I think he is kind of missing the point. If TikTok is banned from Google and Apple app stores, it will become less popular and won’t melt brains at the same rate. Sure it can be circumvented, but it is not a “terrible idea” with “intolerable” side effects. And sure, there will be other apps that replace TikTok; when that happens maybe it will be easier to argue for comprehensive rather than ad hoc regulation.
Also disappointed to see him arguing for “commerce” as an important bedrock value, and leaning on State Department talking points like Cuba being a “censorship-loving autocracy.” I suppose Schneier is still a good source on the technical side of things.
From here it looks like you missed the point. He says the effective bans would be terrible/intolerable. Then he points out that merely banning the apps would not be effective.
If you’re disappointed to learn that Schneier isn’t a hardline Leftist, you may have been mistaking him for someone else, maybe Noam Chomsky?
It’s not about being a “hardline Leftist.” It’s about parroting false propaganda. Cuba has public wifi hotspots that provide access to the open web and are not meaningfully firewalled. Its internet practices are nothing like China’s and Iran’s and it is an error of fact to claim that they are.
In strictly technical terms, that’s true, but… uh, how do I put it so that I don’t start a political flamewar again.
It’s very easy to underestimate how governments like the Cuban government can enforce these things if you haven’t lived under one. The Cuban government doesn’t use the exact same technical means that China uses partly because it has better, more easily-enforceable non-technical means to achieve its goals, and partly because it just doesn’t have the tremendous resources that the Chinese government has.
The two don’t belong together in terms of specific technical means (deep packet inspection firewalls) but that’s quite literally a technicality. I understand why it doesn’t look the same from a technical perspective, but take it from someone who’s familiar with that kind of legal climate – it’s pretty much the same.
I don’t really understand what you are alluding to. Cubans can and do routinely use mainstays of the open internet like Google, Wikipedia, Facebook, Reddit, and Youtube, all of which are blocked in China. Cuba does not employ any means–whether deep packet inspection, social pressure, mind control rays, or anything else–to prevent this.
I’m sorry, I’m not trying to be mysterious here :-(. I just don’t want to go there because the last time I did, I started a big flamewar and I really regret it. I know it comes off as pretentious. I’m just trying to stay away from the politics underneath it.
Let me try to state it in as non-political terms as I can, because I really think this is technically relevant, the way social engineering attacks are technically relevant for network security, even though they are a non-technical matter. Please don’t take any of this as a political statement. This is really not my intention.
If one’s goal is to ensure that some information doesn’t go through a censorship-resistant network (like the Internet), or that if it does, it at least doesn’t spread, there are more ways to do it than one. One is through tight content access control at the network layer – firewalling, strict control of telecom equipment etc.. Another is through tight information access and dissemination control, where one openly allows access at the network layer but ensures everyone stays away from information they want restricted, and that anyone who does not is at least unable to disseminate it easily. Both can be equally effective.
I don’t want to get into the “how” of it because I don’t think I can do that in a way that’s not open to political interpretation and this is not the place. All I want is to caution, based not just on specific technical and legal understanding of this particular matter, but also on my own experience, against a line of thought like “Internet access is effectively open, as it is not subject to firewall restrictions”. “Not subject to firewall restrictions” is one conotation of open, and it’s correct in this case. But many others are not, and “not subject to firewall restrictions” doesn’t automatically imply all the other ones.
Another is through tight information access and dissemination control, where one openly allows access at the network layer but ensures everyone stays away from information they want restricted, and that anyone who does not is at least unable to disseminate it easily. Both can be equally effective.
I don’t want to get into the “how” of it because I don’t think I can do that in a way that’s not open to political interpretation and this is not the place.
If this is not the place to explain your very political claim, maybe it’s also not the place to state it?
I don’t think what I stated is a political claim, otherwise I wouldn’t have stated it. I’ve strived to make sure that:
It’s not about a political current or doctrine.
It’s stated in generic terms, rather than political notions – i.e. in terms of how the flow of information can be restricted, not in terms of what information ought to be restricted or not, or if it should be restricted in the first place.
It doesn’t include my position on whether that is good or not.
I’m sorry if it made anyone uncomfortable, or if I didn’t keep my own views out of it as well as I should have. It wasn’t my intention.
Edit: just to clarify, I’m obviously not insensitive to the fact that this is all being said in a thread regarding a government’s policies. My remarks apply equally well to information access in any network environment, from schools to corporate networks. They are about the specific case being dicussed here only insofar as… this is literally what the topic is about. They aren’t – or at least I have no intention of them being – any more political than your own root post in this thread about Schneier “leaning on State Department talking points”.
I’m not aware of a taboo on political discussion, and the article is about government policy, so I didn’t see a problem with pointing out State Department talking points.
My issue with your statements is that they require more detail to evaluate – Is the Cuban government restricting the flow of information in a way that is comparable to network layer consorship, or in a way that exceeds what Western governments do? That would require going beyond generic statements that apply to literally every government, and explaining the non-technical means that you think are employed by the Cuban government. But you have refused to do saying it would cross a line into being too political.
I’m not aware of a taboo on political discussion, and the article is about government policy, so I didn’t see a problem with pointing out State Department talking points.
There is one. Just look at how many people have flagged this as off-topic.
I don’t know if you familiar with American-mass media or social networking, but there is a lot of easily-enforceable non-technical censorship at play. Its easy to handwave about some technical or non-techinal cencorship in Cuba but ff Iran or Cuba had the same ability to project propaganda as the US there would certainly be a great American firewall.
Apps like TikTok (or FB, Youtube, Twitter … ) rely on network effects to get their popularity. People use TikTok because their peers are on TikTok. Make it sufficiently hard to install (and yes, sideloading apks on a device is suffiently hard that most people won’t bother), and people will flock to the next ephemeral video platform.
Sure, it won’t prevent a dedicated person from installing TikTok on their phone - but most people won’t even want to.
Then the question becomes “should companies like Apple and Google be required to facilitate the installation of TikTok, and, if so, can the US govt require them not to?”. That question seems to revolve more about free trade/commerce than about free speech.
And I would wager that there are several clones to TikTok spinning up as we speak. They’ll use the same dark patterns to increase engagement that TikTok does, but at least one of them will be owned / controlled by a Western company, and thus be “acceptable” to the State Department.
All that’s missing is sourcing some content to start things off, and spending some millions on advertising to start to attract users.
The end result will be nearly the same amount of harm to the users, but with less spying by the CCP, and more spying by some Western companies.
These seem like two separate concerns to me. Unfortunately, we live in a time when companies can iterate quickly to make their products as addictive as possible.
Nearly the same amount of harm, but still less. There would still be a drop in addictive usage patterns before the new western TikTok becomes socially compulsory for teens. Could make a difference in the development of children who otherwise wouldn’t have a gap in that mode of interaction during their school years.
From here it looks like you missed the point. He says the effective bans would be terrible/intolerable. Then he points out that merely banning the apps would not be effective.
And sure, there will be other apps that replace TikTok; when that happens maybe it will be easier to argue for comprehensive rather than ad hoc regulation.
YouTube Shorts is already eating TikTok’s lunch in a lot of ways. The addiction-optimized-queue-of-clips format is almost certainly here to stay.
Am I… not the right audience for YouTube Shorts? I do watch a fair amount of YouTube, but these clips are mostly uninteresting to me. The best of them are just clips from channels I already subscribe to.
The one thing I want but don’t get with the Shorts is how old the video is. If I’m seeking news on The War, space and astronomy news, etc, I don’t want to look at something from last year or even six months ago. But since the Shorts don’t show the date, I’m mostly unlikely to click on them, and am usually unsatisfied when I do. I just looked in the Settings again, and don’t see a way to just hide those on the home screen.
You and me both! I’m basing my anecdote on what I’ve observed among friends and family, particularly those who are banned from using TikTok by their government and government-adjacent employers. I think it’s just very hard to fit genuinely interesting content into such a short clip, but presenting many such clips in rapid sequence is great for engaging that slot-machine-seeking hunger some people seem to have.
(Unless I’m misunderstanding your comment. If you’re implying that you were able to get what you wanted out of TikTok, teach me your ways! I’ve been trying and failing to get into it.)
Either that, or we’d suddenly have normies actually using alternative app stores in large enough numbers to make them matter, weakening the duopoly’s stranglehold on mobile software distribution. I certainly wouldn’t mind that outcome.
We’d also see a rise in normies getting malware installed on their phones. The amount of malware that still makes it into the official app stores is already too much.
I doubt it. The rate at which malware makes it onto the Apple App Store and the Google Play Store far exceeds that of most other moderated software distribution platforms.
There’s another catch-22, also related to TikTok, which I think shows just how unnecessary the whole “national security” angle is. I don’t know if TikTok poses one or not – I think that, in fact, is mostly irrelevant when it comes to data collection, for reasons that Schneier already points out in the article so I’m not going to repeat them.
A while ago TikTok caught some flak because someone found out the Chinese version also has a bunch of educational content for kids, which it pushes to young users based on some timing and location rules. It’s obviously attractive to frame this as a conspiracy to brainwash Western children’s minds, but the explanation is a lot more mundane: Chinese legislation forces all media companies that offer content to children under a certain age to include some proportion of educational content. Western countries could enact similar legislation – or, in the case of some of them (including, I believe, my home country), re-enact it, as they once had such legal provisions and eventually dropped them.
Same thing here. If TikTok does, indeed, collect data that poses a national security risk, at least some of that data is bound to be data from some high-interest people’s devices, not from everyone‘s device. There’s no way collecting that data from a handful of people’s phones is risky for national security, but collecting it from everyone’s devices is not risky for consumers’ and private citizens rights in general. Most Western countries already have the constitutional basis to ban this if they want it.
The “national security” risk angle is related to TikTok’s ability to control narratives, shape thinking and potentially influence elections in the US. Of course, this can be argued about FaceBook and other social media companies, but none of them have the share among young people as TikTok does.
Yeah because facebook wasn’t a hotbed of misinformation for older conservatives. Like. Facebook is notoriously awful about letting troll farms just manufacture whatever narrative they want and it just not being questioned.
Yes because citizenship is the issue here/s I’m all for placing restrictions on social media companies to have responsibilities wrt misinfo but like. Fox News exists in America, we don’t get to point fingers here.
Many countries/regions have rules restricting “foreign” apps/companies/etc. from receiving or processing their citizens’ data.
Not saying that it’s good to do that, but it’s not some sort of unprecedented new thing here, and any reasonable discussion about it has to understand and account for current practice.
A while ago TikTok caught some flak because someone found out the Chinese version also has a bunch of educational content for kids, which it pushes to young users based on some timing and location rules. It’s obviously attractive to frame this as a conspiracy to brainwash Western children’s minds, but the explanation is a lot more mundane: Chinese legislation forces all media companies that offer content to children under a certain age to include some proportion of educational content. Western countries could enact similar legislation – or, in the case of some of them (including, I believe, my home country), re-enact it, as they once had such legal provisions and eventually dropped them.
Sounds like the Chinese equivalent of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulations_on_children%27s_television_programming_in_the_United_States , which apparently subtly regulated a bunch of things about TV shows I remember nostalgically from my 90s childhood, and which seems pointless to me in retrospect. They should’ve let Weird Al be funny on TV for kids without having to shoehorn in content that technically counted as educational to fulfill a legal requirement.
IIRC, this is why GI Joe had the little “and knowing is half the battle” skits at the end of every episode, so they could cynically claim to be educational. I think Masters of the Universe had the same thing.
which apparently subtly regulated a bunch of things about TV shows I remember nostalgically from my 90s childhood, and which seems pointless to me in retrospect.
Prologue + Part 1 of this article is required reading on this subject, from a person who grew up in the 80s.
Oh, I’m not implying it’s a good idea. I bet the educational content they push in China is… kind of on par with the kind of children’s educational content that would be legislated in certain areas of the country :-P.
The point I was trying to make is that the delivery of “brainless” entertainment content is not inherent to a platform’s technology or algorithms. Those don’t exist in a vacuum. TikTok, like many other platforms, is doing a bunch of things because #1 they’re allowed to do it without any restrictions and #2 because management thinks it’s a good idea. It’s completely unproductive to create the conditions for #1, and then fuss about how it’s used. As long as #1 holds, anyone who also ticks #2 will handle it the same way, so simply banning the current market leader will just change the market leader, not the things it does.
Similarly, gathering data to facilitate misinformation campaigns is not inherent to the technology TikTok uses, or the algorithms they use. It’s something that TikTok, and other social networks, do because they’re allowed to and because it’s good for their bottom lines. Banning a company, but not the practice, just makes room for another company to engage in it.
It’s kind of like school admins trying to ban chat programs because they interfered with students’ activities back in the day. When ICQ was banned and filtered, we just moved to Yahoo Messenger.
absolutely not. ppl shifted to ig reels like tiktok didn’t even exist. there was about a 1week cry time at max.
also afaik the ban is not just on the app, the whole domain is blocked, or it might even be ip based block(haven’t checked), but no access to api or even their website without using vpn.
Apple maintains a tighter control over what apps are allowed on its phones, so users would have to “jailbreak”—or manually remove restrictions from—their devices to install TikTok.
While it’s tremendously stupid to ban TikTok and leave Facebook alone, one silver lining could be increased popularity of jailbreaking procedures and an easy-to-convey example of why walled gardens suck.
easy-to-convey example of why walled gardens suck.
Pointless, IMO - we had walled gardens back in the day with AOL and Het Net and people did learn they sucked. But now we’re back to where we started in many ways. People forget such lessons quite easily.
We’re seeing a mass exodus from Twitter to Mastodon, but that’s not because people value Mastodon’s decentralised character. It’s just a usable alternative that happens to be there.
Even developers flock to such centrally controlled platforms as GitHub, while having known Google Code shutting down, SourceForge’s bad practices and things like BitBucket shutting down Mercurial hosting etc.
Blame network effects and “laziness” - most people value convenience, usability and low cost over everything else.
I doubt it will ever be a “all or none” scenario. Think of the usefulness to society - TikTok serves no useful purpose than entertainment, which can be easily dispensed with, while FaceBook does allow people of common interest to share ideas and thoughts (like local hiking groups, meetups and so on). Policy makers have to take into account several such nuances before making the call, so I don’t think it is “tremendously stupid” to ban TikTok and leave FaceBook alone.
That said, knowing the history of CCP Politburo, I am inclined to ban TikTok first and then look at FaceBook later (though thankfully I am not one of the “policy maker”). :-)
TikTok serves no useful purpose than entertainment
This is just not true. Tons of TikTok videos are educational or informative. I’ve learned things about linguistics, cooking, history, woodworking, geography, botany, chemistry… you name it. Since TikTok tends to show you lots of videos from people you don’t follow, I’ve also learned a lot about other cultures—I see a lot from people in other countries, and people whose social or cultural groups are not well represented in the other online (or offline) spaces I inhabit. I’m not a fan of the CCP either, but I don’t think it’s fair to write off all of TikTok as frippery just because a lot of the content is “entertainment.”
Honestly that just makes it worse from a data protection angle. If your concern is protecting people, it’s already very easy to avoid the harm of TikTok, but without help from regulation, protecting yourself from Facebook is much more difficult.
If we want to address the real problem, we need to enact serious privacy laws, not security theater, to stop our data from being collected, analyzed, and sold—by anyone. Such laws would protect us in the long term, and not just from the app of the week.
I agree with this. As an American, I think letting a hostile foreign power own a major content platform is kind of nuts, but at the same time, we don’t ban the BBC or Al Jazeera or RT or Xinhua even though they’re controlled by foreign governments. Lots of American magazines take MBS’s blood money to advertise for “Neom: the city of the future” lol. At a certain level, the American system is predicated on giving people the freedom to make bad choices, especially in the realm of media. It’s reasonable to legislators to try to find a way to push back against Tik Tok, but the pushback has to be done within the bounds of the Constitution and freedom of speech. Protecting privacy, regardless of the nationality of the holding company, is a better approach.
As a practical matter, it would have been very difficult to run RT America once the Ukraine War sanctions came into place. I can still load RT.com though. I think that’s a decent balance: we’re not banning RT per se, just removing the incentives for it to be distributed in the US.
Good post but it doesn’t matter. What lawmakers and their lobbyists want to do is what’s going to happen. If your pockets grew enough maybe you could get a lawmaker to “care” about privacy.
I have TikTok installed on a tablet that I don’t have anything else really installed on (a couple games like solitaire). I see a LOT of people talking about how TikTok changes how people think or interferes in election stuff, but my feed is a bunch of horses, dogs, and people cleaning cow hooves. I’ve never even seen a political video on it before so I’m not sure how it gets to that point.
I agree with him that people should be free to choose to watch what they want, but I also agree with the gov that government devices should not allow TikTok on it. That seems pretty obvious.
I’ve watched a few of those because it was interesting. But also disgusting. Then YT kept putting more on my home screen, so I had to “don’t recommend channel” a few times to stop seeing them.
I’m not sure how you got that from the article. It is quite clear that TikTok collects a lot of data and probably is a threat to national security, it just points out that banning it specifically is difficult to do legally and would have a lot of unintended consequences. The correct solution is to pass privacy laws that would make TikTok’s business model impossible. This would also impact several large US corporations, though not in a way that’s detrimental to society as a whole.
It is quite clear that TikTok collects a lot of data and probably is a threat to national security
As a European; and with as much kindness as I can muster: Why is it a problem when China is doing it and not the US?
Bytedance is as tangled with the CCP as Facebook/Meta is with the US government.
Why is it ok when some people collect as much data as possible and provably impact political discourse and not when others do it? Reeks of exceptionalism and honestly as a person who has been quite critical of Google/Facebook, I can’t really abide the hypocrisy here.
Note also that the CIA is elbow-deep in much of the US tech sector by way of In-Q-Tel. It’s okay to condemn the Chinese tech sector, but simultaneously giving the US tech sector a pass is super hypocritical.
As a European; and with as much kindness as I can muster: Why is it a problem when China is doing it and not the US?
As a European you should be aware that the EU already has regulations on what kinds of non-EU entities can receive data about Europeans.
And while you might protest that it’s different because the EU does this for good reasons people generally approve of, keep in mind that A) “national security” is still, by many people, considered a good reason they approve of, and B) the debate still ends up shifting from a binary yes/no good/bad to a spectrum of reasons and methods used by particular jurisdictions to restrict “foreign” entities’ ability to collect and process data on their residents. Which means the debate has to be about where on that spectrum it’s acceptable to be.
As a European; and with as much kindness as I can muster: Why is it a problem when China is doing it and not the US?
That is the key question in the article, though the key difference is that it isn’t ‘the US’, it is US-based corporations (versus CCP-controlled corporations). The US in general seems to be happy with exploitation as long as it’s by the private sector.
(Note: not parent, but European). I also think that ideally this business model should be banned for everyone, but I understand the “not okay if it’s China” angle. All governments, including European governments, and also the EU, place all sorts of restrictions on what companies from other countries can do and under what conditions. The Chinese government, too, has special requirements for non-Chinese companies and specific bans for companies in specific countries.
A trivial example – China notoriously banned South Korean entertainment content a while back after a diplomatic dispute. In Europe, the Finnish Ministry of Economic Affairs and Employment can restrict foreign acquisitions if they affect key national interests related to national defence, security of supply, or functions fundamental to society
This isn’t special in any way, it’s just TikTok playing the victim card.
Well, it’s the USA banning foreign spyware without banning their own spyware, which makes it different. If it was for example the EU banning TikTok while allowing Facebook, now that would be inconsistent.
As a European; and with as much kindness as I can muster: Why is it a problem when China is doing it and not the US?
That is one of the points of the essay, actually. The problem is not TikTok, the problem is the lack of data privacy in general.
Bytedance is as tangled with the CCP as Facebook/Meta is with the US government.
That’s a major exaggeration! The US government has powers to extract data from Meta and others. It is not involved in the governance of those companies, even if some Congresscritters would like it to be. (Not making value judgments, but this is one of the differences between an extremely-Socialist and an only-very-slightly-Socialist form of government.)
That’s a major exaggeration! The US government has powers to extract data from Meta and others. It is not involved in the governance of those companies
As a European; and with as much kindness as I can muster: Why is it a problem when China is doing it and not the US?
There are at least two reasonable answers to this.
First, who is doing something makes a big difference as to whether it is a good idea to allow it or not. A law-abiding citizen who has a rifle is a very different thing than a known mass-murderer who has a rifle. Of course, this means the whole argument turns on how you evaluate the Chinese and American governments.
Second, you could say there isn’t anything “wrong” with what China/TikTok is doing to further their agenda. The US just wants to prevent it because China is a geopolitical adversary. And of course, the US wants to further its own agenda. There’s not anything inconsistent about that.
Of course, this means the whole argument turns on how you evaluate the Chinese and American governments.
As an Australian, I can say without a hint of sarcasm that I, for one, welcome our American overlords. Because they’re a damn sight better than the Communist Party of China.
Maybe start somewhere. And I can’t see why banning some social media thingy, that collects a lot more data and uses VM techniques to prevent decompilation, can’t be banned on federal devices, which possibly handle very sensitive data. I hope germany starts doing stuff like that too, and with more than only tiktok (we’ve had just now a case about the privacy laws not allowing a federal facebook page). It’s also not a question of whether tiktok is ok, I’d rather ask: What does this app have to do with work.
Of course you can play whataboutism, and it’s fair to point at other corporations. But let’s face it: When the radio news said that china criticizes the US for misusing national security to uninstall tiktok from federal devices, I have to ask: Why do they even bother reacting to that, if it is a completely irrelevant video app?
What I meant to say, explicitly, was: I’d rather install TikTok in protest than accept more Government censorship of apps or the Internet. Of the two (significant!) evils, I’d rate the latter as worse.
Only because the boundaries of discussion about the political implications of technical decisions are selectively moderated. If this article is on topic on lobsters to begin with, it’s hard to fairly argue that a comment stating that the article’s national security argument is correct isn’t on topic.
While I agree with his “side-effect” deductions, it’s not like these things are arbitrated in a vacuum. The ban is part of the trend that Schneider laments; a gradual commodification of our data, a continuation of gradual censoring and sandboxing of the internet to the benefit of “our” big tech companies. It’s not like if we wrote a bunch of thinkpieces that congress would go against the polticial and financial incentives to ban a more successful foreign competitor doing the same awful stuff “we” have already been doing for a while.
I think he is kind of missing the point. If TikTok is banned from Google and Apple app stores, it will become less popular and won’t melt brains at the same rate. Sure it can be circumvented, but it is not a “terrible idea” with “intolerable” side effects. And sure, there will be other apps that replace TikTok; when that happens maybe it will be easier to argue for comprehensive rather than ad hoc regulation.
Also disappointed to see him arguing for “commerce” as an important bedrock value, and leaning on State Department talking points like Cuba being a “censorship-loving autocracy.” I suppose Schneier is still a good source on the technical side of things.
From here it looks like you missed the point. He says the effective bans would be terrible/intolerable. Then he points out that merely banning the apps would not be effective.
If you’re disappointed to learn that Schneier isn’t a hardline Leftist, you may have been mistaking him for someone else, maybe Noam Chomsky?
Maybe keep the over-the-top snark to Hacker News or somewhere else?
It’s not about being a “hardline Leftist.” It’s about parroting false propaganda. Cuba has public wifi hotspots that provide access to the open web and are not meaningfully firewalled. Its internet practices are nothing like China’s and Iran’s and it is an error of fact to claim that they are.
In strictly technical terms, that’s true, but… uh, how do I put it so that I don’t start a political flamewar again.
It’s very easy to underestimate how governments like the Cuban government can enforce these things if you haven’t lived under one. The Cuban government doesn’t use the exact same technical means that China uses partly because it has better, more easily-enforceable non-technical means to achieve its goals, and partly because it just doesn’t have the tremendous resources that the Chinese government has.
The two don’t belong together in terms of specific technical means (deep packet inspection firewalls) but that’s quite literally a technicality. I understand why it doesn’t look the same from a technical perspective, but take it from someone who’s familiar with that kind of legal climate – it’s pretty much the same.
I don’t really understand what you are alluding to. Cubans can and do routinely use mainstays of the open internet like Google, Wikipedia, Facebook, Reddit, and Youtube, all of which are blocked in China. Cuba does not employ any means–whether deep packet inspection, social pressure, mind control rays, or anything else–to prevent this.
I’m sorry, I’m not trying to be mysterious here :-(. I just don’t want to go there because the last time I did, I started a big flamewar and I really regret it. I know it comes off as pretentious. I’m just trying to stay away from the politics underneath it.
Let me try to state it in as non-political terms as I can, because I really think this is technically relevant, the way social engineering attacks are technically relevant for network security, even though they are a non-technical matter. Please don’t take any of this as a political statement. This is really not my intention.
If one’s goal is to ensure that some information doesn’t go through a censorship-resistant network (like the Internet), or that if it does, it at least doesn’t spread, there are more ways to do it than one. One is through tight content access control at the network layer – firewalling, strict control of telecom equipment etc.. Another is through tight information access and dissemination control, where one openly allows access at the network layer but ensures everyone stays away from information they want restricted, and that anyone who does not is at least unable to disseminate it easily. Both can be equally effective.
I don’t want to get into the “how” of it because I don’t think I can do that in a way that’s not open to political interpretation and this is not the place. All I want is to caution, based not just on specific technical and legal understanding of this particular matter, but also on my own experience, against a line of thought like “Internet access is effectively open, as it is not subject to firewall restrictions”. “Not subject to firewall restrictions” is one conotation of open, and it’s correct in this case. But many others are not, and “not subject to firewall restrictions” doesn’t automatically imply all the other ones.
If this is not the place to explain your very political claim, maybe it’s also not the place to state it?
I don’t think what I stated is a political claim, otherwise I wouldn’t have stated it. I’ve strived to make sure that:
I’m sorry if it made anyone uncomfortable, or if I didn’t keep my own views out of it as well as I should have. It wasn’t my intention.
Edit: just to clarify, I’m obviously not insensitive to the fact that this is all being said in a thread regarding a government’s policies. My remarks apply equally well to information access in any network environment, from schools to corporate networks. They are about the specific case being dicussed here only insofar as… this is literally what the topic is about. They aren’t – or at least I have no intention of them being – any more political than your own root post in this thread about Schneier “leaning on State Department talking points”.
I’m not aware of a taboo on political discussion, and the article is about government policy, so I didn’t see a problem with pointing out State Department talking points.
My issue with your statements is that they require more detail to evaluate – Is the Cuban government restricting the flow of information in a way that is comparable to network layer consorship, or in a way that exceeds what Western governments do? That would require going beyond generic statements that apply to literally every government, and explaining the non-technical means that you think are employed by the Cuban government. But you have refused to do saying it would cross a line into being too political.
There is one. Just look at how many people have flagged this as off-topic.
Plus they have El Paquete, which I’m sure a lot of Americans would envy if they knew about it.
(Yes, admittedly, El Paquete is illegal, there as here.)
I don’t know if you familiar with American-mass media or social networking, but there is a lot of easily-enforceable non-technical censorship at play. Its easy to handwave about some technical or non-techinal cencorship in Cuba but ff Iran or Cuba had the same ability to project propaganda as the US there would certainly be a great American firewall.
Apps like TikTok (or FB, Youtube, Twitter … ) rely on network effects to get their popularity. People use TikTok because their peers are on TikTok. Make it sufficiently hard to install (and yes, sideloading apks on a device is suffiently hard that most people won’t bother), and people will flock to the next ephemeral video platform.
Sure, it won’t prevent a dedicated person from installing TikTok on their phone - but most people won’t even want to.
Then the question becomes “should companies like Apple and Google be required to facilitate the installation of TikTok, and, if so, can the US govt require them not to?”. That question seems to revolve more about free trade/commerce than about free speech.
And I would wager that there are several clones to TikTok spinning up as we speak. They’ll use the same dark patterns to increase engagement that TikTok does, but at least one of them will be owned / controlled by a Western company, and thus be “acceptable” to the State Department.
All that’s missing is sourcing some content to start things off, and spending some millions on advertising to start to attract users.
The end result will be nearly the same amount of harm to the users, but with less spying by the CCP, and more spying by some Western companies.
These seem like two separate concerns to me. Unfortunately, we live in a time when companies can iterate quickly to make their products as addictive as possible.
Nearly the same amount of harm, but still less. There would still be a drop in addictive usage patterns before the new western TikTok becomes socially compulsory for teens. Could make a difference in the development of children who otherwise wouldn’t have a gap in that mode of interaction during their school years.
And do you see what’s missing from that?
YouTube Shorts is already eating TikTok’s lunch in a lot of ways. The addiction-optimized-queue-of-clips format is almost certainly here to stay.
Am I… not the right audience for YouTube Shorts? I do watch a fair amount of YouTube, but these clips are mostly uninteresting to me. The best of them are just clips from channels I already subscribe to.
The one thing I want but don’t get with the Shorts is how old the video is. If I’m seeking news on The War, space and astronomy news, etc, I don’t want to look at something from last year or even six months ago. But since the Shorts don’t show the date, I’m mostly unlikely to click on them, and am usually unsatisfied when I do. I just looked in the Settings again, and don’t see a way to just hide those on the home screen.
You and me both! I’m basing my anecdote on what I’ve observed among friends and family, particularly those who are banned from using TikTok by their government and government-adjacent employers. I think it’s just very hard to fit genuinely interesting content into such a short clip, but presenting many such clips in rapid sequence is great for engaging that slot-machine-seeking hunger some people seem to have.
(Unless I’m misunderstanding your comment. If you’re implying that you were able to get what you wanted out of TikTok, teach me your ways! I’ve been trying and failing to get into it.)
I’m pretty sure that banning the app from the two major app stores would be enough to kill TikTok In the US.
Either that, or we’d suddenly have normies actually using alternative app stores in large enough numbers to make them matter, weakening the duopoly’s stranglehold on mobile software distribution. I certainly wouldn’t mind that outcome.
We’d also see a rise in normies getting malware installed on their phones. The amount of malware that still makes it into the official app stores is already too much.
That assumes the alternative app stores allow malware at a higher rate than the dominant ones.
I doubt it. The rate at which malware makes it onto the Apple App Store and the Google Play Store far exceeds that of most other moderated software distribution platforms.
There’s another catch-22, also related to TikTok, which I think shows just how unnecessary the whole “national security” angle is. I don’t know if TikTok poses one or not – I think that, in fact, is mostly irrelevant when it comes to data collection, for reasons that Schneier already points out in the article so I’m not going to repeat them.
A while ago TikTok caught some flak because someone found out the Chinese version also has a bunch of educational content for kids, which it pushes to young users based on some timing and location rules. It’s obviously attractive to frame this as a conspiracy to brainwash Western children’s minds, but the explanation is a lot more mundane: Chinese legislation forces all media companies that offer content to children under a certain age to include some proportion of educational content. Western countries could enact similar legislation – or, in the case of some of them (including, I believe, my home country), re-enact it, as they once had such legal provisions and eventually dropped them.
Same thing here. If TikTok does, indeed, collect data that poses a national security risk, at least some of that data is bound to be data from some high-interest people’s devices, not from everyone‘s device. There’s no way collecting that data from a handful of people’s phones is risky for national security, but collecting it from everyone’s devices is not risky for consumers’ and private citizens rights in general. Most Western countries already have the constitutional basis to ban this if they want it.
The “national security” risk angle is related to TikTok’s ability to control narratives, shape thinking and potentially influence elections in the US. Of course, this can be argued about FaceBook and other social media companies, but none of them have the share among young people as TikTok does.
Yeah because facebook wasn’t a hotbed of misinformation for older conservatives. Like. Facebook is notoriously awful about letting troll farms just manufacture whatever narrative they want and it just not being questioned.
Those old conservatives you clearly despise (don’t worry they’ll be dead soon) are citizens. The CCP are not.
Yes because citizenship is the issue here/s I’m all for placing restrictions on social media companies to have responsibilities wrt misinfo but like. Fox News exists in America, we don’t get to point fingers here.
Ah but facebook is good because the us military has fingers in its executives
Many countries/regions have rules restricting “foreign” apps/companies/etc. from receiving or processing their citizens’ data.
Not saying that it’s good to do that, but it’s not some sort of unprecedented new thing here, and any reasonable discussion about it has to understand and account for current practice.
Phrasing!
Sorry, but … lol.
Sounds like the Chinese equivalent of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulations_on_children%27s_television_programming_in_the_United_States , which apparently subtly regulated a bunch of things about TV shows I remember nostalgically from my 90s childhood, and which seems pointless to me in retrospect. They should’ve let Weird Al be funny on TV for kids without having to shoehorn in content that technically counted as educational to fulfill a legal requirement.
IIRC, this is why GI Joe had the little “and knowing is half the battle” skits at the end of every episode, so they could cynically claim to be educational. I think Masters of the Universe had the same thing.
Prologue + Part 1 of this article is required reading on this subject, from a person who grew up in the 80s.
I don’t want to imagine the kind of children’s educational content that would be legislated, especially in certain areas of the country.
Oh, I’m not implying it’s a good idea. I bet the educational content they push in China is… kind of on par with the kind of children’s educational content that would be legislated in certain areas of the country :-P.
The point I was trying to make is that the delivery of “brainless” entertainment content is not inherent to a platform’s technology or algorithms. Those don’t exist in a vacuum. TikTok, like many other platforms, is doing a bunch of things because #1 they’re allowed to do it without any restrictions and #2 because management thinks it’s a good idea. It’s completely unproductive to create the conditions for #1, and then fuss about how it’s used. As long as #1 holds, anyone who also ticks #2 will handle it the same way, so simply banning the current market leader will just change the market leader, not the things it does.
Similarly, gathering data to facilitate misinformation campaigns is not inherent to the technology TikTok uses, or the algorithms they use. It’s something that TikTok, and other social networks, do because they’re allowed to and because it’s good for their bottom lines. Banning a company, but not the practice, just makes room for another company to engage in it.
It’s kind of like school admins trying to ban chat programs because they interfered with students’ activities back in the day. When ICQ was banned and filtered, we just moved to Yahoo Messenger.
Are people in India jailbreaking their phones to install Tiktok?
absolutely not. ppl shifted to ig reels like tiktok didn’t even exist. there was about a 1week cry time at max.
also afaik the ban is not just on the app, the whole domain is blocked, or it might even be ip based block(haven’t checked), but no access to api or even their website without using vpn.
so just jailbreaking would not help
While it’s tremendously stupid to ban TikTok and leave Facebook alone, one silver lining could be increased popularity of jailbreaking procedures and an easy-to-convey example of why walled gardens suck.
Pointless, IMO - we had walled gardens back in the day with AOL and Het Net and people did learn they sucked. But now we’re back to where we started in many ways. People forget such lessons quite easily.
We’re seeing a mass exodus from Twitter to Mastodon, but that’s not because people value Mastodon’s decentralised character. It’s just a usable alternative that happens to be there.
Even developers flock to such centrally controlled platforms as GitHub, while having known Google Code shutting down, SourceForge’s bad practices and things like BitBucket shutting down Mercurial hosting etc.
Blame network effects and “laziness” - most people value convenience, usability and low cost over everything else.
I doubt it will ever be a “all or none” scenario. Think of the usefulness to society - TikTok serves no useful purpose than entertainment, which can be easily dispensed with, while FaceBook does allow people of common interest to share ideas and thoughts (like local hiking groups, meetups and so on). Policy makers have to take into account several such nuances before making the call, so I don’t think it is “tremendously stupid” to ban TikTok and leave FaceBook alone.
That said, knowing the history of CCP Politburo, I am inclined to ban TikTok first and then look at FaceBook later (though thankfully I am not one of the “policy maker”). :-)
TikTok has heaps of educational content; if you demonstrate an interest in that, it will show it to you.
This is just not true. Tons of TikTok videos are educational or informative. I’ve learned things about linguistics, cooking, history, woodworking, geography, botany, chemistry… you name it. Since TikTok tends to show you lots of videos from people you don’t follow, I’ve also learned a lot about other cultures—I see a lot from people in other countries, and people whose social or cultural groups are not well represented in the other online (or offline) spaces I inhabit. I’m not a fan of the CCP either, but I don’t think it’s fair to write off all of TikTok as frippery just because a lot of the content is “entertainment.”
Honestly that just makes it worse from a data protection angle. If your concern is protecting people, it’s already very easy to avoid the harm of TikTok, but without help from regulation, protecting yourself from Facebook is much more difficult.
I agree with this. As an American, I think letting a hostile foreign power own a major content platform is kind of nuts, but at the same time, we don’t ban the BBC or Al Jazeera or RT or Xinhua even though they’re controlled by foreign governments. Lots of American magazines take MBS’s blood money to advertise for “Neom: the city of the future” lol. At a certain level, the American system is predicated on giving people the freedom to make bad choices, especially in the realm of media. It’s reasonable to legislators to try to find a way to push back against Tik Tok, but the pushback has to be done within the bounds of the Constitution and freedom of speech. Protecting privacy, regardless of the nationality of the holding company, is a better approach.
RT has been (effectively) banned in several Western countries, though.
As a practical matter, it would have been very difficult to run RT America once the Ukraine War sanctions came into place. I can still load RT.com though. I think that’s a decent balance: we’re not banning RT per se, just removing the incentives for it to be distributed in the US.
Good post but it doesn’t matter. What lawmakers and their lobbyists want to do is what’s going to happen. If your pockets grew enough maybe you could get a lawmaker to “care” about privacy.
I have TikTok installed on a tablet that I don’t have anything else really installed on (a couple games like solitaire). I see a LOT of people talking about how TikTok changes how people think or interferes in election stuff, but my feed is a bunch of horses, dogs, and people cleaning cow hooves. I’ve never even seen a political video on it before so I’m not sure how it gets to that point.
I agree with him that people should be free to choose to watch what they want, but I also agree with the gov that government devices should not allow TikTok on it. That seems pretty obvious.
I’ve watched a few of those because it was interesting. But also disgusting. Then YT kept putting more on my home screen, so I had to “don’t recommend channel” a few times to stop seeing them.
Well, I’ll be damned. I never thought I’d ever find a reason to install TikTok; now perhaps there is one.
I’m not sure how you got that from the article. It is quite clear that TikTok collects a lot of data and probably is a threat to national security, it just points out that banning it specifically is difficult to do legally and would have a lot of unintended consequences. The correct solution is to pass privacy laws that would make TikTok’s business model impossible. This would also impact several large US corporations, though not in a way that’s detrimental to society as a whole.
As a European; and with as much kindness as I can muster: Why is it a problem when China is doing it and not the US?
Bytedance is as tangled with the CCP as Facebook/Meta is with the US government.
Why is it ok when some people collect as much data as possible and provably impact political discourse and not when others do it? Reeks of exceptionalism and honestly as a person who has been quite critical of Google/Facebook, I can’t really abide the hypocrisy here.
Note also that the CIA is elbow-deep in much of the US tech sector by way of In-Q-Tel. It’s okay to condemn the Chinese tech sector, but simultaneously giving the US tech sector a pass is super hypocritical.
As a European you should be aware that the EU already has regulations on what kinds of non-EU entities can receive data about Europeans.
And while you might protest that it’s different because the EU does this for good reasons people generally approve of, keep in mind that A) “national security” is still, by many people, considered a good reason they approve of, and B) the debate still ends up shifting from a binary yes/no good/bad to a spectrum of reasons and methods used by particular jurisdictions to restrict “foreign” entities’ ability to collect and process data on their residents. Which means the debate has to be about where on that spectrum it’s acceptable to be.
That is the key question in the article, though the key difference is that it isn’t ‘the US’, it is US-based corporations (versus CCP-controlled corporations). The US in general seems to be happy with exploitation as long as it’s by the private sector.
(Note: not parent, but European). I also think that ideally this business model should be banned for everyone, but I understand the “not okay if it’s China” angle. All governments, including European governments, and also the EU, place all sorts of restrictions on what companies from other countries can do and under what conditions. The Chinese government, too, has special requirements for non-Chinese companies and specific bans for companies in specific countries.
A trivial example – China notoriously banned South Korean entertainment content a while back after a diplomatic dispute. In Europe, the Finnish Ministry of Economic Affairs and Employment can restrict foreign acquisitions if they affect key national interests related to national defence, security of supply, or functions fundamental to society
This isn’t special in any way, it’s just TikTok playing the victim card.
Well, it’s the USA banning foreign spyware without banning their own spyware, which makes it different. If it was for example the EU banning TikTok while allowing Facebook, now that would be inconsistent.
That is one of the points of the essay, actually. The problem is not TikTok, the problem is the lack of data privacy in general.
That’s a major exaggeration! The US government has powers to extract data from Meta and others. It is not involved in the governance of those companies, even if some Congresscritters would like it to be. (Not making value judgments, but this is one of the differences between an extremely-Socialist and an only-very-slightly-Socialist form of government.)
Are you, uh, sure about that?
There are at least two reasonable answers to this.
First, who is doing something makes a big difference as to whether it is a good idea to allow it or not. A law-abiding citizen who has a rifle is a very different thing than a known mass-murderer who has a rifle. Of course, this means the whole argument turns on how you evaluate the Chinese and American governments.
Second, you could say there isn’t anything “wrong” with what China/TikTok is doing to further their agenda. The US just wants to prevent it because China is a geopolitical adversary. And of course, the US wants to further its own agenda. There’s not anything inconsistent about that.
As an Australian, I can say without a hint of sarcasm that I, for one, welcome our American overlords. Because they’re a damn sight better than the Communist Party of China.
Maybe start somewhere. And I can’t see why banning some social media thingy, that collects a lot more data and uses VM techniques to prevent decompilation, can’t be banned on federal devices, which possibly handle very sensitive data. I hope germany starts doing stuff like that too, and with more than only tiktok (we’ve had just now a case about the privacy laws not allowing a federal facebook page). It’s also not a question of whether tiktok is ok, I’d rather ask: What does this app have to do with work.
Of course you can play whataboutism, and it’s fair to point at other corporations. But let’s face it: When the radio news said that china criticizes the US for misusing national security to uninstall tiktok from federal devices, I have to ask: Why do they even bother reacting to that, if it is a completely irrelevant video app?
That was my lame attempt at humour.
What I meant to say, explicitly, was: I’d rather install TikTok in protest than accept more Government censorship of apps or the Internet. Of the two (significant!) evils, I’d rate the latter as worse.
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This whole post is off-topic for Lobste.rs.
Only because the boundaries of discussion about the political implications of technical decisions are selectively moderated. If this article is on topic on lobsters to begin with, it’s hard to fairly argue that a comment stating that the article’s national security argument is correct isn’t on topic.
While I agree with his “side-effect” deductions, it’s not like these things are arbitrated in a vacuum. The ban is part of the trend that Schneider laments; a gradual commodification of our data, a continuation of gradual censoring and sandboxing of the internet to the benefit of “our” big tech companies. It’s not like if we wrote a bunch of thinkpieces that congress would go against the polticial and financial incentives to ban a more successful foreign competitor doing the same awful stuff “we” have already been doing for a while.