[clashmoore]

So I'm an American who uses TikTok for entertainment.

I don't think it's utterly ridiculous to allow TikTok to continue. Even hearing these threats that China is possibly surveilling me - what do they get that other social media apps like Instagram get from me? From the FBI it sounds like the national security threat is that China may use it alter my feed to influence me or take over the control of my Apple phone? Has Apple warned users that TikTok will take control of their phone?

As far as I'm concerned, I'm just watching short 60 second videos and could not care less if China has my birthdate.

[SkyMarshal]

Reposting from another comment [0], but there are at least three reasons you should be concerned what happens with your TikTok data:

1. Shaping and manipulating minds. Eg, show healthy, educational, intellectual content to Chinese users, and unhealthy, addictive, emotional, short-attention-span-inducing content in US and foreign markets (already happening [1]).

2. Train AI that can be used for analyzing and further manipulating foreign publics, or for providing strategic insight into political and election dynamics, making political and election interference operations more effective.

3. Collate data on individuals gained from TikTok with other sources like credit ratings agency breaches, OPM, etc. for their entire life, to create a continually growing lifetime data profile on every American, European, Asian, South American, African, etc. which may be used for pressure, coercion, or manipulation operations or similar. Think of it as "customer lifetime value" [2] for political purposes.

None of which we want an adversarial, totalitarian foreign power to be doing to us.

[0]:https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33657429

[1]:https://www.cbsnews.com/news/tristan-harris-social-media-pol...

[2]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Customer_lifetime_value

[DiogenesKynikos]

The reason for #1 is that China has regulations on what content can be shown to children. The US could pass similar regulations, but chooses not to. This isn't TikTok's or China's fault.

[archagon]

Gee, that kind of sounds like we should ban advertising and tracking in general.

[piva00]

You are oversimplifying the issue. It's not about having your birthdate, it's about capturing data about your tastes and preferences over time to feed into a profiling model.

It's a way to capture data to use inference models to understand who you actually are, your tastes and personality.

Yes, Instagram/FB/Meta do the same, Google does the same, the difference is that Meta and Google are not the government or, worse, an adversarial government from your nation that could weaponise such data. Tailor-made suggestions and recommendations already work pretty well for adtech, tailored suggestions of content with aims to slowly shift cultures and perceptions is much more dangerous than serving compulsive consumption.

And yes, very likely the US government has some access to FB/Instagram/Meta/Google profiling data, I also believe that's dangerous (even more that I'm not an American citizen, nor live in the USA and still am probably surveilled by its government) but in a different degree and level than what TitTok and China might be able to.

[clashmoore]

The article mentioned the company sharing birthdates which is why I used it myself.

I'm just failing to understand why China using whatever data TikTok has on me to understand my tastes and personality is a national security issue for the United States.

The fear seems to be that China could tweak a US citizen's feed, based on their profiling, to inject Chinese propaganda?

[piva00]

> The fear seems to be that China could tweak a US citizen's feed, based on their profiling, to inject Chinese propaganda?

Yes, that's the assumption. And just to be clear, not feed you direct Chinese propaganda but drip-feed behaviour-changing content to make you more or less sensitive to some topics, and not necessarily you but maybe a different cohort they identify as being more easily manipulated. For example: teenagers or young adults (which are the majority of users on TikTok) that are still not mature enough to have developed critical thinking about what they are being fed.

It's exactly to avoid this kind of possible operation that the bells are ringing. Not necessarily because they are already exploiting it but because it's definitely a massive risk to allow such data to be vacuumed by an adversarial government.

[ncr100]

It's akin to ChinaTV being popular in the USA.

The concern is China, the government, has chosen to make concerted efforts to influence the US culture through its businesses.

So would you let your kid watch a TV channel that's overtly NOT aligned with enjoying the US culture in a healthy manner?