TikTok cannot be considered a private company, says Australian report ByteDance, the Chinese developer of TikTok, "can no longer be accurately described as a private enterprise" and is instead intertwined with China's government, according to a report [PDF] submitted to Australia's Select Committee on Foreign Interference through Social Media. The report, by a quartet of researchers, was hailed …
What Australia have said rings true IMO, although it ignores some uncomfortable truths about Microsoft, Google, Apple, Amazon, Intel, "Meta" etc. who are all very much in the lap of US three-letter-agencies.
It seems that big tech companies have become weapons for the Powers that Be, in a war that is raging on in the upper echelons of society, out of sight of the rest of us. There's bugger all you can really know, let alone do do about it unless you're in the Billionaire's club and/or a high-ranked member of a corporate/governmental cult.
It's ok for USA to spy on users of Big Tech vs PRISM, but not ok for other countries outside 5-eyes plus Israel to spy on US citizens.
Ignore the blazing hypocrisy. Spies spy, and all countries have them.
I think this is more a tacit admission that the social media companies have built up very good profiles of the users, to a degree that, say, it would be possible to filter out suitable targets for coercion. For example, a user that is heavily critical of a countries policies AND is in a position to provide useful intel or action.
Before you say that that I'm exaggerating, US schools have been open book to the armed services for student records to assist recruiters for years. And that profiling is much less personality based that what FB can produce.
True but I think the issue is TikTok constantly denying they are a Chinese app. They are owned by ByteDance a Chinese company with CCP members. TikTok is a "private" company, so why did the CCP get really annoyed when it was said it would be banned on government devices. The CCP did their press conference & moaned about this.
1. Why would they be bothered if its a private company
2. Why is it OK for the CCP to ban TikTok from their devices but no-one else is allowed.
3. How many American and UK apps are allowed in China, none.
So its clear TikTok is a spy tool and the CCP are getting annoyed that this is potentially going to go away.
At least you're allowed to critise PRISM, do the same to anything CCP related and you're in China, then you'll never be heard of or seen again.
By law, every business in China is owned by the CCP and 'allowed', with varying degrees of freedom, to operate for its benefit. Otherwise you'd just have greedy, grasping, cutthroat capitalism that oppresses the proletariat and makes poison milk and that would be terrible! What varies is how much direct oversight there is. All medium to large companies have a cell of the CCP in them, which may or may not be explicitly labeled. Often, management is also CCP, so the lines might be quite blurry. If the company is small enough they might not even bother, but just because it's not worth their time, not because they don't own you.
Obviously, something as integrated into everyday Chinese life as Tik Tok is going to have strong oversight. Ditto for TenCent.
Certainly in all countries you have companies that are the govt's eager bitches (AT&T, Boeing ,etc. in America), but in Xi's China it's not even a choice.
"Certainly in all countries you have companies that are the govt's eager bitches (AT&T, Boeing ,etc. in America), but in Xi's China it's not even a choice."
I think you underestimate the power the government has over so called independent US companies.
How long do you think the likes Lockheed Martin and Boing would last without government contracts and technology export bans?
Yes, obviously every US defense contractor is completely the US Govt's bitch, which is why I used Boeing there. But, for example, in the US Valve, Google, Chick-Fil-A, and Home Depot are not. Or for the UK you can use Sainsburys, BAT, Barclay's, Virgin. Obviously they are not 100% disconnected from the law, but they're not outright arms of the government. In China, those equivalents are.
Report gives their names and that is all.
Better check on TikTok to see if I can find out who they are.
And they kick off with a less than objective : "Our submission is motivated by concerns that TikTok (and potentially other platforms subject to authoritarian political leverage) pose risks..." and were damn well going to find something!
Always beware of the pious. They will stop at nothing to maintain that illusion.
America doesn't gives a shit about your security or privacy. If they did, Goodle/Facebook/Microsoft simply couldn't exist.
All America cares about is being top dog.
It's an insecure little fuckwit country. Hence why it spends more money on weapons than the rest of the planet put together.
It truly believes it can invade any and all countries to install its version of 'freedom and liberty' into the country, down the barrel of a gun of course.
And then you have the left wing liberals who are up in arms that the rest of the world doesn't think the same way they do.
Lets be honest, the ONLY reason America is having a tantrum about China is because it's scared of competition.
I'd you truly thin it's about privacy, you've really followed the propaganda.
Remind me again, how many US companies trackers on this one website...
Go on...
Well, there is one way to support the Neoliberal Status Quo while taking action against ByteDance, invoke the, "No True Scotsman," fallacy.
Since private property must be inviolate under all circumstances, you redefine TikTok as not private property.
No True Scotsman, or appeal to purity, is an informal fallacy in which one attempts to protect their generalized statement from a falsifying counterexample by excluding the counterexample improperly. Rather than abandoning the falsified universal generalization or providing evidence that would disqualify the falsifying counterexample, a slightly modified generalization is constructed ad-hoc to definitionally exclude the undesirable specific case and similar counterexamples by appeal to rhetoric. This rhetoric takes the form of emotionally charged but nonsubstantive purity platitudes such as "true", "pure", "genuine", "authentic", "real", etc.
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