100 sats \ 4 replies \ @xz 13 Mar freebie \ on: Is TikTok installed on your phone right now? tech
Never have installed, never will.
Is there an actual difference to Instagram in terms of the format? I've never used that either. Nor snapchat.. I have to confess to having been used by Twitter and Facebook in the past. Not much though. To me these are all very similar.
I understand the 'potential threat' it is not a homegrown data harvesting all those seconds, minutes and hours of videos are going straight to P.R.China (via U.S.)
What is obviously not an issue is if that data could be bought legally anyway, so the idea of a pretext to ban an app based on x y z is straight up censorship and eroding of the U.S constitution.
Knock on effects will be censorship, further fragmentation of app-stores internet platforms. Tribalism. State sanctioned application-induced comas.
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That algorithm is racist AF, too. For instance, if you are Chinese it always tends to show you videos of people making life & the world around them better, with words of wisdom & prosperity every other video.
If you're american though, it only shows you ghetto drama, gay promotion, and a whole lot of twerking videos.
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Insidious.
The problem IMO is the need to link your profile to phone number. Correct me if I'm wrong, without that it would be difficult to distinguish user nationality and pipe a different algorithm to pump garbage or healthier content. Maybe IP allows to do the same, but that is the beautiful thing about connecting from different locations, and to my mind is how and why the internet was designed.
Not that it provides much anonymity if there's real incentive to trace, but that little protection or masking that it can provide to stop profiling users based on location, just like drawing the curtains in your home. Gulag surveillance is the problem. There's no benefit to exposing your location from a users perspective. It does not increase security.