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Brandon Adams's avatar

> What I do not understand is why Apple and Google haven’t taken care of this for us.

They probably don't take anything the media or intelligence agencies say at face value. Media constantly shits on them with distortions and lies. The intelligence agencies break their crypto, man-in-the-middle everyone's data, and make PowerPoint slides about it with little smiley faces.

If I was Apple or Google I'd do my own verification of these reports. They probably did, and they probably found nothing there. As far as I can tell the danger is almost all hypotheticals, and even in the article you linked they fired the employees that were found to be improperly accessing data.

There's not much more TikTok can do than enforce policies and build systems with limited access. At some point employees do have to have access to this data in order to do their jobs. At Facebook we had ways to detect if you were accessing data from someone close to you on the social graph, but not even that would help in this situation. You could flag sensitive accounts, but that would probably also result in negative press: "TikTok internally identifies 521 journalist accounts."

The principle you're establishing seems to be that you can't be a Chinese company and operate a product with targeted advertising in America.

Also, is TikTok Chinese spyware any more than any other app is spyware for whatever country it hosts its data in? There's not a country on the planet that lacks legal authority to subpoena whatever data it wants. Sure, maybe some countries have more rules, but if they think it's important enough, they'll just ignore the rules. I think you've written about them doing this. And of course, they can just have their intelligence agencies make unknowing cooperators of tech companies, regardless of geographic boundaries.

I'm a little raw about this because I've seen many times the press and the government go nuts about things that are non-issues. Remember the negative emotion social contagion experiment at Facebook? This was written to cast Facebook as definitely evil, we were flooding people's feeds with downer content just to see what happens.

I saw the code for this, I read explainers from the folks who worked on it. It was regexes for like a dozen negative words. If your user id ended up hashing out to be in the experiment group, you'd have like a 1% greater chance of seeing one of those regex matches than people in the control group.

The whole point of the experiment was to know if we ought to downrank such content so that we weren't bumming people out.

See also the news cycle about evil tech companies offering egg freezing benefits because they're heartless taskmasters that just want to wring as much value as they can out of employees and don't want them disrupting their work with babies. Nonsense. This benefit was introduced when an employee needed cancer treatment and asked for it. This framing also made no sense in the context of our generous parental leave, a five thousand dollar baby cash bonus for every baby born to employees, IVF coverage, emergency daycare coverage, and a bunch more things that I'm forgetting.

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Adam's avatar

Not a lawyer and I'm not gonna find this precedent if it exists, but I was under the impression there is some kind of court precedent saying Congress can't pass a law targeting a single company. Thus, it has to be rules-based. Of course, the rules don't need to be this broad.

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