Banning TikTok Won’t Keep Your Data Safe | Pompous billionaires, authoritarian regimes, and opaque oligarchs are hoarding our data. Only an alternative online ecosystem will stop them.
First, it's not a TickTok ban. It's a ByteDance ban. ByteDance could sell TickTok to another company outside China and TickTock would be fine in the US.
Second, it was never about protecting user data. It was about preventing China from tweaking the algorithm to try to subtly influence public political opinion, instead of maximizing generic rage and political polarization, to exploit for ad dollars.
An adverserial nation shouldnt be able to influence public opinion like that.
We all understand that those companies do nefarious things. Imo its quite a bit different when its a whole ass country purposefully manipulating public opinion and they dont like the united states.
You're exactly right on both counts. When you hear it from politicians, the sound bite (byte?) is "to protect the children" which is ambiguous. I take it to mean to protect the data of my children, somebody else takes it to mean to protect my children from being brainwashed and the children running the social media companies take it to mean it's protecting their right to wealth. It's win win win!
If the US govn't were serious about protecting people, they'd implement GDPR and put data privacy into the hands of the individual.
New idea for a web service: Give it the url of an article decrying the sorry state of corporate social media and hyping up some zany theoretical alternative that nobody's heard of, and it tells you whether or not the author gives any hint of having heard of the fediverse.
As I said last time this was shared, the article isn't really about TikTok - that is only used as a recent example of why these big proprietary datasets are problematic. The main point of the article is really to explain why we need an alternative and how it could work, using the example of Getgee. I wish more people would read past headlines, especially for interesting articles such as this one.
If you want to really make a change do not ban anything just stop advertise it and promote it. The people next will switch to privacy alternatives. It's not the TikTok fault it is the society fault.
Meaning there is one solution and it's to change massively the society
How about we just create some laws governing data collection and addictive behaviors? It shouldn't just apply to a few companies either it should be a simple policy that everyone must follow. It also needs to relatively easy to understand and clearly documented on how to be compliant