Tag Archives: freedom

Some Thoughts on TikTok

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TikTok is a video messaging app that was developed in the People’s Republic of China and is owned by ByteDance, another PRC company. The Wall Street Journal published a Q&A on the app last Tuesday.

I have some thoughts, too.

For background, here are some of the data that TikTok collects just because you’re using it.

…location data and your internet address, according to its privacy policy, and it tracks the type of device you are using to access its platform. It stores your browsing and search history as well as the content of messages you exchange with others on the app.

How to locate your device in the Net, where you’ve been virtually, and what you say in your correspondence. That’s just for starters.

If you opt in, TikTok says it can collect your phone and social-network contacts, your GPS position, and your personal information such as age and phone number along with any user-generated content you post, such as photos and videos. It can store payment information, too. TikTok also gets a sense of what makes you tick. It can track the videos you like, share, watch….

Your physical location, and all that personally identifying information. It exposes your contacts, too, without their having any opportunity to reject “opting in.”

Now, some of the rest of the story:

Why is the US concerned?
Beijing performing mass data collection on American citizens….
…a vast database of information that could be used for espionage…if TikTok’s user data could be obtained by the Chinese government, that would enhance any such efforts. “You can use [artificial intelligence tools] to sort through it and find an awful lot of data….”

And this:

A TikTok spokesman said that the Chinese government has never asked the company for user data and that it would refuse such a request. “TikTok has an American CEO and is owned by a private company that is backed by some of the best-known US investors[.]”

This is a disingenuous claim. What the PRC has or has not done in the past in this regard is wholly irrelevant to what it can do. The more important thing, too, is what it can do. Under a PRC 2017 national intelligence law, all PRC companies and people are required to comply with any and all intel community requests for intel-related information. What is intel-related is determined by the intel community. Under the just-passed Hong Kong national security law, the PRC government has arrogated to itself the authority to go after any entity or person it deems a national security threat—wherever that entity or person is located, under whatever sovereign nation jurisdiction that entity or person resides, in the world.

TikTok, owned by ByteDance, is as subject to those laws as is ByteDance.

Does TikTok share any information with ByteDance, its China-based parent?
TikTok stores its data on American users on servers in the US and Singapore, but its website says that information can be shared with ByteDance or other affiliates.

Not only can be shared, but will be. Nor will it matter what firewalls ByteDance might claim to have erected between it and its subordinate—limiting the number of employees who have access to user data and the scenarios where data access is enabled, for instance—the parent organization can tear them down at will. And can be expected to, as necessary, to satisfy information demands from the PRC’s intel community.

As for those “other affiliates”—some of them may well be within the PRC.

What happens to your data if you quit TikTok?
Users can ask TikTok to delete their data, and the company has said in its policy that it will respond in a manner consistent with applicable law upon verifying your identity.

Users are supposed to believe TikTok’s wide-eyed innocent claim to have complied, even though they have no means of independently verifying TikTok’s assertion. But the kicker is that manner consistent with applicable law caveat. Two of those applicable laws are the PRC’s security laws mentioned above.

This is not a bit of software that should appear anywhere on anyone’s device.

Free Speech, Free Assembly

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Here is how two clauses of our Constitution’s First Amendment will be enforced under a Progressive-Democrat administration.

Officials in the city of Houston, Texas have cancelled the state’s Republican convention. On Wednesday, Democrat Mayor Sylvester Turner announced he has instructed the city’s convention center to cancel the event.

Today I instructed the Houston First Corporation to exercise its right contractually in cancelling the State’s Republican Convention that was set to take place next week at GRB. #COVID19
— Sylvester Turner (@SylvesterTurner) July 8, 2020

It was supposed to be held there next week, but Turner claimed it would’ve posed a “clear and present” danger.

Notice: the Progressive-Democrat mayor carefully waited until virtually the last minute to block the Texas Republican Party’s convention. By waiting until so late in the game, Turner has made it exceedingly difficult if not impossible for the party and its members to exercise their free assembly rights and free speech rights, except on a schedule acceptable to the Progressive-Democrats. Which Turner has carefully omitted to lay out.

More Disingenuosity

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The Supreme Court has ruled—7-2—in favor of the Little Sisters of the Poor and other organizations. The Court upheld the Trump administration’s rule exempting these employers from an Obamacare requirement to provide insurance coverage that includes contraception.

Justice Clarence Thomas wrote for the Court:

We hold today that the Departments had the statutory authority to craft that exemption, as well as the contemporaneously issued moral exemption. We further hold that the rules promulgating these exemptions are free from procedural defects.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg dissented.

…this Court leaves women workers to fend for themselves, to seek contraceptive coverage from sources other than their employer’s insurer, and, absent another available source of funding, to pay for contraceptive services out of their own pockets.

Ginsburg is being disingenuous in this. Contraceptives are dirt cheap in Walmart and drug stores. It’s no great burden for “women workers” to pay for contraception “out of their own pockets.” If it’s a burden to seek “contraceptive coverage” from other sources, that’s the direct result of Obamacare driving up the cost of all coverage.

Ginsburg is being sexist in this. Condoms are nearly as cheap and even more widely available. But Ginsburg is blithely assuming that contraception is solely the responsibility of the woman.

Distractions

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Much is being made of the cybersecurity threat, the national security threat, that the People’s Republic of China’s Huawei represents. For instance, Senator Ben Sasse (R, NE) has said it’s good for the British government to be removing Huawei from the core of the British Internet.

Senator Mark Warner (D, VA):

Huawei has been and will continue to be a national security threat….

Senator Tom Cotton (R, AR) on the Brits’ initial decision to allow Huawei into their Internet infrastructure:

[t]he Chinese Communist Party (CCP) will now have a foothold to conduct pervasive espionage on British society.

But a question arises in my peabrain.

Huawei and ZTE, with their backdoors and outright spyware, have been remarkably easy to identify. Suppose they were intended to be seen. What are we missing in Xi’s left hand while we focus on the glitter in his right? Or more aptly, are we missing Xi’s dagger while we let ourselves be distracted by his épée?

It’s Been Going On for a Year

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This is what Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler, in a series of tweets, said so weakly about antifa on 2 July 2019 after that gang assaulted journalist Andy Ngo and others, putting them in the hospital:

Portland has always been a beacon of free speech. We are proud of that history.
— Mayor Ted Wheeler (@tedwheeler) July 1, 2019

But in the last couple of years, some have increasingly used their opportunity to exercise their 1st amendment rights, as an opportunity to incite violence.
— Mayor Ted Wheeler (@tedwheeler) July 1, 2019

Over the weekend some chose to engage in violence in Portland, which is unacceptable and will not be tolerated.
— Mayor Ted Wheeler (@tedwheeler) July 1, 2019

Wheeler then said ‘twarn’t him:

I wasn’t even here. I wasn’t even in the United States. I was with my family in Ecuador on a wildlife tour.

Because he was out of all contact with the world.

No, wait–his Number Two wasn’t following the command set and instructions he’d left behind when he went on his trip.

No, wait–no one was following the corporate culture he’d so carefully set up when he took office.

Now we have this:

Police in Portland, OR, declared a riot around 11 pm local time Saturday as Independence Day marked the 38th consecutive day of civil unrest in the city.

Not peaceful protesting for 38 days, civil unrest—and Saturday was the second consecutive day the police have had to declare a riot and move to disperse the gathered thugs and rioters.

Riot? The “gathering” was shooting fireworks, not into the air in celebration, but directly at the Multnomah County Justice Center. Yes, riot.

This is another example of Progressive-Democrat governance.