[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.