50 million followers is of course going to be banned before someone with 5 followers. Same applies to TikTok. It's the 50 million followers compared to Facebook's, I dunno, 500,000.