TikTok Ban
So TikTok seems to be officially over for now and I haven't seen much debate about it.
Some of the best arguments I've seen in terms of national security I quote here.
One possibility you could think of it being abused for is in the long term identifying and profiling young people for if/when they get high levels of security clearance for future exploitation.
Specifically people sign up when they are young and keep using it for years and during that time you can identify their interests and so forth. They should also be able to work out locations for most users based on IP or possible even directly from the phone if location permission is on (I don't use TikTok so no idea if that is a permission they ask for), which could help you identify if they move to an area near a secure facility or onto a military base etc. Given that you have years of their viewing data as well as potentially information from what they themselves post you could then work out the 'perfect' person to become their friend and slowly gain trust with the eventual aim to gain information from them (or access to others) or potentially something that the person might not want to be revealed and exploit them that way.
Of course people post lots of stuff on other places so that is not unique to TikTok. Stava is a good example where people have been able to identify people working at military bases from their run data etc.
So I would argue this is rather unlikely but if you want to have the 'what if' mindset that I think it is possible to envision it being used that way to quickly identify users near location X, see if any match someone known to work there and then go back through the data to look for possible avenues to use. Though, again, I think this is very unlikely to be realistic and the main problem that might be the real concern for western governments is really that it could be exploited at a time of conflict as a propaganda tool or to spread misinformation to try and paralyse or otherwise damage a country at a critical moment. Though arguably that can be done via other social media sites albeit with less direct control.
It's a **** ton of Metadata. It doesn't matter if some guy knows YOUR habits, interests, location, etc.
But if a state actor suddenly has access to the data of millions of people, you get a lot more possibilities for nefarious reasons. You can create social trends, slowly and surely manipulate trends, map infrastructure (like who works at military installations, how many people, when they come and go, etc), spread propaganda, rile people up against each other, etc.
With access to over 100 million people your options are limitless.
To me these are good points but I still can't help but have a bad taste in my mouth when the govt tells me what I can and cannot read/view.
What if TikTok was Danish owned, would that make a difference?
I know that China itself bans most if not all American social media apps. So is this an admission of just how powerful social media is? Is every country eventually going to have siloed social media for the same purposes? It will be harder and harder to interact with people from other countries?
Personally I think the first step should be the US passing more strict privacy laws when it comes to data collection. So many other apps collect this information and they are just so secure it's not a security issue for them to hold it? Our data is a commodity so I guess there is a lot of pushback to enact these protections from some of the biggest companies in the world but if the data is that critical if it falls into the wrong hands shouldn't steps be made to prevent this?
