The Chinese make about half the apps on the Apple app store. Probably more in the Android store. All of them are just as able to be spyware as TikTok is. In fact more so. The amount of Wireshark TikTok has been exposed to and will continue to be exposed to is far more than the various obscure apps you have. Half of which or known to be Chinese. A half of the remaining could be the Chinese using a straw developer in another country. Any of the for certain Chinese ones have the same obligation to share data with the government TikTok has.

If they ban TikTok and only TikTok the only differentiating factor it has verse a large number of allowed apps is the speech they’ve allowed. This would be congress singling out a single company for punishment over speech it has allowed others to do. IDK. Maybe TikTok would have a case in the courts.

Some say “yeah, but TikTok is a larger company more capable of doing shady processing of the data they receive on the back end.” What with their algorithms! We don’t know what these “smaller” companies back ends look like. If they are a state sponsored data collection their back end processing could be just as capable. Heck they could just raw dog the data sharing and give everything to the Chinese government and then their government could apply whatever sophistication is claimed TikTok has exclusive access to.

Banning TikTok because it’s Chinese while China is the single largest app source in general makes no logical sense. Maybe we shouldn’t have a bunch of Chinese apps on a device with a mic that’s always on and always with us. Maybe there are exploits I’m not aware of that could make that dangerous. But if that’s a problem let’s fix that. Banning one single app that congress decided they don’t like wouldn’t fix that anyway.

It’s like arresting someone exclusively for being at Walmart, no other details, which is not a crime, while at least half the other people at Walmart are also at Walmart.

Make it make sense!!!

  • @cm0002
    0•5 days ago

    But other things have influence too.

    As far as non-American companies influencing American politics go, not to TikToks scale

    If Russia bans Youtube are we going to call them draconian for it? Saying we are going to ban something because we ended up with political outcomes we didn’t like that we don’t want to spread is what authoritarian regimes do.

    Not entirely, to cross the line into a authoritarian regime you have to consider what happens if someone does access banned apps/information and how difficult the country in question makes it.

    In Russia or China if you’re caught accessing something forbidden, you’re probably not going to be heard from again. Not to mention the constant VPN switching you have to do to escape “the firewall”

    In contrast Americas ban amounts to having the app delisted from app stores with no penalties to its citizens if they choose to access it regardless AND no VPN is required as the ban is not enforcing a countrywide blockade