• peregrin5@lemm.ee
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    19 days ago

    They are both security risks. The difference is the SA oligarch has already successfully infiltrated our national security and installed himself in a position of power so we can’t do anything about it anymore.

    Honestly the way he did it was pretty perfect. Create technology and weapons and R&D for the country you want to infiltrate, ingratiate yourself to it’s people, government, and military. Then start throwing money into politics to buy yourself a spot on the cabinet.

    This is a game any bad state actor with a huge wad of cash can play thanks to Citizen’s United.

  • PugJesus@lemmy.world
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    18 days ago

    Maybe both are bad?

    “Facebook should be under incredibly strict regulation or killed outright” is also a position I’m fond of.

  • Jo Miran@lemmy.ml
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    19 days ago

    They are all problematic. My disagreement with the removal of TikTok is that it should not stop with TikTok. Meta’s apps are an absolute nightmare. Google, Xitter, Amazon, etc., they all need to be curbed when it comes to data collection.

    Data brokering needs to be made illegal or VERY tightly regulated.

    • Venator@lemmy.nz
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      19 days ago

      Seems like meta were trying something similar with thier replacing all links in Facebook messenger with thier fbrpc://facebook/nativethirdparty?app_id Links, but seems like they gave up on it because it was all broken.

      • kibiz0r@midwest.social
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        19 days ago

        Yup. They’re all dangerous monsters.

        IMO, it doesn’t even matter who’s worse, cuz they’re all bad enough they should all be subject to aggressive regulation with the goal of establishing safe interop off-ramps for people to stop using the services or at least use more trustworthy clients.

        In my estimation, TikTok is worse, but that’s not even what the ban is about. It’s because China is spying instead of the US. That’s not a reason to defend TikTok though, or to oppose the government’s decision — cuz they were accidentally right, for the wrong reason.

  • Geometrinen_Gepardi@sopuli.xyz
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    19 days ago

    Because tiktok data goes to China, and China is a competitor/geopolitical adversary to the USA. If tiktok was russian, it would be the same story. Besides, tiktok has been proven to be by far the worst data miner you can download from an app store.

    • AlexWIWA@lemmy.ml
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      18 days ago

      Messenger is worse by far. This is a verifiable fact just from the permissions requested. The Dunning Kruger in this thread is comical.

      Redditors just turn their brain off when TikTok is the topic

    • Semi-Hemi-Lemmygod@lemmy.world
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      19 days ago

      China buys a ton of data from Zuck and Musk and a lot of other people.

      The reason it’s being banned is for cutting out the middle man.

      If they actually cared about our data going to geopolitical rivals they’d pass comprehensive privacy protections regardless of where the company is headquartered.

    • PhilipTheBucket@ponder.cat
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      19 days ago

      Not just a data miner, it has some crazy capabilities that are malicious even by the standards of social media phone apps, which were already explicitly malicious. If I remember right, it can download custom code to augment its capabilities per-target, and has encryption to attempt to thwart any attempt to analyze it, which are both pretty unusual amounts of effort to spend from the POV of “we just want to gather your advertising data and listen to your microphone all the time” which are pretty standard things.