Or, perhaps they have made a reasoned determination that their own government does not represent their best interests, and are less concerned about the impact a foreign power thousands of miles away has on their lives.
Giving a totalitarian regime access to the device that more-or-less holds your entire life and acts as a perfect surveillance portal to your every move decidedly falls more on the unconcerned side of the scale.
Unless, of course, they didn't make a particularly "reasoned" determination like you said.
> learn to read yourself before lecturing people about education
Some of us consider the USA to be an authoritarian regime. And without a doubt as someone living there they have massively more influence over my life.
poof China has all my data - what do they do with it? Vs the USA where there is documented proof that the NSA was used against Vietnam War critics etc.
> Some of us consider the USA to be an authoritarian regime.
Some of us have a definition of "authoritarian" that is different from that of reality. I've lost count of the number of political dissent posts I've seen towards both sides of the political spectrum in the United States on American-based social media platforms.
And if authoritarianism is really a problem, why double down on the governments you give your data to?
> And without a doubt as someone living there they have massively more influence over my life.
Compared to the influence that the Chinese government has over the Chinese people, it's minor. That also goes for the governments of most places China has strong ties with. Strengthening their sphere of influence in the US is not the act of those who have concerns over authoritarian regimes influencing their lives.
> poof China has all my data - what do they do with it?
They're a rather imaginative bunch when it comes to cyber offensives, so let's imagine one ourselves.
They could scour your contacts and content for dissidents abroad, using that information to inform those operating one of their extralegal international "police stations" as to their whereabouts. [0]
Now, let's stop imagining. Let's see what they have been confirmed as actually doing with it.
They could collect geospatial data and combine that information with other personal details to compromise the security of people who work in sensitive places. This has actually led a number of nations, including Norway, Belgium, Canada, New Zealand, and the UK to ban TikTok from being installed on devices with access to government networks [1]
It's worth remembering that the US only banned the TikTok app - they could have continued operating in the US through a mobile webpage, but decided not to and threw a fit until Trump rearranged (perhaps extralegally) the law banning the app. Why? Because apps give far more access to devices than webpages, which have sandboxed processes and other checks on what code can access. If keeping American eyes on TikTok was the one and only goal, that app would have been a sacrifice that they were willing to make. The fact that they had to have the app tells me that they may have wanted the extra access that native apps afford.
> Vs the USA where there is documented proof that the NSA was used against Vietnam War critics etc.
I'm not saying the American intelligence apparatus has clean hands. If that's the concern, then again, cut back on social media and apps that collect unknown quantities and qualities of data, instead of opening up more accounts to totalitarian governments that have a long history of using censorship and surveillance in a very straightforward way to achieve their political aims.
Hey I'm all for not using either, that's what I do. And I get banning it on government phones. They ought to ban almost everyhring on those, but especially foreign controlled apps. And I don't like what China does to their citizens either.
But you'll never convince me that the main reason for the ban wasn't to replace Chinese propaganda with American / Billionaire propaganda and tbh that one's less charming.
And if your imaginative worst case scenario is that they use my data to root out and extrajudiciously kill ex-Chinese dissidents in America then idk why that would be a problem for me since I don't know any of those. I do know some American activists, though.
I can easily invent way more damning fantasies of what the US Govt could do to me, a US citizen, if they had an admin willing to subvert constitutional norms and more visibly use the PRISM surveillance tools.