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!!!
No. Honestly they probably won’t ban a single other app unless it gets as big as TikTok. The only reason TikTok is being banned is because it’s become big enough to get on the news and that’s the only way out current batch of septuagenarian and octogenarian politicians ever hear about anything.
If it doesn’t show up on the nightly news or in an actual physical newspaper then they don’t know it exists.
Wouldn’t that eliminate 80% of app stores?
Yes. It’s literally not a suggestion from me. I worry it reads that way. It’s more like saying it is pointless to plug one hole in a sive. Either plugging all the holes in the sive is worth it and you do it, or it’s not and you don’t. But people who demand that we plug one hole in a sive either are stupid or have a different motive. If you want to look at the other motive possibility look at who is angling to buy it.
It’s not just the spying, but also the amount of influence they have.
They’ve been implicated as a big reason for the sudden rise of far-right candidates in Romania (iirc, could be wrong, but it’s def an Eastern EU country) when just weeks before the election they were polling extremely poorly.
If China wants a far-right government in some country they can easily tweak the algorithm to promote far-right misinformation and propaganda and because the app is so popular with millions upon millions of people it’ll have devastating effects.
Subway Surfer might include spying BS, but it’s not going to be able to influence shit or spread propaganda like TikTok can
Not that TikTok isn’t a problem for those reasons, but Facebook and Twitter are being used to spread far-right propaganda now too, just without the direct state-level control that applies to TikTok.
Very true, from a citizens perspective, there’s no material difference.
From the government perspective though, the fact that it’s controlled by a foreign actor whose a frenemy at best carries a whole lot more weight.
If the US government wanted to reign in an American company doing it they could do so easily at any time through any manner of mechanisms. With a company whose wholly foreign owned, things get considerably more difficult between the reduced amount of levers you can pull to having to “thread the needle” as to not spark a more serious international situation.
But other things have influence too. 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.
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
Addendum: If you were to not single out a single company and actually address the fear at play you wouldn’t even single out the app store. You would ban any chinese company from distributing any networked software in the US. That’s what an actual law would look like instead of making a law blatantly making rules for one entity. That would be a pretty intense law, but at least it would address the fear that’s being claimed, be logically consistent, and apply the same rules to everyone. The question would be if that juice is worth the squeeze. That’s not something I’m trying to sell or not sell. Other people can think about that. But the absurd wackamole version is ruled out of making sense.
If anything it makes congress come off as stupid. We’ve got Rs and Ds on this issue. And maybe we can drop the tribalism for one second and have a cogent take away from this for once that correlates with observed reality. Maybe, congress by in large is stupid.
