Did the US Government Ignore a Chance to Make TikTok Safer? (yahoo.com) 59
"To save itself, TikTok in 2022 offered the U.S. government an extraordinary deal," reports the Washington Post.
The video app, owned by a Chinese company, said it would let federal officials pick its U.S. operation's board of directors, would give the government veto power over each new hire and would pay an American company that contracts with the Defense Department to monitor its source code, according to a copy of the company's proposal. It even offered to give federal officials a kill switch that would shut the app down in the United States if they felt it remained a threat.
The Biden administration, however, went its own way. Officials declined the proposal, forfeiting potential influence over one of the world's most popular apps in favor of a blunter option: a forced-sale law signed last month by President Biden that could lead to TikTok's nationwide ban. The government has never publicly explained why it rejected TikTok's proposal, opting instead for a potentially protracted constitutional battle that many expect to end up before the Supreme Court... But the extent to which the United States evaluated or disregarded TikTok's proposal, known as Project Texas, is likely to be a core point of dispute in court, where TikTok and its owner, ByteDance, are challenging the sale-or-ban law as an "unconstitutional assertion of power."
The episode raises questions over whether the government, when presented with a way to address its concerns, chose instead to back an effort that would see the company sold to an American buyer, even though some of the issues officials have warned about — the opaque influence of its recommendation algorithm, the privacy of user data — probably would still be unresolved under new ownership...
A senior Biden administration official said in a statement that the administration "determined more than a year ago that the solution proposed by the parties at the time would be insufficient to address the serious national security risks presented. While we have consistently engaged with the company about our concerns and potential solutions, it became clear that divestment from its foreign ownership was and remains necessary."
"Since federal officials announced an investigation into TikTok in 2019, the app's user base has doubled to more than 170 million U.S. accounts," according to the article.
It also includes this assessment from Anupam Chander, a Georgetown University law professor who researches international tech policy. "The government had a complete absence of faith in [its] ability to regulate technology platforms, because there might be some vulnerability that might exist somewhere down the line."
The Biden administration, however, went its own way. Officials declined the proposal, forfeiting potential influence over one of the world's most popular apps in favor of a blunter option: a forced-sale law signed last month by President Biden that could lead to TikTok's nationwide ban. The government has never publicly explained why it rejected TikTok's proposal, opting instead for a potentially protracted constitutional battle that many expect to end up before the Supreme Court... But the extent to which the United States evaluated or disregarded TikTok's proposal, known as Project Texas, is likely to be a core point of dispute in court, where TikTok and its owner, ByteDance, are challenging the sale-or-ban law as an "unconstitutional assertion of power."
The episode raises questions over whether the government, when presented with a way to address its concerns, chose instead to back an effort that would see the company sold to an American buyer, even though some of the issues officials have warned about — the opaque influence of its recommendation algorithm, the privacy of user data — probably would still be unresolved under new ownership...
A senior Biden administration official said in a statement that the administration "determined more than a year ago that the solution proposed by the parties at the time would be insufficient to address the serious national security risks presented. While we have consistently engaged with the company about our concerns and potential solutions, it became clear that divestment from its foreign ownership was and remains necessary."
"Since federal officials announced an investigation into TikTok in 2019, the app's user base has doubled to more than 170 million U.S. accounts," according to the article.
It also includes this assessment from Anupam Chander, a Georgetown University law professor who researches international tech policy. "The government had a complete absence of faith in [its] ability to regulate technology platforms, because there might be some vulnerability that might exist somewhere down the line."
Re: It is not about TikTok. It's about total contr (Score:4, Insightful)
>> it's about control
Maybe its about national security. And then all kinds of social apps are banned in China so they should expect no sympathy from the USA.
Re: It is not about TikTok. It's about total cont (Score:4, Informative)
TikTok is. The one owned by China and which funnels all it's useful information to the Chinese government.
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so you say this is banned in china? https://www.douyin.com/ [douyin.com]
you should tell that to its nearly three quarters of a billion users.
and your comment is +5 informative ... comedy gold. :O)
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Douyin and TikTok are not the same. Those pretending they are are nothing but shills for the CCP.
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you double down. why am i not surprised ...
ok, so ... when was tiktok banned in china exactly?
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TikTok isn't banned in China, it works just fine. It's not available on the Chinese app stores because they have a domestic version, to keep the two populations apart because... Well, let's just say it would be all out war if they didn't.
But TikTok works just fine, if you grab an APK and install it, or take your phone with it already installed to China, there is no block. Same with Apple and Microsoft services. Google ones are blocked because they do not abide by Chinese domestic laws.
Also, the Chinese vers
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>> What apps, exactly, are banned in China
You listed several, and I have zero interest in your crap.
Re: It is not about TikTok. It's about total contr (Score:5, Informative)
Oh my, this is about as uninformed as you get. I work in IT security and have worked at companies that are under Homeland Security audits, so have been privvy to information about HOW TikTok spies on the US via this application. The first is the ban itself, which is exactly what they wanted. This allows spying without even anything bad in the source code. Because of the ban on using TikTok on government devices, combined with the fact that TikTok uses gps, they have the ability to use aggregate data to identify locations of interest. Say a building in New York city where there is a dead spot with no TikTok users for example. Also, just because the source code for every normal person is clean, the app itself can be used to push TEMPORARY escalation attacks to do things to specific people for short periods of time, then remove, while the regular TikTok app for the majority of userbase is still confirmed as a non-threat. People that say things like this post that I replied to are absolutely clueless about security, I hope this made you think a bit and learn something.
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I work in IT security and have worked at companies that are under Homeland Security audits, so have been privvy to information
judging from your description of the security implications ... you were the janitor, right?
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I agree the dead spot idea is a threat, though I'm not sure it's nearly as big a threat as you make it out to be.
a) At least on Android the default is for location sharing only when you're using the app. There's probably a lot of offices with no TikTok users, at least during work hours. The dead spot approach creates a lot of false positives.
b) Employees don't always pay attention to bans, meaning a lot of false negatives as well.
c) They'd already know the location of most government offices (from the phone
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Doesn't your phone allow you to simply decline the location permission?
In any case, the TikTok app for Android doesn't even request GPS permissions: https://play.google.com/store/... [google.com]
Click on the arrow next to "About this app" and then scroll down and click on "permissions". If it could access GPS it would say "precise location". It has "approximate location", but that is one you have to affirmatively grant it access to after installation.
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Are you really implying that an app under control of the chinese government should be up to the users to choose to disable GPS?
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Are you really implying that the GPS permission can be subverted? I'm sure Facebook would like a word with you.
Re: It is not about TikTok. It's about total cont (Score:1)
Re: It is not about TikTok. It's about total cont (Score:5, Insightful)
Trump joined. Now Biden will have to ban it.
A few facts...
First, Biden signed the sell-or-ban TikTok law before Trump joined TikTok. [npr.org]
Second, the Biden-Harris campaign is already on TikTok [ny1.com] but presumably would leave if it gets banned.
Third, Trump joined TikTok even though he himself wanted to ban it while he was president. [nbcnews.com]
Ignore? How about "following the law"? (Score:2)
The U.S. government doesn't have the kind of control that would have allowed such a thing. Maybe TikTok was working under Chinese law, and felt American law was the same?
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In my opinion, I would like to see everyone butt out of the business and raise awareness of the users that perhaps everything they are reading shouldn't be treated as the truth.
You must have just woken from a coma. Had you been awake in 2020-2021, you'd know no amount of telling people what they were reading and being told was false had any effect.
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The U.S. government doesn't have the kind of control that would have allowed such a thing. Maybe TikTok was working under Chinese law, and felt American law was the same?
There are special agreements called "consent decrees" which allow you to agree almost anything as long as the two parties are happy with that. Lots of things could be agreed and written down in such an agreement. Probably what Bytedance was proposing could fit within such a scheme.
I think the problem is different. If they were talking about "source code" instead of about administration then it sounds very much like an agreement which was designed to seem to address the issues that the US admin was talking a
Re: Ignore? How about "following the law"? (Score:1)
The problem here is that the US government canâ(TM)t run a for-profit business as they proposed. Iâ(TM)m sure ByteDance is aware of this and the proposal was just a sham for some quick media influence and look, it worked.
Had they operated ByteDance in the way proposed, the next question would be what branch of the government and what agency would run it, a special set of laws would have to be crafted. Would ByteDance, being a subsidiary of the federal government now be subject to FOIA requests as
I don't think it matters (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:I don't think it matters (Score:5, Insightful)
Governments shouldn't have that kind of influence over anything. Including forcing sales.
if that were the case the U.S. woudl probably still have only one phone company.
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>> than I am about China having it
So the Chinese government has the best interests at heart for US citizens just as much as the US government does?
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Governments shouldn't have that kind of influence over anything.
You're begging the question: why should they not?
Re: I don't think it matters (Score:2)
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That's not a reason, that's just a statement of opinion without any reasoning behind it.
The government interfering, sometimes a lot, is why you can live productively in a successful capitalist country. You can see what happens in failed states where there's no government to get in the way: they are not great places to live or do business.
Couple issues with this stories narrative (Score:5, Insightful)
Firstly is if TikTok was expecting this deal to be done via Executive Order which seems to be the inference with talks of how the Biden Admin walked away from the deal but any EO can be superseded by Congress and if Congress is doing investigations and Congress is planning legislation then there's little incentive to work directly with TikTok when that is still on the table. If they make this deal for EO and then Congress passes a bill anyway that's not a good look and the Biden admin has shown it will give the greatest deference to something bipartisan from Congress.
Second is the idea that government "lacks faith" in ability rather than the fact this this:
The video app, owned by a Chinese company, said it would let federal officials pick its U.S. operation’s board of directors, would give the government veto power over each new hire and would pay an American company that contracts with the Defense Department to monitor its source code, according to a copy of the company’s proposal. It even offered to give federal officials a kill switch that would shut the app down in the United States if they felt it remained a threat.
Sounds like a hand grenade and the exact type of thing most American's would not want the government to engage in, this is exactly what many folks think happens with social media platforms today. Like the idea of having the DoD be the guardian of a social media content feed algorithm, I mean, to me this sounds like something the CCP would suggest so earnestly and innocently because this type of action is probably what they do with ByteDance and in their system of values this makes the most logical sense, like in their minds why would the government not want to do this?
Or more likely as the article suggests this was never really a good faith offer and is calculated to give them an advantage in the upcoming legal case.
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>> this type of action is probably what they do with ByteDance and in their system of values
The Chinese government arbitrarily controls all the social media there, and then of course there is the Great Firewall. The agreement they proposed would have put the US federal government in the position of being the monitor of TikTok's actions and thereby responsible if there were any sort of transgressions. And then of course if there were a change of administration in the US the agreement could have been ar
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The Chinese government arbitrarily controls all the social media there
This is misleading but often repeated. It's true in the sense that the US government "controls" all social media in the US because ultimately it creates laws and can apparently force the current owner to sell up if it is really unhappy. But that's different to what you seem to think where the government has a hand in actively directing how algorithms work and what content is promoted etc.
The Chinese government does have things like a list of banned search terms. Western governments do too, but only put stuf
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>> The Chinese government does have things like a list of banned search terms
I don't know where you get your info on this and you provide no cites, so I'll assume its just your uninformed personal opinion.
China has very considerable direct control of the internet there in the form of the Great Firewall and other mechanisms such as DNS hijackers. Western countries have no equivalent surveillance or control.
"The effect includes: limiting access to foreign information sources, blocking foreign internet t
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"The effect includes: limiting access to foreign information sources, blocking foreign internet tools (e.g. Google Search,[4] Facebook,[5] Twitter,[6] Wikipedia,[7][8] and others) and mobile apps, and requiring foreign companies to adapt to domestic regulations."
Western democracies have all those powers too, and exercise them.
The US is currently forcing the sale of TikTok, with the threat of a ban. The UK keeps threatening to block apps with end-to-end encryption. Streaming video apps are regularly blocked due to piracy, and the US maintains an official list of "notorious" websites. Access to knowledge is widely blocked too, with attacks on sites like SciHub. Gambling is another example of websites and apps that are widely regulated and blocked in Western countries
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>> Western democracies have all those powers too, and exercise them.
They don't block sites or apps except for criminal activity, which is not defined as information considered "harmful to public order, social stability, and Chinese morality". Western countries have no equivalent to the Great Firewall.
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So what is the reason TikTok is getting banned?
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Actually it is "sell-or-be-banned", which is different from an outright ban. And you can easily see the purported reasons for yourself.
"classified and unclassified national security assessments show that the app is a threat to user privacy and that it's been used to target journalists and interfere in elections"
https://www.npr.org/2024/03/13... [npr.org]
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Considering their verified opinions are "you're not allowed to even see the algorithm" and "we're spending a gazillion dollars to split the the secrets out of our code" they definitely weren't planning to go through with this.
Not about control (Score:5, Insightful)
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Nothing about that proposal really makes any sense. They were offering government oversight of a social media company, that's a political landmine. And a "kill switch"? It sounds dramatic, but actually using it would cause a cavalcade of accusations and lawsuits.
Government Lacks Capacity to Regulate Tech (Score:2)
It also includes this assessment from Anupam Chander, a Georgetown University law professor who researches international tech policy. "The government had a complete absence of faith in [its] ability to regulate technology platforms, because there might be some vulnerability that might exist somewhere down the line."
A far more provocative possibility is that they actually don't have the ability to regulate technology platforms. They are just floundering around in the political "we have to do something" mode. The new reality may be that we are moving into a world controlled by authoritarian structures such as corporations where democracy is a sideshow since elected government lacks any real capacity to enforce popular will.
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don't have the ability to regulate technology platforms.
In the US they actually really don't outside of what is legally authorized already which usually means you do in fact have to get some type of court order to obtain information about users or data. The government can ask (and they do) but if anything the Twitter files showed the government actually can't do much beyond that.
The advertiser/PR implications seem to have far, far more influence over social media platforms than the state, when things get censored it's to protect ad revenue and platform reputati
Closing the door after the horses got out. (Score:3, Insightful)
It's too late, social media has spread to the point that now everybody has to use it or they're not part of modern society. Want a new job? You must be on Linked-In so potential employers can see your recommendations. It's all about social credit and those who post more selfies and meaningless drivel on { your platform of choice here } wins. Of course, the feds want to control the message, the tone, and the outrage and censor things they don't like but that's too late. Our 1st amendment rights have been violated and curiously nobody is outraged about that as much as losing a potential outlet where idiots can post videos of themselves getting kicked in the balls.
Not surprised (Score:2)
it would let federal officials pick its U.S. operation's board of directors, would give the government veto power over each new hire and would pay an American company that contracts with the Defense Department to monitor its source code, according to a copy of the company's proposal. It even offered to give federal officials a kill switch that would shut the app down in the United States if they felt it remained a threat.
Personally that sounds like a recipe for a gong show.
There's just so much minutia that
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>> same damn fool thing they did with Citizens United
Blaming the victim.
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Both parties are attacking Tiktok at the behest of their largest and most influential donors because Tiktok is allowing criticism of Israel and Zionism and the donors find this unacceptable.
The donors are going to get what they want one way or another because that's who the politicians work for.
Seriously? Do we believe this removes concerns? (Score:2)
All that the Chinese government would require would be a hidden back door to enable it to continue to get the data it is no doubt getting now. The fact that non-techies fall for this sort of nonsense is a reminder of how little those mundanes know.
My congratulations to the MSS for another misleading story successfully inserted into the media.
You only need one USB key (Score:2)
It's not about source code, it's about the entire organization being absolutely serious about protecting the data. If a crew working in a location just happens to be all Chinese expats and they see another expat they suspect works for the CCP use an USB key and walk out with it, will they know what is expected of them or rock the boat? They aren't going to get a bonus from management for rocking the boat ...
In an American company what is expected of them is to call security, in the Chinese company what is e
Evidence China understands nothing about the US (Score:4, Insightful)
Chinese PsyOp (Score:4, Insightful)
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Ironically you sound like the CCP. They created the Great Firewall to stop foreign political interference. You want to ban TikTok because people organize against Israeli genocide and rampant capitalism on there... Which you think is directed by foreign political interference.
Just say you admire them and want the same control for your own government, which you trust will not abuse it because you happen to agree with them on this subject.
The strategy seems to be .. (Score:3)
Quite obvious why.... (Score:2)
It makes perfect sense if you consider that Biden etc. don't actually care about privacy or control. What they actually want is to personally enrich themselves, meaning Biden and other politicians already have their fingers in the forced sale pie.