<
https://www.techdirt.com/2022/06/23/the-myopic-focus-on-tiktok-privacy-issues-remains-kind-of-weird/>
"U.S. consumers face a parade of major privacy and security problems. Poorly
secured routers, Internet things devices with zero privacy and security
safeguards, major telecom network vulnerabilities, a massive unaccountable
adtech and telecom hyper-surveillance apparatus (often unaccountably linked to
government), all operating in a country that can’t seem to pass a privacy law
for the Internet era because Congress is too corrupt.
Yet for whatever reason, the press and broader discourse remains singularly
focused on…TikTok. For example, Buzzfeed released a report recently noting that
“engineers in China” (read: at Beijing-based TikTok owner ByteDance) had
repeated access to U.S. user TikTok data, contrary to a lot of ByteDance and
TikTok promises that U.S. user data is stored in the U.S.
To be clear, this is dumb and bad. TikTok officials had testified before
Congress that a “world-renowned, US-based security team” employed by the
company strictly decided who got access to said data. It generally blows up a
lot of the superficial promises the company has made as it tries to untangle
itself from ByteDance and fears of Chinese intelligence agencies exploiting the
app’s popularity.
Criticizing a company for being full of shit is fine. Countless companies all
over the world are immensely full of shit when it comes to largely performative
privacy practices. But for whatever reason we seem singularly obsessed with
TikTok, and the singular threat the company poses to planet Earth. In a way
that drowns out the broader issues and context.
But these stories always operate in a weird, contextual vacuum. One where the
entirety of global technology markets aren’t a privacy shit show and user
datasets of all kinds aren’t bouncing around the ether."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
