Biden administration pauses pursuit of TikTok and WeChat The Biden administration has paused the United States’ attempts to run TikTok and WeChat out of the country. Former US president Donald Trump sought to expel both on grounds that they represent national security risks. TikTok was given an out if it could find a US entity willing to buy the service, then run it and store data …
"Pursuit" can be positive or negative. It really doesn't have the connotations you think it does. If I am in pursuit of an efficient refactoring of my codebase, my company and users will be pleased. If I am in pursuit of money without doing work,, they're unhappy. If I'm pursuing a person who is lost in a dangerous area so I can direct them away from the abandoned building site, I'm helping them quite a bit. If I'm pursuing someone with the goal of robbing them, not so much. The Trump administration pursued the companies to try to cut them off. There is no question about that. If the Biden administration isn't doing that for now, then they paused that pursuit. If you want to argue bias, go find some bias.
right, but if a non-CCP-controlled nation blocks THEM, it's "endless lawsuits" dragging it on until a "friendly administration" just "pauses" (read: buries) the whole matter. Puppet strings notwithstanding.
The CCP has WAY too much influence/control over the things we're doing, from suddenly (and without warning) LIMITING PPE EXPORTS during a pandemic, to routing the usual privacy-violating things (that people are wiling to agree to, go fig) through servers in CHINA. And they're not friendly, no matter how wide the Stepford Smile. Look what they do to their OWN people...
I for one will NOT be subjugated to anything resembling a "Social Credit Score" derived from CCP spy data. Or Google spy data, for that matter. But Google is a U.S. company, and may have trouble getting past those "stupid laws" whereas the CCP would NOT.
Where you could reasonably argue that Huawei kit on 5G networks could be a threat to national security if there are backdoors in the kit. It never really washed with the general public that Tiktok is a threat to national security. Even if the Chinese government was spying on its users, the information would be of little use to them considering its an app primarily used by teenager to share dancing videos and memes.
I can't imagine how any "social network" could function if it wasn't spying on all its users - these days we're all running around talking about Chinese networks because we've forgotten the few things that Snowden revealed - he didn't tell everything. You are living in your dreamworld if you think that the Chinese "invented" spying in social networks ... two eyes don't see even half as much as five eyes.
Or, more generally, no industrialized nation will have state intelligence organizations so short-sighted as to miss the trove of information in social media.
But of course the Trump administration's attacks on TikTok and WeChat were the usual combination of spite, circus, and gifts to Trump's manipulators. Any relative benefit to US intelligence services would have been minimal, and almost certainly not a real consideration for anyone actually involved in the decision.
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