[ericjang]

It's less of a matter of "I don't want the government to spy on me, the individual with a banal life" than a matter of "I don't want the government to spy on us, a society".

For instance, having a FB account enables FB to spy on non-FB users via shadow account - they will create shadow accounts based on faces they don't recognize in photos, and shadow friend profiles based on numbers stored in my phone.

A more insidious situation is that TikTok enables Bytedance (read: the CCP) to monitor political dissent and potentially shape cultural zeitgeist via content recommendation [1]

Many content recommendation algorithms use some sort of collaborative filtering algorithm, where if the system lacks data on one user's preferences they can infer it given a sufficient number of users with overlapping preferences and attributes [2]. So even though my data and life are not special, it does enable the government to find out more about people they are interested in.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/sep/25/revealed-... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collaborative_filtering

[dcewcrrec]

I agree this is a problem. I just don't think the app should be banned and I don't want people to tell me to stop using it (granted no one here did). At the end of the day a gigantic systemic failure in both countries is not going to be solved by one country banning one app, and one ceo of that one app trying to 'do the right thing'.

The problem is that, for the last few decades, all the information that could possibly be known about you is already known and your own country can and will use it against you. Why am I to be worried about a toy?