Feds want to ban Tiktok - What's the deal?
Let's start with why. Tiktok is aimed at the social media generation. From a consumer standpoint its great, you can see videos of people dancing to the trending song clip, and in 30 seconds your kids can perform the same dance and get thousands of random views and make it viral. Heck, you can take a middle aged man drinking cranberry juice riding a skateboard and make the news. It's easy and gets viewers and contributors a cheap dopamine hit when using the app. Brilliant.
Now let's peel back the onion. TikTok collects Data location, contact lists, analytical data similar to YouTube and Facebook. Almost 50% of the population in the United States uses this app daily.?Here's a list of the Tiktok collects, from their Privacy Policy website - listed below:
Social Media Account information
Activities from other websites
Other accounts where you're mentioned
Information about the user from publicly available sources, government authorities, professional orgs, and charity groups.
purchase information
information on your devices clipboard
messages.
Devices media
Account info : such as name, age, username, password, language, email, phone number, social media account information, and profile image.
Usage information
Device Information
Location Data
Image and Audio information
Metadata
Cookies
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"ByteDance has over 150,000 employees based out of nearly 120 cities globally, including Austin, Barcelona, Beijing, Berlin, Dubai, Dublin, Hong Kong, Jakarta, London, Los Angeles, New York, Paris, Seattle, Seoul, Shanghai, Shenzhen, Singapore, and Tokyo."
ByteDance owns tiktok and takes the data and sells it to 3rd party companies. It's not the first company to use this business model. This isn't groundbreaking. If you have a Google account, Facebook, reddit, tinder, or basically anything you click an agreement (that you don't read) to use, your data is being harvested and used for marketing or sold. Your internet service provider does the same thing most likely. ( https://cybernews.com/privacy/isp-selling-data-why-you-should-actually-care/) Take a look at Google's business model. Has it ever crossed your mind why you get free email, photos, sheets, google docs, and much more? Friends, we are the product.
Every search you perform on your account is tied to your profile and can be tracked on every site you visit ( do an online search to see how analytics works). You can also use this for ad marketing, using... you guessed it, google ads. So if you're conserned that tiktok is grabbing data that isnt already being willingly offered up by the consumer, you might not be 100% correct.?
The Federal Government's main problem with tiktok is its popularity. Almost every person under 30 has tiktok installed on a device in their home, and the ability to correlate data via open-source medium (osint) is basically handed to anyone who wants to take the time and compile it.
Think of having 100's of temperature sensors all around your house. Theoretically you would be able to identify heating zones, hvac on/off cycles - which may indicate the times of the day that the house is empty, and the occupants are at work. From this data, you would be able to identify spaces that are typically used, or left vacant, indicating occupancy - all based off of temperature, collected by the sensors. ?
Now extrapolate that concept to cellphones, tablets, and computers with all of the data collected by each device. Every application used, every website visited, and every search performed by the consumer ( which the consumer gives access to), is able to collect this data and determine a pattern of each sensor and contact on your device. We have these devices in every house, on every person, every minute of every day. We are agreeing to, as consumers, and willingly providing this data to whatever application asks for it. Why? Because it makes our lives easier. We're willingly trading our privacy for convenience.
Consider this - citizens by military bases might show the military jets taking off, as it is an amazing site to watch, or take a impressive video of entire units mobilizing or getting ready to deploy. The list goes on- and so do the parties that may be interested in that 3rd party data. This includes governmental agencies, both the US and foreign governments collect this data and use it as a source of intelligence gathering - this isn't new. (https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/social-media-surveillance-us-government)
Other companies have data overseas as well, your information is on servers all over the world. Any 'cloud enabled service' is not actually just floating in the ether. This data is being served, stored, and processed on bare-metal equipment. Amazon's AWS (amazon web service) literally has data centers in China. Your physical data, resides on available web servers. It's basic economics for online businesses, if it costs $20 to host in the united states, and $2 to host in china, where would you put your new game/app/webserver? (https://www.google.com/about/datacenters/locations/) (https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/global-infrastructure/)
Federal entities are required to use 'fed-ramped' cloud services. Cloud services with infrastructure ONLY located in the United States, and services that meet a criteria of security. Federal mandates like NIST-800 series outline requirements of how that data is to be stored and handled. For the federal government to identify one social media platform and drop the hammer, it's underwhelming. I've yet to see a specific reason that Tiktok should be banned over other social sites.
It's mind blowing to me how much data we, the consumers, willingly give to the services we use. It takes 30 seconds to download an app and 'click through' the agreements. Most users will indicate ' I dont care if they know where I am, or what I'm doing. ' Most people will think that handing over privacy is no big thing. After all - you can get a 'high' off of having your video be seen by thousands of random people, and getting those ever coveted 'like' buttons smashed.
It is NOT the job of the government to tell you what's good for you. Nor is it the job of the government to decide what is acceptable for you. It's the job of the government to make sure the rights and freedoms you're afforded are upheld.
My family understands the basics of cyber security. Having and practicing cyber hygiene is not the responsibility of the federal government, it's your job (consumer, business owner, parent) to know whats really going on, and make educated decisions based off the knowledge you have. Social media is much deeper than videos of guys skateboarding drinking cranberry juice. You are the responsible adult in the room, you have the responsibility to lead your family.
I encourage you to disagree with me, or agree with me. Whatever you do, don't put your head in the sand and be ignorant.