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Craterdome t1_j2x9itg wrote

Reply to comment by HanaBothWays in Why TikTok’s future has never been so cloudy by prehistoric_knight

You may think it's fine that TikTok has abused their power to spy on journalists who report on them, but I'm glad the US government does not find that OK.

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The_frozen_one t1_j2xnqt4 wrote

Then why not generalize this? Why is it ok for any number of companies to collect data on US citizens, well beyond what is necessary to operate, with little to no oversight or accountability? The solution isn’t adhoc. Make all tech companies accountable. Require any company that meets a size threshold to have a regular external audit of their practices, with big enough repercussions for violations that companies can’t just pay a small fine and change nothing.

TikTok is low hanging fruit, but what’s the point if data brokers can legally resell mountains of information about you? The truth is TikTok isn’t breaking the law in most instances, we just don’t have any law that prevents what they are doing. National security arguments can’t be where this is fought, because we’ve seen over and over that countries will claim everything they don’t like is a national security issue.

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HanaBothWays t1_j2xam4p wrote

ByteDance, the company that owns TikTok, fired the employees who inappropriately accessed user data including the data of journalists. Seems like those employees were doing on their own in violation of company rules and ByteDance was not okay with it!

Lawmakers’ stated concerns about TikTok are not related to that issue specifically, and are mostly speculation about what the Chinese government might do with that data if they compel ByteDance to hand it over.

Congress also did not need to pass a law banning TikTok from being installed on Federal government devices (AKA Government Furnished Equipment or GFE). The White House or certain offices within Executive Branch agencies can prohibit certain software from being installed on GFE, without a bill being passed. If you know that, you know passing a bill to make that happen is a bunch of jingoistic chest-thumping nonsense.

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Craterdome t1_j2xb1yu wrote

Hey look they found some scapegoats to fire. Look I don’t trust them and you do, not much more to argue about here.

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HanaBothWays t1_j2xcbxv wrote

You can be a conspiracy theorist about it or man up and apply the Occam’s Razor principle, maybe.

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StrangerThanGene t1_j2xd0da wrote

>The internal ByteDance report, as first reported by the New York Times, found that the employees accessed IP addresses and other data of two U.S.-based reporters via their TikTok accounts — one for BuzzFeed News and one at the Financial Times — along with several individuals connected to the reporters.

This should be even more concerning. ByteDance is a company that allows employees user-access to database entries.

This is... wildly unsecure. Screw the employees, how in the hell did they even have access to client IP information? It's literally not something any employee would ever have cause to access. This is why we write functions to handle traffic.

The fact that this happened at all should be setting off every alarm bell and red flag you have about data security.

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