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Comment by namelosw | Hacker News Reader

There has been a lot of bash on TikTok recently. TikTok is by no means good, but I'm yet to see it proofed much worse than counterparts from Western companies.

A lot of videos and articles make me feels more like pure anti-China sentiments, just like many similar campaigns did to Huawei last year.

It's fine call out the risk in terms of personal privacy, or national security.

It's also fine to have and express anti-China sentiments, since everyone has his/her own opinions.

But it annoys me there are a lot of people charging with only assumptions, or play double standards just to make every Chinese business or Chinese person looks evil. It's just hypocritical.

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I'm yet to see it proofed much worse than counterparts from Western companies

Telling people that TikTok is doing some shady stuff doesn't mean other companies are better. It's not a competition to see which company is good and which is bad. Every company that employs user tracking should be highlighted and asked to stop, and users should be informed about what the company is doing, no matter where the company is based.

If it could be proven that every social media app is covertly tracking users that would not mean TikTok is good. It would mean every social media app is bad.

But here, no proof was provided at all. It's just accusations. Whenever there's an article about privacy issues with Facebook, WhatsApp, Google etc. there's in most cases a real name attached to the findings, and in all cases detailed information on what is leaked, how it is leaked, snippets of reverse engineered code, etc.

In this case we have a random reddit shitposter calling himself an expert, making wild accusations.

It's not about "which company is better", it's about holding them up to the same standards.

You sound a bit too defensive, the original poster didn't mention anything about China.

Similar things have been said about Facebook for ages, but it's beating a dead horse now. We all know Facebook collects everything.

I don't think they're off the mark with linking the reckless exuberance about this post to anti-China sentiment. Distrust and outright hostility has grown substantially over the past 18 months, particularly on reddit. It's a mix of anger at Hong Kong protests/crackdown, fears of espionage (particularly involving Huawei), and mistrust with COVID-19.

There was a huge shift in reddit's demeanor (and uses of "fuck China/fuck the CPC" etc) once the Hong Kong protests got going. COVID-19 (and its associated conspiracy theories) seems to be what brought that sentiment more mainstream.

Well in the latest iOS update it was found that they are copying all clipboard data on your device constantly (even in other apps), so that’s shady as fuck.

Any user with a password manager has probably disclosed that to them.

What I saw was people talking about how lots of apps check what type of content is on the clipboard in order to adjust what they show the user (e.g. if the user has a photo on their clipboard make it easy for them to attach it). At least at the time I saw the post about this there was no evidence TikTok was actually harvesting the copied data itself.

And what exactly would they want with arbitrary passwords anyway? Using them would basically destroy their business as soon as anyone figured it out, and selling them would not remotely be worth the risk.

It’s common and defensible to do it once on startup, apparently tiktok was accessing to clipboard “every few keystrokes” (I read elsewhere it was every 8s). https://www.ilounge.com/news/tiktok-clipboard-data-collectio...

As like microsoft teams chat and some popular text editor

Since it makes very little sense to check more than once after opening the app - other apps don't randomly put data into the clipboard in the background (I guess they could snag something from a Mac over Handoff but that already pops up an invasive system progress bar giving away the game) - I'm going for incompetence over malice.

Maybe not even incompetence. It could just be that some sort of periodic UI refresh triggered the clipboard lookup, because why bother caching clipboard data if you can just read it on the fly when updating your UI?

FWIW I discovered yesterday the Slack app is doing this too (at least if there’s images on the clipboard), as is the Kaiser Permanente app. TikTok is not remotely unique in this regard.

In a world where Tiktok provided information to a government, arbitrary passwords are useful.

Western Companies are only aim to take your money, but they rarely cooperate with the state. China on other side is known to have tight control on their companies and doing all kind of shady stuff which goes far beyond anything that is allowed for western governments.

Bein critical toward something which potential aims for your soul is legit IMHO.

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