[tempsy]

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.

[explorigin]

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.

[tempsy]

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?

[explorigin]

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.

[tempsy]

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.

[explorigin]

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.

[solstice]

Couldn't they also tweak the algorithm at a crucial moment to steer public opinion to certain content?

[throwaway5752]

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.

[ls65536]

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.

[Notorious_BLT]

Yes, they could.

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"?

[yorwba]

> 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.

[tempsy]

You can direct message people in TikTok