What exactly about the tiktok app makes it Chinese spyware? Has it been proven it can do something?
In: 4544
It’s not in a great spot, I’ll put it that way.
To start off, the Chinese government has a habit and history of having back doors into a lot of products made by companies that have their home there. For example, Huawei, a company known for phones and servers was ~~discovered a a few years back to have been putting gov. back doors into server chips used by American companies.~~ Under heavy suspicion by American companies and others for having backdoor in their systems after various security flaws were found.
On top of that, most analysis of the app itself have set off quite a few red flags, such as requiring way more security permissions than it should need, their Terms of Service requiring you to allow them to “build a full profile,” on you including who you interact with and every bit of info about you, and IIRC was found to be uploading keystrokes or copied clipboard data at frequent intervals, which is a great way to get someone’s passwords and/or other sensitive data.
So we’re at the point of “it’s doing a lot of weird shit that it shouldn’t be, but we can’t *prove* it’s doing anything malicious with it… yet.”
EDIT: Because I’m seeing it here **a lot** I’m going to clear this up. No, this is not the same thing as Google, Instagram, Facebook, etc. in the US. Here in the US (and most western countries) we not only have privacy laws that protect us from certain breaches, but more importantly the government and company are two separate entities, and are even frequently at each-other’s throats. While all those companies certainly collect data, they are *not* responsible for handing it directly to their government outside of official process such as warrants and subpoenas. In China it’s the opposite, companies over a certain size are required to by law to allow the government to access and have direct control over large sections of the companies operations. The problem worsens when we remember that China isn’t really the best of friends with a lot of western nations, and giving *them specifically* control over what large numbers of western people (especially youth) see and interact with is not great for national security. Should you still always keep privacy in mind with the western companies? Absolutely, but the two issues are worlds apart.
Edit 2: Cool that so many of you have opinions and thoughts on this. Got a little distracted by all of them and the pasta I was cooking now has the consistency of oatmeal 😅. Great having all the discussion, but getting lots of notifications still, so I’m going to mute notifications on this thread. Ttyl
Latest Answers