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Chinese spies saying hi to 5 Eyes spies while they all watch me watch funny videos on the clock app
"Morning, Sam."
"Morning, Ralph."
Why can't we just push politicians to have privacy laws?
I understand that the 5 eyes, China, Russia, Israel, and all our mothers want to spy on us, but surely the average citizen is willing to protest to push to have our personal privacy protected from all governments?
Canada doesn’t have spies as a moral country. Even it has, it’s all for the sake of goodness. 5 eyes for the good ness.
No, the average citizen doesn't really think of the repercussions that surveillance has. Snowden blew this wide open years ago and not a single thing changed. I think that made them more brazen if anything. They realized we don't care.
Hell, the liberals recently tabled an online harms bill that would give police the power to "retroactively" search someone's social media history and charge them for things they said before the law was enacted. And also charge people who are "likely" to commit a "future" offense. It's so crazy im pretty positive it won't get passed. Their bill uses the term "harmful speech" which they don't clearly define. The fact they attempted to do this says it all. These are their intentions. This is why they spy on us.
The average person just says "oh I have nothing to hide, I don't care, it doesn't affect me" while not even considering the question of "why".
Once they have total surveillance in place it opens the door for basically anything. Even if it wasn't being misused right now (it is) whose to say the government 10,15,20 years from now won't use it to silence any, and all dissent.
Justin Trudeau said he admired China's authoritarianism. It shouldn't be hard to see where they want this to go.
The scariest part is even if the future governments are inherently good - they will always have this temptation in front of them.
And when Canadians get together en mass and protest peacefully to ask for change - they get demonized, jailed and have their bank accounts frozen. Many have been "de-banked" entirely meaning they cannot even use a Canadian bank account.
Call me a conspiracy theorist but what is stopping the government from "de-banking" people who post dissenting opinions online? Especially if they have an intentionally vague definition of "harmful speech". Based on what we've seen over the last 10 years, that seems likely to me
Or try to change your mind on things by bias for their own interests. Which if you ask the average person living under the CCP isnt good.
Yeah. Even ask the average person in like any country including ours where we are being spied on by our government.
People already know this but are obsessed with making and watching pointless shit. So they'll just keep using it.
The irony of saying this on Reddit of all places, you know tencents main goal is to steal data right? Nobody cares because realistically none of us have any interesting data to steal
Comment deleted by user
Right? There’s a reason that companies pay for that data. There’s basically an entire industry around data collection. Clearly there’s money in it.
The main reason is it allows companies to more effectively market their products to the right target audience.
If it costs you $10 for 10000 views of ad, but you can make sure the only people who view that ad already like products similar, or maybe better yet people who have lots of money, havnt bought one in 5 years and a new tech came out Making it popular again.
because people think about individual data, which is pointless. They don't think "oooh, tencent gets to get personalized data to sell to XYZ in order for that entity to tailor their propaganda for an entire foreign population".
The article is literally warning people about being individually targeted.
I will never be in the crosshairs of the Chinese Government and there's nothing they can crawl through Tiktok that can hurt me anyways. So yes I'm going to continue consuming the free dank memes and healthy recipes at the risk of some foreign government using information gathered from my app usage to push propaganda at some undefined time.
Aggregate information is way more revealing than you think.
Oh i totally get the irony of posting it on Reddit. But other than the apparently evil Wall Street bets subreddit, you dont really hear about Reddit in the news as you do about X, IG, or Tiktok
Well, I mean... They are stealing something valuable from you. They steal your privacy and sell it and make millions. Imagine if you got paid for the data and privacy they steal from you.
Wouldn't it be nice to be able to opt-in and get a 5000 dollar direct deposit every year for the privacy and data that was stolen from you and sold for a profit?
They are taking away one of your fundamental rights as a human being, and selling it for money. And YOU get jack shit for it. In fact, the cost of everything keeps going up.
That's what pisses me off the most. These companies are getting rich by stealing. This shit used to be illegal. Now it's an entire industry.
One day, your entire 50,000 page Google profile will be for sale. Job interviews probably won't even exist at some ppint.You'll just get "selected" by an algorithm that combs through data.
I say this, because we accept anything and everything. And if we don't accept it, it doesn't matter. When's the last time a protest accomplished something?
My individual privacy is not being sold for millions.
That payment would be a lot less than what it would cost to subscribe to another media service. A lifetime of my data is probably worth less than 10$.
Don't threaten me with a good time.
It's not the same. Tencent stealing marketing data is not the same as China having potential security flaws exploited in your phone. It's entirely possible China has a database of all Tiktok users, scored by something similar to social credit - and fed content that aligns with China's policies dependent on it.
Tencent is a shareholder, on a form meant for discussion, where people are pretty openly critical of China. With offices in the US, and Americans familiar with the source code, who aren't beholden to the CCP. Bytedance is not that.
It's not about your secrets anyways - it's about analyzing your opinions and tendencies, and then giving you carefully crafted propaganda. Listening to conversations of those around you - hoping you know someone in the military, in the private arms sector, in the financial sector. Someone mention a password to their hospital computer - which then gets fed to their hacking department - a thing we know exists so assuredly, we even know the building they're in.
At least Reddit is a resource to access information, do some reading, and occasionally have an intelligent discussion. Tik Tok is instructional material for Zoomers who eat tide pods for breakfast.
You have no clue what TikTok is for. TikTok is more educational than reddit if you want it to be. Reddit is a porn site for a large share of users.
The whole TikTok is spying on you shit is such blatant falling for propaganda by out of touch boomers and outcast millennials.
Tik Tok presents dangerous misinformation to the most gullible, knowledge-averse generation in our nation’s history. It’s irresponsible to allow this sort of vile content to influence our most vulnerable citizens.
The problem is the CCP manipulating the lens at which you see the world. Ask the average person living under the CCP their views on them...if you can.
Reminds me of Halloween 3...
Because it's a billion-dollar advertising industry. There's a reason why TikTok is free. The user is the product. We're allowing espionage to happen because we don't want companies to lose money selling advertisements.
I went to a conference in 2019 in Silicon Valley and one of the presentations was on big data and how a company aggregates data from multiple sources and draws inferences from it about you and tuen creates a product. This is one of many products out there operating on the open market. TikTok is the least of your worries. Anyone can buy your data.
Also, just like YouTube or Reddit, there's mindless content on TikTok as well as informative content. There are so many creators out there from many professions, sharing lots of informative content on TikTok. Topics like basic science, astronomy, anthropology, ancestry, history, small business, current events etc.
The problem is not the data. The problem is a foreign government which we have security concerns with, can use it to manipulate people against our goverment.
Our government? Have you watched the food prices soar? Have you watch our economy deteriorating before your eyes? China doesn’t need to spy on lowly Canada trust me, they have bigger fish to fry
That's a very broad take. There are plenty of things that Canada has to offer China. But that all ignores the very basic fact that it is public FACT that they are doing it. The Supreme court states this, the thousands of Canadian citizens who have reported incidents state this, the RCMP state this, Provincial government state this, Allied countries State this, The Five Eyes state this, OUR OWN INTELLIGENCE AGENCY STATES THIS.
Do you deny China is spying on our nation and considers itself at war with Canada?
Exactly! Sadly, certain groups feel it's necessary to be see & be seen. If you drop a pin or check in everywhere on social media; do you think that that isn't tracked? Check your setting children. Do you use plastic pay? Tracked. Go to the ATM? Tracked. Use a loyalty card? Tracked. Order something on Amazon? You see what I'm saying? I use a VPN & I use a whole host of online malware, Spyware and an anti-virus suite. I'm not that interesting.
TikTok works by repeating a lie. Repeating a truth ought to have some effect.
I think people know it for the phones they make too but it's cheaper than apple with a great camera
Facebook hands your data to the NSA and allow them to spy on us in our own country, they also give you information to companies to cold call us. I’m more afraid of that then china, I’m sorry
Because you have the answers to life’s point, right bud? Go crack a brewski and watch the Canucks game. Your life is soooo much more full of non pointless activities woowww good job bud
Lots of people make money on Tik Tok. Anybody worth spying on is already getting the shit spied out of them. Don't like it, don't use SM period. End of story.
it's not just spying. It's also a serious national security concern to have an adversary control your media.
So we should ban Facebook and Reddit?
Is Facebook owned by a foreign adversary?
No, those are not from governments we have security concerns with.
I mean the world would probably be a better place if they didn't exist...
The main worry is foreign governments undermining the interests of our goverment. A security concern. There have been examples of TikTok being used as such already.
Ahaha! I rather give it to tic toc then facebook
I hope they don’t control the camera. They are getting a good understanding of my bathroom habits!
None of the TikTok users will see this news unless it's posted on Tiktok.
Correct. And Mark Zuckerberg can use Facebook to spy on you too. Which can then by sold legally to any paying customer, like China.
Does Facebook sell user data to China?
The Canadian and US governments can have way more of a tangible impact on your daily life than China. Facebook selling your data should far more concerning to you than TikTok doing the same. Let me add that I despise surveillance capitalism and think it should be criminalized outright, but I do not appreciate the false notion that being spied on is a problem only when the spy is foreign
Agreed, but does Facebook sell your data to China? Also I am just saying it's a BIGGER problem when you are being spied on and influenced by a foreign adversary.
I agree with you completely.
That's not what the problem IS though. The problem is the goverment of China, the CCP using TikTok to manipulate people against their own goverments.
Sure, they can have a more tangible impact on my daily life than reducing my dietary intake of sugar, too, that doesn't mean it's not a good idea.
It's a much bigger problem when the spy is foreign and actively trying to dismantle western society and democracy as we know it.
Like nobody is worried about being spied on by Germany or France.
Companies have been collecting publicly available information, databases it, and selling to to advertising companies for decades.
That is not the problem.
The problem is foreign governments manipulating people against our goverment. Which they have already done at small scale.
I completely agree
But our goverment doesn't have a security concern with Mark or Facebook. They do have security concerns with the CCP government of China. They can use TikTok to manipulate people against our goverment, and have already done so.
Mark Zuckerberg didn't use a then-unknown security exploit in the Android OS to collect my MAC address to uniquely identify my physical device.
But more importantly, Mark Zuckerberg doesn't want to ban the free press, or make it illegal for me to criticize the federal government.
You might have an argument if you compared it to Trump and Truth Social though.
Every time these Tiktok threads come up, a whole bunch of users who don't normally post to r/canada show up to bombard me with disingenuous "both sides are the same arguments" with regard to Tiktok, and they're disingenuous because we've known for years that Tiktok is way, way worse. It's a firehose of falsehood to have to constantly keep correcting these people over and over and over again over years, and we just can't keep up.
But IMO, the bigger problem isn't that Tiktok is spying or that they're pushing propaganda through it. The bigger problem is that millions of people saw what happened with Brexit and Trump and people trusting unverified anonymous Youtube accounts over reputable mainstream media, and instead of learning from those mistakes, they went "yes, I'd like to also become just like them", and started to trust Tiktok over reputable news outlets like AFP.. That's not something we can fix by just banning Tiktok, they'll just flood Youtube next. That's something we have to fix at home.
Ironic to say on r/canada
I'm well aware of the daily Toronto Sun articles at the top of the feed, one thing at a time here.
The “both sides”-ing of this is rampant on all socal platforms and is brigaded from TikTok.
Reputable and mainstream media in the same sentence…tough sell
Reputable as in they have a reputation. Like when CBC tells me "This is a video from Gaza, showing the suffering of Palestinians", their description of the contents of that video is much more likely to be accurate than when a random video on Tiktok does it, where it is more likely to be a Russian propaganda bot posting scenes from their war in Syria and mislabelling it as Gaza.
That doesn't mean everything mainstream media says is true or that you should always believe them or that they won't omit or obscure information.
It just means the information they present is more likely to be true.
It doesn't mean if you get your information from a non-mainstream source that it's all lies and propaganda. Just that you should view it with greater skepticism, since they don't have any reputation or history for you to rely on instead.
The same skepticism should be applied across the board. Mainstream media either lies overtly or by omission.
I don't understand the spying angle - tons of articles saying how it's dangerous but none explain actually how
Even this article says that its dangerous because when these kids grow up china will have all sorts of info on then and this can be dangerous if they travel the world - what?
What exactly does this mean? How is it dangerous that china knows what websites you go to?
It's certainly wrong and annoying and dumb - but I am more and more suspicious of these claims that lack justification stating that this is some security threat, also all the while relationships with china erode. It feels like protectionism of US tech vs china
It would seem there is an extremely remote chance that China could use any information gathered through this to gain leverage on someone, and even more remote that they could actually filter through what must be a gigantic database of noise to even derive that leverage.
The TikTok app logs all of your telemetry, not just your browsing history.
I googled this word - it means location data right?
Again, while a total intrusion, why is it dangerous that a tech company knows where a person has been? What is the actual "danger" about that?
Telemetry is everything that your phone is transmitting. TikTok logs everything - your contacts, browsing history, location data, call data and length, app usage, etc. These disparate pieces of information can be used to infer patterns and behaviours. Individually, it may not seem significant, but if you consider it on the level of populations, it becomes insidious.
Meta, Google, Amazon, they all track that stuff to some degree, but they are also bound by US law, as well as the laws of any country they operate in. TikTok sends all this data to servers in China, where the CCP is allowed to access it. ByteDance employees used the app to spy on journalists.
Notably, TikTok isn't even used in China, because China restricts almost all Western apps from operating there. There is a similar app, Douyin, which shows its users vastly different types of content.
This app is dangerous, especially for children and teenagers.
This is your misconception, that everyone is such a unique individual that all of that data will just be noise. This is the farthest thing from the truth, people are extremely homogeneous for the most part and when you have huge aggregating sets of data, extremely obvious patterns form within. Its those patterns that are potentially problematic for a adversary to own and know about. If they know what makes a population tick (if they have all of that data over a long period of time its easy to do things to see how the reaction shifts) then they can effectively point the population in one direction or another by showing or hiding specific content.
Agreed 100% - for sure about aggregating the data to draw patterns that could be exploited at a population level
But I take the articles mention of danger to specific to the individual.
"Most people can say, 'Why is it a big deal for a teenager now to have their data [on TikTok]?' Well in five years, in 10 years, that teenager will be a young adult, will be engaged in different activities around the world," he told host Catherine Cullen.
"If you are, for whatever reason, getting in the crosshairs of the [People's Republic of China], they will have a lot of information about you."
He's talking about danger to the individual - which is where my confusion lies - what actual real physical danger on such a degree to prompt the country-wide banning of this app could this be? I am yet to read an actual example from any of these articles
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambridge_Analytica#Elections
It’s also like, all companies spy on us to make money, our own governments spy on us and manipulate us for power, our friends and family spy on us for gossip and power, places of employment spy on us to make sure we don’t organize and keep our wages low, like it has kinda become meaningless to be spied on. May as well just do whatever I was going to do and not care about being spied on. The amount of effort it would take to not be spied on is ridiculous. I’m too poor for them to really steal anything of value from me, if it’s not them trying to stealing its a company/service over changing me and stealing it all away. So like wtf does it even matter anymore?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambridge_Analytica#Elections
It could matter to you on a personal level because when something happens in your city, that's bad, like maybe a police officer shooting someone. They use that opportunity to spread the negative message as far as possible, not to get justice, but to undermine our trust in our own authority.
Even if it turned out the officer who was punished turned out to be innocent.
This is a goverment that sees itself at war with us already. There's no end to the manipulation, just ask the average person living under the CCP, if you can.
This isn't new.
CSIS has been saying this for years.
My robot dance moves!
This has been known for years.
lol “can”. Why not just say “does”
lol .. everyone is being “watched” all the time so long you are using smart phones! Our data is being sold at an unbelievable rate daily… that’s just the new world! 🤷♂️
My music taste alone is so all over the place it's probably costing Spotify more than they make trying to make an algorithm for my likes.
Just be completely unhinged and your data is useless to these companies 😎😎😎
Haha exactly the one difference might be that they don't have to pay tik tok for our info. Every tech companies are in bed with China snyway.
Really no different than Facebook or Google but 🇺🇸
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/02/08/tiktok-shares-your-data-more-than-any-other-social-media-app-study.html
CNBC is not objective nor credible.
I think when compared to all the other options, they're a hell of a lot more credible and objective than anonymous accounts on Tiktok.
But even a cursory look at the article would have shown you CNBC was merely reporting on the results of another study, and we don't have to rely on CNBC's objectivity or credibility to trust the results of this study.
Feel free to link the study.
None of the tracking people are concerned about can be traced by some study. Google, MS, Facebook, etc are all complicit in backdoor deals with Five Eyes/US gov. Tik tok is the same but with China instead. Some publically seen ad trackers are just the surface.
The difference is that America are our allies, with shared cultural, economic, and political principles. We already share all of our intelligence with the Five Eyes.
China is not an ally, and we don’t share anything with them.
Lmao intelligence is not too intelligent ig. Why was this shittok banned in India and many other countries? 😂
Similar to the US, this constant fear mongering and petitioning to ban Tiktok is nothing more than normalizing censorship. There has so far been no real evidence that China is actively spying on TikTok users. It's a convenient excuse to push a ban - that and saying that it's eroding the mental health of children (oh won't somebody PLEASE think of the children!).
If you are a TikTok user, you are aware how fast information spreads on this app and know exactly what is happening with these bans. If you are not a Tiktok user, you probably think the app is full of silly videos and stupid dances...and that's what MSM and governments want you to believe.
It's actually a lot of talking head videos of thoughtful discussions about what is going on in the world right now, and this is problematic for a government that can't control the app. Why do you think the US pushed this ban so quickly during an election year?
Governments are (and should be) concerned by Tiktok because it totally gives people the freedom to express their views and share information that is actively suppressed by MSM. I constantly see information and events on Tiktok that I then see in the regular news sometimes a week later...again, information spreads like wild fire on there and can't be controlled the same way it is on Meta.
I am a bit older than the average age of the Tiktok users, but I can also tell you that the young people on that app are ANGRY with the state of the world right now. These young folks are actively encouraging each other to boycott, block and question those in positions of power and authority, and other things that don't align with their values. And it's not being done in a hateful way either - it boils down to people being frustrated with the cost of living, corruption, the negatives of late-stage capitalism...things that young people shouldn't have to be talking or worrying about. One could also argue that class consciousness is starting to take form on this app. This is absolutely a problem for a government when they can't control this app.
On the flip, is China possibly actively encouraging these sentiments and this type of content on the app to de-stabalize western powers and culture? Honestly, probably! But the points and feelings that these young folks have are valid.
At the end of the day, it's censorship no matter which way you look at it. And we as Canadians really need to put our fucking foot down about these kinds of things.
This is what the ban is about. From my perspective as a father who had a teenager using Tik Tok, I found it to be highly influential on her beliefs and habits. I could literally tell the day a new trend was gaining traction as that is what her mind was focused on. It took many conversations and education for her to see the issues she was talking about from different sides and in the end it didn't seem healthy the amount of time that was devoted to looking at the screen. No Tik Tok until she is older.
All social media is a problem, but social media with the ability to influence young minds from across the world and across the many differences in our cultures and values is a bit of a stretch for me as well. I don't think there is enough information to give social media carte blanche on attention of our people.
You are a good parent for monitoring her usage of social media, and your concerns about how social media can influence young minds are absolutely warranted. On top of just being incredibly addictive (dopamine overload is not good for developing minds), social media requires a lot of media literacy and discretion to use (for lack of a better term) safely which is something that must be taught and reinforced in young people. Letting kids scroll endlessly on social media in general is definitely a recipe for disaster.
I just don't think that the government should really have a say on the matter without calling it direct censorship. It really should be up to the parents to control how their kids are using social media, and let the rest of the adult Canadians determine how they want to use it. Tiktok is no worse than any other platform, and any of the expressed concerns the government has about Tiktok are not well founded...speculation and fear-mongering. This quote in the article reads like propaganda, "They're using big data analytics, they have amazing computer farms crunching the data, they are developing artificial intelligence ... based on using this data,"
Like, we don't think the US government and big tech like Google and Meta aren't doing the exact same thing with everybody else's data? And we are just suppose to assume that this data collection is totally okay and not at all even slightly nefarious because it's going into the hands of Western governments and tech giants? Any of this unbridled data collection is bad no matter who it's going to, but the lame rationales and hypocrisy doesn't justify censorship in a seemingly democratic nation.
I would say that the qualifier of western governments and non-western governments is enough for me to believe that our government should intervene on our behalf. Just like we ask our government to form relations with foreign governments that don't have a natural connection to the people, we should allow them to make determinations based on their expertise and experience. Western cultures are easier for us to reciprocate with on civil level, we share language and trade and a host of other things with American people, for example. The governments set up the framework but we mostly just do our own thing and its easy because the people are very much like us and share a lot of cultural similarities.
I am as anti-censorship as it comes but I think having barriers to foreign influence are going to be essential in the future as we become a technologically smaller world.
Plus, there is zero reciprocity from the Chinese on this. They ban a very large swath of foreign technology and information from their citizens. If we were worried about censorship as a whole across all people in the world I don't think the Tik Tok ban hits the top 10 list of things that need to be looked at.