U.S. user data is mostly stored by TikTok on servers in Virginia, with backup storage in Singapore. Company officials say Chinese authorities have never attempted to gain access to Americans' information.
The backup is stored on Alibaba servers in Singapore.
I don’t know why it serves anyone well to 1) believe the company’s word at face value and 2) not believe that the Chinese gov does not have backdoor agreements with the largest Chinese tech company.
The better question to ask is what information TikTok even has on someone. It isn’t exactly an app that asks for a lot of real world identity data to signup with.
IMO their biggest thing would be their ability to use computer vision to instantly process videos and match faces with real world identity databases and then to link faces and backgrounds to locations, family members/connections, interests, etc.
TikTok has been outed as an app that captures massive amounts of telemetry data that could be used to identify a user after the fact. The data it collects (contact lists) absolutely could be used for targeted oppression.
What do you mean by “identify a user”? Isn’t the fact that you’re filming videos of yourself “identifying yourself” more so than whatever device data TikTok and every other app on your phone is capturing?
Tiktok doesn't require that a user film themselves. If they never appear in frame, there would still be plenty of other data captured from the device to correlate to a specific human.
Ok sure...but the main use case is filming yourself. It would seem really strange for anyone who chooses to publicly post videos on that app to be worried about TikTok being able to identify people or things in the app, or capture data associated with your phone or email you use to sign up with.
Think back to any round of recent protests. People are passionate about their positions...they post about it on their chosen social media platform being completely unaware of the technical consequences. Later on, they "disappear" (wordage chosen because that's what happens to dissidents in China).
The point is that tons of people have no idea how to protect their own privacy. We can still advocate for protections in the same way we have warning labels on harsh cleaning chemicals.
That being true and meaningful are two distinct things. That is true of anything that selects information to present to a user. Netflix recommendations, Facebook feed/ads/group recommendations, LinkedIn feed, Twitter feed, Reddit rankings, or search engine results. It could not be algorithmic and it could be mandatory editorial programming in a companies that run large numbers of local news stations.
What you said describes literally any technology that makes decisions about what to present to the user.
In my view, this is really the more important and unfortunately often underappreciated concern here. There's a lot of talk about what personal data might be captured by these apps/services (not to minimize that either), but it seems there's overall much less discussion about the potential for the control of information/ideas over large audiences, even in subtle but impactful ways. Not only is it plausible that such interference could happen, be it to exert political or economic influence, but it's likely that it could be done surreptitiously with little to no oversight by regulators, governments and ultimately the people using these services.
Funny you mention this, because an effort to purchase tickets to a high-profile campaign rally for Trump (and not attend, in an effort to make his rally look poorly attended) was conceived and organized through Tik-Tok. Not a Trump supporter by any means, but given that Trump is much more hostile to China than Biden, doesn't that explicitly seem like a situation that could be considered "foreign election meddling"?
> IMO their biggest thing would be their ability to use computer vision to instantly process videos
An intelligence agency interested in that information could just scrape TikTok's entire catalog and do the processing themselves. If it were a messaging app that would be different, but since TikTok is all about posting videos for the whole world to see, they don't really have much secret information about their users.
It is not just about data. It is also about asymmetry of control. China bans all of western social media and gets to censor tiktok with it is rising share of users and a bunch of others. Go write something about Tibet Taiwan or Tiananmen Square
It is not about appearing weak, it is about a trade deficit . TikTok can make money off Americans with little effort but Facebook and Google have to make entirely new apps to get entry to the Chinese market (I can't remember if they still have live apps or if they are banned right now)
TikTok is literally a new global app for Douyin. It's not about trade deficits, it is about waning exceptionalism of silicon valley. They finally learned to debundle US culture with US tech. Something TikTok has been very agile on, making regional adaptations and complying to regional laws. Hubris is what kep facebook and google from returning to Chinese market 10 years ago.
Pretty easy to “debundle” when you just block access. If I lived in China I would take tiktok over any Silicon Valley app, and if I was looking for maximum network effects I would also use tiktok because potential market is 1.4 billion people larger
Are you suggesting that if one of our trading partners engages in protectionist measures (tariffs, dumping, subsidies, etc.) that we shouldn't retaliate?
Seriously. I'm baffled at the number of people that don't give a crap and that we should just do nothing. I hate to pick sides and perpetuate the "us vs. them" mentality, but the geopolitics of today are increasingly pushing toward it. We're on the verge of a new Cold War with China whether we like it or not. But instead of hoarding ICBMs, it's tech companies and the technologies surrounding them.
It's not a bad idea to principally ban social networks that exercise government censorship on their users. I don't know if TikTok does that. Do they? The problem is also that what one country regards as political censorship another country just considers the application of reasonable laws. However, in the case of China that's such an obvious lame excuse - I mean, they literally interrupt phone calls in which people use certain terms.
I don’t to now why free speech is the issue OP chose to highlight. The bigger problem is access to the Chinese market. The West allows basically unfettered access to their markets with rules that generally are applied equally (obviously an ideal if not always the case). China is explicitly against that. To operate in the Chinese market you have to partner with a Chinese company and divulge a lot of IP to them.
I disagree with the way Trump targeted a single company but I think instituting a similar policy across the West to deal with China in similar terms wouldn’t be a bad idea to try to get them to negotiate a better status quo.
> China is explicitly against [unfettered access].
They are not "explicitly against that". They don't allow full access at the get-go, true, but it's a big overstatement to say that they are against the concept. If you look at what they've done in the past 20 years, you'll see that they're opening up to foreign business more and more.
For example, joint ventures used to be required. A couple of years ago, that requirement has been dropped. And now with RCEP, they're reducing tariffs for many Asian countries.
Walk down the street in China for 10 minutes and you'll see tons of western companies.
Western countries also don't fully adhere to the free trade principle. There are countries that blocked investment from China for political reasons, way before the "but China is unfair for not allowing access into their markets" started.
Proof? They still require joint partnerships [1] and IP transfer in high tech industries. Sure they don’t require it in others where they’ve already built up domestic competitors and obtained all the IP they need (ie manufacturing).
Granted maybe you have updated information here so open to reading about it. Claiming that “but western countries do it too” is unhelpful whataboutism. I didn’t claim Western countries don’t do crappy shit. In terms of market access and competition, that shiftiness is more about established players and regulatory capture rather than outright pseudo-fascism whereas China seems to have adopted fascism quite aggressively (ironic considering they call themselves a socialist party but I guess all authoritarian regimes end up looking very similar).
Saying “I see western logos when I walk around in China” is missing the mark when I talk about what is required of companies when they enter China (and as I said not all industries, but the ones strategically important to China somehow, especially high tech)
I've heard of Tesla owning 100% shares in China. Does that count as high tech?
>×Claiming that “but western countries do it too” is unhelpful whataboutism.
Wait a minute... Many people are saying that the west should ban China for not allowing full access. The whole premise was literally about whataboutism. Saying that we shouldn't engage in whataboutism when the whole thing was based on whataboutism in the first place, is a bit odd.
Having a gigantic conglomerate in control of my supply chain is too risky.
I think that's how we need to look at Chinese companies. Are you willing to deal with the biggest company in the world?
Although most humans are not going to understand that the CCP owns 51% of every company. And if they do, even less are going to understand the implications.
As a result you can have networks formed out of ignorance.
I wonder how Chinese schools work then, given that Tienanmen is part of their curriculum. Also, how does the ban work given everyone and their dog use VPNs?
My point is - the ban is trivially easy to work around by using VPN, which lot of people do. And this means the stories about Chinese being banned from accessing western media don't have much to do with reality.
What is happening is pretty much the opposite - the West doesn't have access to Chinese media (except those explicitly targeting the West), for language reasons.
I am curious of how exactly events of Tienanmen square are taught in Chinese schools. Stalin’s purges was also part of the soviets schools curriculum, they were taught as necessary toughness - mostly bad people died with some minor mistakes
I just got genuinely curious how it's being taught in Western schools. The image I remember (from Poland, but media, not schools back then) was entirely single-sided, "evil communists murdered hundreds of thousands of protesters". There was no mention whatsoever about the whole context, or _why_ people actually died. It was being portrayed almost as a kind of mass execution.
AT&T said that the NSA was not intercepting their traffic... it was illegal at the time and Congress retroactively made it legal to get the EFF’s court case to go away.
All of this is an equal argument against Facebook and Google as well, especially for any country outside the US. And before you say China is totalitarian and the US is a democracy, that is very true, but also irrelevant because the US is already known to use this data in illegal ways through the Snowden revelations.
Whether they are already attempting to access that information is only one part of the question. Will they do it in future, given they could do it at any time and TikTok would have to comply?
Until proven otherwise. And honestly, where is the 'national security' risk? There is probably far more data available in public databases that China could gather and analyze, not to mention you can apply the same paranoia to other services US and foreign.
Not sure how much that counts. In the US, under certain warrants under the so-called "PATRIOT" Act, it's illegal to admit that government accessed user information. China likely has similar ways to compel silence upon threat of losing privileges.
A related concept is the warrant canary, which is a positive statement that the government has not accessed user information. It is current untested in court whether the PATRIOT Act can compel speech, or merely silence it, and so the idea is that if you stop making the positive statement that no government intrusion has occurred, then it implies that there has been intrusion. (The constitutionality of Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act has, to my knowledge, never been tested in court, and I firmly believe that it violates the First Amendment's protection of free speech.)
That said, they are generally ignored when they disappear. Apple and Reddit both removed their warrant canaries in 2016, to very little fanfare, despite the implications of them doing so.
I don’t know why it serves anyone well to 1) believe the company’s word at face value and 2) not believe that the Chinese gov does not have backdoor agreements with the largest Chinese tech company.
The better question to ask is what information TikTok even has on someone. It isn’t exactly an app that asks for a lot of real world identity data to signup with.
IMO their biggest thing would be their ability to use computer vision to instantly process videos and match faces with real world identity databases and then to link faces and backgrounds to locations, family members/connections, interests, etc.