it’s important to remember that there is very little value to individual history of search and purchase, so diabolical uses aren’t very likely.
there is more value in collective datasets obviously, with a couple caveats. for a huge subsets of people the histories look exactly the same, even to ML, while data mining may try to figure out if a particular feature in the data is at the early stages of going viral. still the prediction error of such findings is big, affected by competing trends and campaigns, and even competing algorithms. the value of any particular algorithm is how much a product is monetized minus the cost of such promotion. in financial terms it’s basically the advertising budget. which is value, but again not super diabolical
how is the app store going to differentiate between a company changing their app on their own vs. a company changing an app at the behest of a government (or any other actor)???
this is the bigger concern though no politicians have really been able to verbalize this well. they don’t want the CCP to be able to potentially weaponze the app as a propaganda tool.
Agreed, and we already know that Facebook can’t be trusted at all. Also everyone with a gmail account has google reading all their email. The amount of data out there is m8nd boggling and tiktok does not represent some unique threat. What you search for, what you watch, how long you watch, all the data you can get from any social media company.
Cambridge Analytica just bought the data from Facebook. China could likely do that indirectly with little trouble. That being said all social media apps are as secure as app stores make them.
It is true we depend on apple and google to protect us from malicious actors on mobile devices. I have a preference there but I think neither wants the huge fallout from any app backdooring user info. It has happened a number of times on smaller scales and really just normal collection data not full device access.
I just have no more fear of CCP having my tiktok data than I have of anyone else having my social media data. I don’t see it as some existent threat.
Gun to head and I had to choose china or Zuckerberg to be spying on me, I would probably choose China.
