Many of the concessions the government asked of TikTok look eerily similar to the surveillance tactics critics have accused Chinese officials of abusing. To allay fears the short-form video app could be used as a Chinese surveillance tool, the federal government nearly transformed it into an American one instead.
lul The real motivation
This is why the US Government wants to ban Tiktok. It’s very easy for them to force Google, Apple, Microsoft or Twitter to spy on people. It’s much harder with a Chinese company that is headquartered overseas.
“Let us see the data and analysis products you’re gathering on our citizens to send home to the CCP”
“How dare you ask us for such an invasion of their privacy!”
They forcefully got tons of data from google, microsoft etc on US citizens. Why would they be doing it for “good” now? Just because “CCP bad”?
Instead Apple and hardware manufacturers in general should prevent their products from allowing any software company from invading the people’s privacy in such intense ways.
This article and the one it links to from Forbes describe arrangements to access the data that is being collected through the app but I believe the Gizmodo headline is misrepresenting that as a request for additional invasive features. My comment is meant to point out how I perceive the drafted agreement and the pearl-clutching response from that headline.
I don’t think they want that information purely in the service of Truth, Justice and the American Way™ but concerns about what the CCP has access to through their app are legitimate. Privacy invasion is unacceptable no matter who is doing it. There are cases where it is necessary but even then, it should be limited and subject to intense scrutiny to protect the rights of individuals. The Patriot act and things like it are an absolute disaster on that front, for example, but that’s no excuse for feeding our information directly to a hostile foreign power.
I’d love to see hardware and software producers (as well as legislators) putting user privacy higher on their list of priorities. It’s a huge problem that we’re still coming to grips with and the people making the rules are generally woefully ignorant of the technology in use.
Thank you,
People who read headlines are being robbed here. I agree following the Forbes article was WAY more helpful and nothing backed up Gizmodo’s claim.
Instead Apple and hardware manufacturers in general should prevent their products from allowing any software company from invading the people’s privacy in such intense ways.
lol, every intel processor has a backdoor called the intel management engine, it’s literally a second processor running minix.
Right? And who do you think asked them to put it in there?
When the US does it it’s just established practise. When a non-US entity does the same thing, it’s suddenly a matter of national security.
The anti-Chinese vibe in the US right now is rather absurd. The rise of China should have been viewed as an opportunity, not a threat.
When the US does it it’s just established practise. When a non-US entity does the same thing, it’s suddenly a matter of national security.
Even as someone with a healthy distrust for the Chinese government, this really is the reason why. If Facebook was Chinese and nothing else changed, the US government would feel the same way.
TikTok is used as a surveillance tool in China but US social media is also used the same way here. I wouldn’t be surprised if Facebook at the very least donated public profile pictures to the FBI for facial recognition purposes.
The US would react the same for almost any other government with exceptions to the Five Eyes, in which case they wouldn’t care, and Russia, in which case it would be fully banned.
Not to claim that the US government and the Chinese government are the same, though. Only more or less from a spying and surveillance perspective.
When you see the amount of patriotism people seem to get flooded in from an early age, it’s kinda understandable the blindness a lot of Americans have to how shitty their country has gotten.
On the flip side, China definitely has its own problems, particularly with such an authoritarian government currently.
the blindness a lot of Americans have to how shitty their country has
gottenalways been.FTFY (signed: a lemming from Latin America).
Any country, US or not, spying on other countries’ citizens ought to be taken as a matter of national security in the target countries. China does take it as a matter of national security, which is why, among other reasons, many foreign social media sites and services are blocked, run as separate instances from the rest of the world, or restricted heavily
On the other hand, if all of this public attention leads to restrictions on ALL digital tracking, not just from foreign corporations, I’ll be soo happy.
Every accusation levelled at china is projection
The only issue I’ve ever had with TikTok is that it’s the Chinese government spying on American citizens in a way they don’t allow America to do to theirs. Not that either instance is right but you can’t say something is wrong and not allowed and do it yourself.
But America spies on non-American citizens in the exact same way as TikTok does. The US complaining here is just hypocrisy. And the US has been doing it for far longer than the Chinese have.
So as a European citizen there is no difference between USian or Chinese Big Tech in terms of spying on me.
China doesn’t let anyone spy on their citizens as they ban all foreign social media etc. That’s the difference.
File it under “no shit” and “stuff that was called from the beginning but now we’ll all act surprised.”
Every accusation is a confession rule
Everything the Americans accuse China and Russia of, they are guilty of it themselves.
So instead of doing their job and preventing US citizens to be spied on by foreign governments, they just want a piece of the cake and spy on them and others, too!
The draft document, which Gizmodo could not independently verify,
So they have no idea what is or isn’t actually in this agreement, but sounds like they’ve asked for data access and audit capabilities to ensure US user data is separated and not sent where it shouldn’t be.
This honestly seems reasonable. It’s a foreign app from a country that has banned every American tech app, data is only flowing one way and that’s concerning.
But honestly without knowing what’s actually in there this article is pretty pointless. Just more unverified fearmongering clickbait.
Have you ever wondered why people are so eager to accept the premise that China is doing everything to spy on foreign nationals?
Considering that those claims are almost all getting started by American agencies, and given the details of the Snowden leaks… America is projecting.
See also: Huawei
Quite. All American networking equipment is being used to spy on people, so clearly all Chinese networking equipment must be, too. Evidence? Unnecessary.
How unsurprising. There will be no consequences for the federal government, even if this information should become common knowledge.
Whoever is responsible for making it common knowledge will be hated by the people and branded a traitor. We’ve already seen this story play out before.
Now we understand what the “National Security Threat” was all this time, not that it wasn’t painfully obvious from the jump. Every other major social media platform is in bed with the Feds, giving them access to whatever they wish at a moment’s notice. The “threat” to the nation isn’t foreign influence it’s domestic influence. If they can’t have backend access to the system to monitor these domestic threats, then the whole system is a threat. If you are using TikTok as a means of ORGANIZING then you are a THREAT to the NATIONAL SECURITY because the Feds can’t WATCH YOU LIKE A HAWK.
At one point, TikTok reportedly altered language that would have allowed government officials to demand changes to the apps recommendations algorithm if it promoted content the agencies disagreed with.
But but but… MUH FREEZ PEACH!
Too late… China already installed the foreign spying features first.
It sounds like those same “spying features” — e.g. examining server logs — would also be useful as *counter-*spying features, to verify that TikTok is not being used as a weapon by the genocidal regime currently in power in China.
Given that the genocidal regime has engaged in illegal harassment, assault, and espionage against people of Chinese ethnicity residing in the US, Canada, and other nations, that seems like a pretty good idea, really! The US government has a legitimate interest in protecting its citizens of Chinese descent from lawless abuse by a foreign power.
deleted by creator
See also: Patriot Act
When has sacrificing our rights to privacy because of fear of an enemy been a problem? No way the government would use that to gain new powers and spy on everyone
Oh fuck off. They wanted it to spy on their own citizens and those of its allied nations. They wanted the same backdoor google, Facebook, Microsoft and all our telecom companies give them.
I’ve seen a lot of bad takes but this takes the cake. There isn’t anything virtuous about mass spy programs and no way was any actual chinese data even on the table.
They wanted the same backdoor google, Facebook, Microsoft and all our telecom companies give them.
None of those companies give “backdoor access”. All information has to be obtained legally via a warrant. Why do you think they’re all throwing E2E encryption in their apps? Nobody wants to work with the government here, it’s bad for business.
I suggest you read all about FISA courts.
They issue court orders which companies cannot divulge they’re under and those things are often not limited to surveillance of specific individuals in the course of investigating a crime but are often mass surveillance orders.
This is how the NSA had servers directly in some US phone providers feeding directly from their core systems.
All this was brought out as part of the Snowden revelations, so you should know better than parrot the description of what has been a fantasy version of how the Law works in the US since 9/11 and the Patriot Act.
Still today it’s a core rule for companies anywhere in the World which have trade secrets that might be of benefit to US companies to not use any systems hosted or owned by US companies (or, in fact, UK ones, were such laws are even worse) exactly because said US companies can silently be complied BY LAW to give the local spy agencies access to that data.
This isn’t “backdoor access” being given by definition, as FISA courts still require legal warrants even though they’re secret.
Not trying to argue the sketchyness of the US government though, I mostly agree with everything you’ve said, but the distinction is the context of the conversation. TikTok is still required to comply to FISA requests if they want to operate in the US, no additional access to user data is given by those American tech companies, or at least we have no reason to think that yet.
The IT Security definition of a “backdoor” is: something that provides open access to the data without the knowledge or control of the owners of the data - who are typically the users.
There’s nothing about the legality or not of it or the company that makes the software being aware of it, which is why sometimes you get news about how a software maker having bing discovered to have a “backdoor” in their software and many of the ways the Chinese Government forces companies to provide access to user data, whilst being 100% legal (just like the US) are described as “backdoors”.
From the point of view of IT Security specialists a technique having been endorsed by members-of-parliament/senators/congressmen/governments/presidents/monarchs/whatever or not is relevant for the naming of that technique - if it provides open access by a 3rd party to user data without user knowledge or control it’s a “backdoor” and using it is “backdoor access”.
So it’s funny (sad funny rather than “ha ha” funny) how in (mainly American) newsmedia stuff which is 100% legal in China is described as a “backdoor” but the exact same techniques when 100% legal in the US are not describe as “backdoors” whilst technically being exactly that: honest and unbiased news would deem both backdoors or not depending on their characteristics (i.e. are they means of open access to user data without the knowledge of the owners of the data). It’s clear the technical term is being misused due to it’s association in the minds of people who aren’t domain experts with “bad thing”.
Normal warrants issued by a normal Court usually aren’t considered “backdoor access” not because of their legality but because they’re limited and executed by the people inside the company that received the warrants in a case-by-case basis (i.e. they fail the “open access” criteria), but the kind of warrants issue under FISA definitelly was open and forced the companies to provide open access: that’s exactly the problem and that along with the absence of Probable Cause is why many consider it to go outside Rule Of Law.
It’s unclear if FISA warrants have been used or not to force companies to provide what are (per the technical definition) “backdoors” in actual software implementations, but as we know thanks to Snowden they certainly did force some companies to provide NSA with free realtime access to their systems, and having a NSA server getting copies of any user communications passing through a mobile phone provider is technically “backdoor access” to their systems.
In summary, Engineering doesn’t care about politics when naming technuques and beware that legality isn’t the same as morality: all the shit that China does is just as as legal as all the shit the US does - after all, the people who make the laws are the one who authorized it.
Personally that was exactly the scary part in the Snowden revelations: the US plus a bunch of other supposedly democratic nations where doing exactly what dictatorships did, by changing the Law to make it legal and then deploying intrusive society-wide surveillance.
We can disagree about the definition of “backdoor access” all day, but you’re still glossing over the context of the conversation, which is that the American tech listed above does not provide additional access to data that Chinese tech isn’t also forced to comply to.
This is exactly what you wrote:
None of those companies give “backdoor access”. All information has to be obtained legally via a warrant.
I pointed out that legality is not part of the definition of “backdoor access”, so the second part of your statement does not at all not support the first part so your entire argument in that post is unsupported.
I don’t even disagree that “American tech listed above does not provide additional access to data that Chinese tech isn’t also forced to comply to” - sadly, the limits on the subversion of American tech for surveillance seems to be only technical (as Snowden’s revelations abundantly showed, the Law is not the limiting factor for surveillance in the US), so American tech probably provides the exact same level of additional access to data as Chinese tech and should be treated with the same distrust.
However I merelly responde to that very specific, very assured statement you made, which is simply wrong in technical terms.
deleted by creator
deleted by creator
Given that the genocidal regime has engaged in illegal harassment, assault, and espionage
Yes, but enough about the US regime.
and Iraq had WMDs, right? right?
It amazes me how you keep believing the lies of the US government.
Are you denying the Uighur genocide?
Are you denying that 30 years of invasions and bombings in the Middle East is anything less?
Genocide denial is illegal in many countries, just so ya know.
Maybe one day it will be illegal to deny the crimes comitted by American murderers.
If you’re looking for an American genocide, the Middle East is the wrong place to look. You want the Native Americans.
“Genocide” means something, and “stupid fucking idiotic war” isn’t it.
It’s not illegal to discuss the crimes of the US government in the US. It is illegal to discuss the crimes of the China government in China, by the way.
“It’s not that bad because it wasn’t an actual genocide. we already have genocide under our belt.”
geez. how many war criminals were put to justice during that “stupid fucking idiotic war”?
It’s not illegal to discuss the crimes of the US government in the US
discussing does fuck all when you have laws to prevent any justice being served for the crimes you commit abroad and sanction the people investigating it.
https://www.hrw.org/news/2002/08/03/us-hague-invasion-act-becomes-law
https://www.hrw.org/news/2020/12/14/us-sanctions-international-criminal-court
and Fuck CCP too. There aren’t just tankies and yankies on the internet. We can be critical of both of you.
stupid fucking idiotic war
then why the hell is the ukraiine conflict called a genocide so often?
And what has that discussion produced? Has the American murderers stopped killing people? They let you discuss, because nothing will come out of it. You have no influence to change policy.
