Everyone collects our data… Apple, Google, third party apps… everyone. So what is the really concern with China doing it specifically? Everything I have tried to read about this just talks about how China will use it for ads, but that’s what tons of other tech companies are already doing… so why is China owning our data different?
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The most likely form it would take would be to use the algorithm to influence the public.
What videos you get shown is decided by the algorithm. How that algorithm decides what videos get shown to many of people and which hardly get shown to anyone is totally unknown to us. There’s nothing stopping the Chinese government from saying to TikTok “I want you to bury most pro Hong Kong democracy videos. Not so much that anyone can prove you’re intentionally burying them, but enough to silence much of our critics.” And that’s very likely what they’ve already done. If war broke out with China, I fully expect the amount of pro Chinese videos on TikTok to be suspiciously higher than the amount seen on any other platforms.
As far as data collection goes, they likely do what Cambridge Analytica did: use user data to target people with videos likely to persuade them to a pro china stance. It’s also plausible that the Chinese government requests and uses that data to better exploit high value targets. Maybe they discover search histories that they can use to blackmail someone with high security clearance.
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