Tiktok collects reams of user data, but it also runs proprietary algorithms, which are likely extremely privacy-invasive. These algorithms are a danger to US users--and everybody else--and should not be secret. Tiktok's user surveillance makes its video scroll compelling: They know what we like.
American teens are on Tiktok an average of 1.5 hours per day, and many get their news on Tiktok. American teens (like other Americans) often lack a basic understanding of how the US government, the news media, and social media companies work. And of course TikTok videos are not fact checked, and can easily be made to deceive (or you can just adjust the mix of videos that people see). Even if the company is driven only by engagement, this is scary.
The Chinese government can compel access to Tiktok's proprietary information if they choose. They've done way worse (mass, forced DNA collection, to name one thing). Regardless of how dumb or ill-conceived the Tiktok ban is, I'm worried about Tiktok. It's a powerful tool in anyone's hands to shape Americans' thinking at scale. So is Facebook.
I remember once when the reporter Kara Swisher visited Facebook headquarters. To make a point about something unrelated, Facebook engineers changed an algorithm in front of her, quickly and easily, and the platform changed instantly. Facebook is where much of the January 6 insurrection was organized and earlier it's where Trump bought targeted advertising, counseled by Facebook staff, that helped him to win the presidency. Tiktok could do what Facebook did, except at the behest of the Chinese government and not because they wanted to impress a reporter.
But you know what else? American teens spend an average of 2 hours a day on YouTube. Luckily, nothing bad has ever happened there. 🙃
To me, these algorithms, coupled with floods of unchecked disinformation, are a huge risk to the upcoming US presidential election and to US democracy. Yes, Americans have a legal right to read propaganda, but to quote Yishan Wong, Quantity has a quality all its own. So yes, I'm worried about Tiktok. And I'm worried about Facebook. And YouTube. The closer you look at Tiktok, the scarier all these companies become. None of them are off the hook.
We finally have a promising comprehensive privacy bill being considered in US Congress that would regulate these companies. To me, the thing we (we, fans of privacy and human rights) should probably do is get behind it and push to make it stronger. Here is a great analysis of it by EFF. In the US, that means calling your member of Congress and Senators at (202) 224-3121 and saying that you're a constituent who supports APRA, the comprehensive privacy act. You can state ways you'd like to make it stronger, or you can leave it at that. Even if a Member of Congress already supports it, it helps them to be able to say their constituents favor it. Do the same for Maria Cantwell and Cathy McMorris Rodgers, who are sponsoring the bill. After that, there are probably more imaginative things you could do to demonstrate your support for comprehensive US privacy legislation, and I encourage you to do them. I'm a huge fan of privacy tools but here I think we also need laws.
If you don't live in the US and think, damn, the US is pathetic on privacy, that is very sad, I almost want to help them, I would say writing about the issue online can help (use the bill's proper name, the American Privacy Rights Act). If you talk to reporters, talk to reporters. Discuss it on whichever social media platform you may favor, if you can get traction there these days. It is almost a secret bill. There is not a giant uprising of support for it. But there could be.
On Tue, Apr 30, 2024 at 4:01 PM kaiser kuo <[email protected]> wrote:
Great point on TikTok, Richard, and one that I've brought up before in arguments: Why risk the destruction of the one Chinese social media app to gain traction outside of China when the valuable data is either out in the open — the TikTok content itself — or easily purchasable from brokers. But the even better point is this dynamic that Byron Tau wrote about and I hadn't thought about: how warrant-free access to data incentivizes maximum intrusiveness. The book goes on my list!
On Tue, Apr 30, 2024 at 12:26 PM Richard Brooks <[email protected]> wrote:
I enjoyed reading Byron Tau's "Means of
Control." In it a WSJ
journalist discusses tech, data, and
surveillance. He had
a lot of things I was not totally aware
of. I would say his
big point is that the US government
realized that you do
not need a warrant to buy data from
data brokers, which
lead to lots of companies competing to
be as invasive as
possible.
Hard to be optimistic, when the
Western vendors seem to
be intent on being more Orwellian than
the authoritarians.
I also got the impression that the
market will sell to anyone.
The idea of China using TikTok to spy
on Americans always
seemed kind of irrelevant. Why would
they invest money
in an app, when they can buy the data
already?
On 4/28/24 22:33, Kate Krauss wrote:
Are we too
techno-pessimistic?
I pulled out
this message from the introductions thread because it didn't
get a lot of attention when first posted, but it's fascinating
--thanks, Kaiser!
I feel ill-equipped to discuss this but I'll get the ball
rolling. Folks on this list? I'd love to hear what you
think about Kaiser's post (which is pasted below mine).
By 2013 and
the Snowden revelations, tech activists were realizing how
much both the US government, and as we already knew, platforms
like Facebook were surveilling our lives. (Snowden also
revealed how hard the NSA and GCHQ were going after Tor. And
they didn't get it, ha.)
I had also
seen, previously, pervasive, all-encompassing surveillance in
China of my activist friends. (They've stopped monitoring your
phone calls and they're sitting in your kitchen--not good). So
for me it was all of a piece, and I didn't have to imagine
what could go wrong if governments conducted unchecked
surveillance. And it motivated me to work on these issues.
Meanwhile, in
the wider US, in late 2015 Trump launched his presidential
campaign by demonizing immigrants, then loudly criticized and
sanctioned China's trade practices, and later he blamed COVID
on China. And by the middle of the pandemic, Asian people in
Philly were afraid to walk down the street. So a lot of racist
Americans who didn't know much about technology, IP, or China,
were mad at China. And there are always China hawks that
sincerely or exploitatively go after China in DC. But those
are different groups, obviously, than are on this list.
The people I
know who care about online privacy and digital rights believe
(and feel free to speak for yourselves) that if you want
privacy and human rights, you have to defend them, whether by
building online privacy tools, censorship circumvention tools,
or decentralized communications platforms, or educating people
in avoiding surveillance, or blurring out your house on Google
maps. You have to take action.
I myself also
think it's important to change laws and regulations, but you
still need the technology. I remember that Griffin Boyce and
others developed tools that made the Stop Online
Privacy Act impossible to enforce. Another lesson from SOPA:
Collective action can get the goods. (Thank you, Aaron
Swartz.)
So maybe we
are techno-optimists and techno-realists at the same time?
Mainstream Americans are still inured to a lack of privacy,
and that is very dangerous. However, they are now suspicious
of Facebook--and maybe that's a good thing.
This doesn't
mean that Chinese companies are always A+ and never steal IP.
I went to a lecture in 2018 or 2019 where a Chinese scholar
presented her research studying Chinese companies--and some of
them lacked research departments because they were "borrowing"
IP. Several things can be true at once.
Date: Mon, 22 Apr 2024 13:20:43 -0400
Subject: Re: [liberationtech] Liberation Tech would like a
word.
Thanks, Kate, for stepping up to revive this
effort — and for the low-key shout-out!
I've written and spoken quite a bit on the seemingly
sudden swing from the politically techno-utopian idea
still present in this listserv's name to the
techno-pessimism that seems so pervasive in discourse on
the relationship between technology and authoritarian
politics. We've gone, as I've often said, from believing
that the spread of digital technology sounded the death
knell for authoritarian governments to believing instead
that tech is the loyal handmaiden of authoritarians,
who've become adept at using them to suppress dissent and
other nefarious ends. To an extent, I get why this has
happened — the failure of the later color revolutions and
the Arab Spring, when we too-eagerly appended the names of
various American social media products to these
revolutions (the "Twitter Revolution," the "YouTube
Revolution," the "Facebook Revolution"); the Snowden
revelations about Prism; Russian meddling and Macedonian
troll farms; Cambridge Analytica, etc). I suppose some
humility about it was needed, but have we (i.e. the
national or "Western" conversation) overcorrected? I'd be
curious to hear from list members with experience in
different geographies to get their sense of how things
have played out in the last decade. I put the inflection
point at roughly 2016: that's when I started sensing the
dramatic narrative shift.
And I'm curious whether people think that's related to,
or completely independent from, another narrative shift
that seems to have been simultaneous when it comes,
specifically, to China: At about that same moment, the
narrative went from this disparagement of China's ability
to innovate (blaming, in most cases, the lack of free
information flows and academic freedom, and positing a
relationship between innovation and political freedom) to
a pervasive sense that China was out-innovating the U.S.
and was an unstoppable juggernaut ready to eat our lunch.
Obviously this latter narrative continues and has been
made worse in recent years.
Thanks! Once again, Kate, thanks for your efforts!!
- Kaiser
--
R. R. Brooks
Professor
(He/Him/His)
College of Engineering Computing and Applied Science
https://www.clemson.edu/cecas
Clemson University
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