I definitely see issues with how it targets young people so aggressively and can have a huge negative impact on their mental health. China can essentially use it as a tool to lower the mental health of our youth and spread misinformation on purpose. The fact that the version available in China emphasizes educational content and limits usage per day shows that they know exactly what they are doing with the international versions.
Comment on Desperate TikTok lobbying effort backfires on Capitol Hill
Veedem@lemmy.world 3 months ago
The irony of their efforts is that it only proved to show that they could easily begin influencing users which is the key argument being used against them.
I’m still not sure what my feelings on the subject are. I don’t use the app myself, but besides its connection to a company in China and, therefore, the Chinese government, it seems to do the same exact tracking and algorithm manipulating that every other social network does.
SpacetimeMachine@lemmy.world 3 months ago
jumjummy@lemmy.world 3 months ago
Ties not just to “a company in China”, but directly to the Chinese government.
For better or worse, and how other US platforms operate, Tik Tok is controlled by a hostile (to the US) nation state.
Keep in mind that China also blocks many US company products/platforms for their own reasons, so this is not at all a surprise.
birthday_attack@lemm.ee 3 months ago
TikTok has always been on the extreme end of tracking and surveilling its users. For example, research found that the app had the ability to record all keystrokes made by users in the in-app browser (i.e. keylogging). This kind of tracking is way beyond what other social media companies do and borders on malware.That’s one reason why the US, Canada, and others banned the use of TikTok on government devices.
A former TikTok employee also alleges in a sworn statement that TikTok stores its user data in China, that the CCP has full access to this data, and that the CCP used this data to spy on protestors in Hong Kong.
So their tracking goes way beyond what other companies do, and China uses that data for expressly political goals rather than simply selling ads to users.
T156@lemmy.world 3 months ago
Does Facebook not also do that? I remember there being some controversy a few years ago about them logging statuses that were typed out, but ultimately not posted.
birthday_attack@lemm.ee 3 months ago
There’s a big difference. Both are more invasive than we would like, but grabbing everything you type while in the app’s browser is much worse than measuring a true or false “did this person submit their comment or did they give up and leave it unsubmitted.”
Tiktok is getting the content of the text, which could be sensitive info, and it grabs from every site you visit, not just the social platform itself.
But I think the main issue is using the data for allegedly targeting of protestors and Chinese political opponents, more than the depth of the data collection itself.
abhibeckert@lemmy.world 3 months ago
That’s common practice across the web. For example in a lot of social networks (not Lemmy) if I were to close this reply box without clicking the “Reply” button, I’d simply be able to open it and my half written reply would be restored.
It’s not about gathering data on users, it’s about saving users from accidental deletion particularly on touch screens where it’s so easy to accidentally brush the wrong button.
Logging key strokes is different, there’s no reason to record that anything you record (other than actually typing messages) is likely to be something the user intended to type somewhere else but didn’t realise which browser window had keyboard focus.
heartpatcher@lemmy.world 3 months ago
That does not require logging. You can use local storage.
hark@lemmy.world 3 months ago
Facebook and google track users across the entire web using widgets that other sites choose to embed.
Maggoty@lemmy.world 3 months ago
You think Meta and Alphabet don’t track your inputs?
Lmao.