EFF Opposes America's Proposed TikTok Ban (eff.org) 67
A new EFF web page is urging U.S. readers to "Tell Congress: Stop the TikTok Ban," arguing the bill will "do little for its alleged goal of protecting our private information and the collection of our data by foreign governments."
Tell Congress: Instead of giving the President the power to ban entire social media platforms based on their country of origin, our representatives should focus on what matters — protecting our data no matter who is collecting it... It's a massive problem that current U.S. law allows for all the big social media platforms to harvest and monetize our personal data, including TikTok. Without comprehensive data privacy legislation, this will continue, and this ban won't solve any real or perceived problems. User data will still be collected by numerous platforms and sold to data brokers who sell it to the highest bidder — including governments of countries such as China — just as it is now.
TikTok raises special concerns, given the surveillance and censorship practices of the country that its parent company is based in, China. But it's also used by hundreds of millions of people to express themselves online, and is an instrumental tool for community building and holding those in power accountable. The U.S. government has not justified silencing the speech of Americans who use TikTok, nor has it justified the indirect speech punishment of a forced sale (which may prove difficult if not impossible to accomplish in the required timeframe). It can't meet the high constitutional bar for a restriction on the platform, which would undermine the free speech and association rights of millions of people. This bill must be stopped.
TikTok raises special concerns, given the surveillance and censorship practices of the country that its parent company is based in, China. But it's also used by hundreds of millions of people to express themselves online, and is an instrumental tool for community building and holding those in power accountable. The U.S. government has not justified silencing the speech of Americans who use TikTok, nor has it justified the indirect speech punishment of a forced sale (which may prove difficult if not impossible to accomplish in the required timeframe). It can't meet the high constitutional bar for a restriction on the platform, which would undermine the free speech and association rights of millions of people. This bill must be stopped.
There needs to be a name for a rule (Score:4, Informative)
This will not ban TikTok. It will give the government more control over information.
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Despotic creep?
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Despotic creeps?
Re: There needs to be a name for a rule (Score:2)
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That's not what those words mean. You are watering down the horrors of those two ideologies in a way that I personally find offensive, as do many others.
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Most often, that name is "bipartisan". When both parties agree on something, that is usually a good indicator that the bill isn't actually going to do what it says on the front of the box.
No chance... (Score:4, Insightful)
protecting our data no matter who is collecting it
Nah, Google, Meta, Microsoft, et all will oppose that. Their pet politicians will therefore prevent any such effort.
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Look at how those companies are regulated in the EU. They oppose it, of course, but that doesn't prevent it happening or being effective.
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That's stupid even for an A/C post.
Re:They act like there are no alternatives. (Score:5, Insightful)
It addresses NO data collection problem. As a US citizen your data is available to anyone who wants it. You have no privacy rights. None.
This is the real message (Score:4, Interesting)
What the EFF is saying is what the mainstream media should be asking most openly. The media should all be asking, 'Why not?' This perspective is not voiced loud enough. The privacy and security risks of all (US) social media should be on the grindstone. And international concerns should closely follow.
Of course let's be realistic. The EU will lead the way sooner or later.
Re:This is the real message (Score:4, Insightful)
Basically what they're saying is that banning tiktok or forcing the sale of it to protect user data is a band-aid solution while the underlying problem remains. If the goal is to protect user data then the bill should be to protect user data (but of course US corps would lobby hard against that).
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Re: This is the real message (Score:4, Informative)
many people stupidly post their personal information to these platforms
It doesn't matter what people post. The value for these data slurpers is in getting people to install their app. Be it FB, Google, OneDrive or whatever Chinese app. One thing these apps all have in common is that, once installed, the apps upload location, contacts, active times - the whole shebang to homebase which can then sell it to whoever has a penny to spend. Insurance companies, mortgage brokers, ads for shoppers,..
As a neccesary side-effect, some people have to post or nobody would bother to install cos there'd be nothing to FOMO about.
(Oh wait. Your device runs an OEM version that has all these apps preinstalled. Good boy!)
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It's all a lie. (Score:4, Informative)
The company has too much "news" influence in the USA and that is why the politicians are upset. China could sway the public quickly in big ways the CIA can only dream of (but tries to do.) Nothing at present is being done but they fear it may. Getting flooded by irate users because of a mild message of protest has only made them fear it more. Any one of them can be destroyed with a MEME more than it can help them with one of their me,me, "look at me" self promotions.
Privacy is their excuse but they don't care about privacy other than for themselves and let Facebook continue to ruin the world.
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What makes you so sure nothing is being done with TikTok already to influence Americans?
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What makes you so sure nothing is being done with TikTok already to influence Americans?
Influencing Americans to do something other than vote the opposite of whichever of our two major parties are currently in power would be an improvement.
Or perhaps you were thinking at the state level, were no amount of idiocy by the party in power in deeply red and blue states can convince enough people to change their vote? A change in that behavior might be an improvement, too.
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Why would voting patterns be the only thing worth influencing? That's one of the least interesting things to influence for a foreign power.
Corrupting an entire culture is a much more powerful long term game. See what the Soviets had to say about that re: US culture.
If I was a foreign power the next random election is the last thing I'd worry about.
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TikTok does influence Americans, but not because of anything Bytedance or the CCP does.
It's the place where gen Z posts videos about socialism and worker's rights. Right wing videos do very poorly. Gen Z is just a more left leaning generation than the previous ones, which is hardly surprising given the situation with the labour market, with education, with property ownership and rent, and with climate change.
What the right wing politicians want is for TikTok to start influencing them to be more conservative
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Genz is not more left leaning because of gen z. Studies out in the last month show that around the western world, gen z females have shift far left while gen z male have shifted right, in some countries very far right. TikTok represents a mostly young female population not the population as a whole. Those conservative young men are not on TikTok posting or consuming left wing content.
Why do you then single out right wing politicians when the anti-TikTok sentiment is very bi-partisan in Congress? That's
Re:An lobbying operation funded by dataminers... (Score:5, Interesting)
If the EFF actually cared about freedom, they would want section 230 gutted.
No, that's what people who don't understand the internet want. One of two things happen without section 230:
1. Sites perform moderation and are held liable for all comments. The result of this will be the sites will not allow any comments (including messages boards like slashdot). Possibly some sites will have an option to review each one, but no company wants that liability.
2. Sites don't perform moderation and are not liable for comments. Without moderation, sites will become cesspools of spam and scammers while trolls run rampant. While this is typically what people with abhorrent views are in favor of, it will result in basically all message boards becoming unusable.
Option 3.
Sites perform reasonable moderation, but users are liable for what they post. This is what we have now and matches what public forum IRL are like. People have the freedom to post but with that freedom comes responsibility and consequences. One of those consequences is that they might not be allowed on that site anymore.
Re:An lobbying operation funded by dataminers... (Score:4, Insightful)
section 230 gutted. They would want liability added into the equation
I don't disagree but I have yet to hear a reasonable method of accomplishing both these goals that doesn't end with every site simply locking down their platforms to user content pretty much entirely. If I was operating a platform and I could be held liable for the speech users make on said platform, why would allow anyone to put me in such a bind?
What I would certainly agree with you on is a lot more transparency in how those TOS are enforced; ban's need human approval and official documentation that explains how said user violated the TOS with an official repeal process that is again, human observed and documented.
I just don't think stripping platforms of their liability shield is going to increase speech on the internet.
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An AC gave an interesting option [slashdot.org] I've never considered before. What if we allow the user to select from various open moderation algorithms? The user could turn it all off and thus see everything. They could choose to option to disable nazi bullshit, then maybe hate speech, then maybe various 3rd-party filters that tend to lean left, or right, or whatever. This sounds awesome to me -- I can tailor the filter based on my preferences, and I could even make my own. Maybe I want one based on keywords, but s
Sorry, but (Score:1)
...it looks like forcing a sale is popular with lawmakers of BOTH parties. That's rare. Tik as we know it is history.
Re: Sorry, but (Score:2)
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I couldn't say "all", but notable examples of bipartisan screwups include Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Patriot Act.
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This is horrible! Where will I get my cat and dance videos now??
EFF is policy driven just like the rest of the web (Score:1)
About Time! (Score:2, Funny)
This is about data soveriegnty (Score:3)
I know the US doesn't really respect the sovereignty of other nations, but that doesn't change the fact that this is about a state attempting some measure of control over who can easily data mine and propagandize its citizens.
It's not that the US shouldn't do this, it's that every single nation that is technologically capable of it should.
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How about the nation respects the sovereignty of their citizens and lets them use whatever services they want regardless of which country they're hosted?
I'd MUCH rather have my data mined by a country on the other side of the world that I have absolutely no plans to ever visit.
Ah yes, o
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Citizens don't have sovereignty. You give that up to be part of a larger society that gives you the ability to live at a higher standard of living than "stone age hunter-gatherer".
I agree with your second point at the personal level. It remains a bad idea at the state level.
I'm sure the state would love to be the sole provider of propaganda, however, in most non-totalitarian states with Western values like freedom of the press, this is hardly the case. The point is to make it more difficult for Putin or
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Every wannabe-dictator on the planet dreams that their citizens adopt the mindset that the only rights they have are what the government feels fit to bestow upon them.
That would be great, but how can you go about enforcing that without encroaching on the free speech rights of your own citizens on a platform that's meant for the exchange of information across the world? This is an extremely slip
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>Every wannabe-dictator on the planet dreams that their citizens adopt the mindset that the only rights they have are what the government feels fit to bestow upon them.
How do you think governments work? We collectively agree to submit to authority in return for a greater ability to cooperate. In a functional democracy, the rights we have are agreed to by the people, and if we want more we elect people who will add more to those currently enumerated in our laws.
If you think you have sovereignty, I invit
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You have rights backwards. Right are boundless and then subtracted from by enumeration.
Examples of enumerated limitations:
1) you can't murder other people
2) you can't steal from other people
3) you can't drive above the speed limit
In your world, we only have the right granted to us by the government. Those are not rights. You are describing privileges which can be granted or taken away by our masters.
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Uh, the speeds are posted. For everyone. Dumb.
Cops commit crimes. Those are crimes. Not rights or privileges. Dumb.
You're a clown, AC.
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Agreed. And in a functioning democracy, when we disagree with our government we're able to let them know without fear of reprisal. The way that the U.S. government is working so hard to make sure that there isn't a single social media network that isn't within their purview is extremely disconcerting for people who value the ability to speak out against the things the U.S. governmen
Here is an idea (Score:2)
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The internet already did that - it didn't seem to work.
Anything with that many users... (Score:2)
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So what's best for this country is to become like China? A bit ironic don't you think?
Effing embarrassing (Score:5, Interesting)
Anyone who thinks this is about stopping anyone from tracking someone has lost the plot. TikTok is a foreign instrument of manipulation. It will be banned or neutered. Trying to oppose this and use the matter to get data privacy instead is cringeworthy.
Not even what the ban is about (Score:4, Insightful)
I usually side with EFF on most issues, but this is just idiotic misunderstanding. I work in IT security... this ban is about so much more. TikTok is under control of a hostile foreign government. It has already been proven to be a spy application. Because of upgrade policy on most devices, they have been proven to push special updates to only specific devices, they have been proven to be using negative usage statistics to identify points of interest... for example, when thousands or hundreds of thousands of devices are using the app with gps enabled, but right in the middel of a large city there is a dead spot where no one with TikTok is allowed to go, these areas become points of interest without actually providing a single bit of data from within that point of interest. This software is also utilized to push foreign agendas. There is so much wrong with this app being used within our borders and it needs to not be here. Framing this simply in the eye of the users privacy is disingenuous.
Sure, buy why **now**? (Score:2)
A more important question for me is WHY PRECISELY NOW and WHO IS DRIVING this ban.
It is rare to see such an overwhelming bi-partisan uproar when it comes to suppressing any kind of social media.
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If the concern is location data, why not simply ban the collection of location data?
It's a permission on Android and iOS, so it can be enforced easily. Speaking of permissions, the TikTok app only asks for approximate location, which Google says is at best about 3 square kilometres, so points of interest are going to be pretty large and vague. Users can always simply refuse to grant the permission too, it's an optional one.
https://play.google.com/store/... [google.com]
Why does it need a total ban?
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Who needs to collect location data?
Send back the name of the SSID you're on, and all the SSIDs you see, and look them up in a ssid geolocation database.
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This may come as a shock, but the developers of Android and iOS are not idiots. They don't allow apps without the location permissions to access the list of visible SSIDs or the SSID that the device is connected to. They also don't allow Bluetooth scans or anything else that might reveal your location, save the user entering it manually.
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Since you seem knowledgable, I honestly have to ask this boomer-sounding question: Why does anyone install the Tiktok, Facebook, or Reddit apps on their phone? People send me tiktok links and Google gives me tiktok links, and they work just fine. I get it if someone is a creator -- but for the majority of people they just browse. Isn't the browser sufficient? I don't even have an account -- what am I missing? Having visited the site plenty of times in a private window, I've never found any reason to en
DO IT (Score:2)
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Finally someone with reason (Score:2)
We should always beware of anyone who tells us that what they're doing is in the interests of national security. This is something we do not want to copy the likes of China, and yet our governments and people are just as susceptible to it, and too many jumps onto the bandwagon of the witch hunt.
Tiktok and social media is not a matter of national security, it's a matter of data privacy. We shouldn't be targeting a single company because of their origin and their owners, we should be putting in place laws and
Read Between the Lines (Score:4, Informative)
It is not about data harvesting. It is about control of the information diet of 60% of Americans under 30. The completely opaque algorithm TikTok uses could clearly be exploited to do many things including:
* Sowing distrust of US institutions
* Bending US opinion toward geopolitical outcomes that benefit the interest of China
* Fomenting belief that US elections are rigged
In fact the timing of the US elections in November are almost certainly a factor in the September deadline given in the bill.
Does the EFF really not see this?
For whatever reason the bill does not explicitly say that China is controlling the weltanschauung of US youth. But come on, read between the lines. The government obviously has no issue with the leak of private info on citizens. Or at least is too incompetent to worry about that, as evidenced by many articles here on Slashdot. The crucial issue is control of media messaging.
But it's not a ban (Score:2)
It's a gambit to get Congress to pass a law giving control of Tiktok to Steve Mnuchin, house of Saud, and players to be named later. Eff that.
As the old poem goes... (Score:2)
And I did not speak out
Because I didn't like Tiktok nor China
Privacy is a distracting strawman (Score:1)
Surveillance and the collection of your data serve as mere instruments; the true ambition lies in embedding a particular ideology within the confines of your consciousness. TikTok is not about read access; it is CCP's root access to your brain.
Only Uncle Sam Should Spy On You (Score:1)