Hacker News Reader

Comment by arvinaminpour | Hacker News Reader

TikTok seemed to run off of Alibaba Cloud (from what I read which may be wrong) so it's an interesting move to buy Cloud Services from Google. I probably read this as a way of strengthening the case that they're an "American" software company since they run on the same infrastructure as any SV startup.

View on HN

This deal was signed in May 2019, before the questions about Chinese control over TikTok had really come to the forefront. There's a decent chance that it's simply about Google giving TikTok a better deal, or other infrastructural features like global availability.

Anyone who believed US would allow a Chinese controlled internet company to reach mainstream is plainly self deceiving.

US and China are both super power. Don’t be naive that they would be doing things differently.

Pretty sure in 2019 if [Chinese company] offered to pay Google a bunch of money for cloud services, Google would take it. Unlike in China, large US corporations don't act as an extension of the government, so China being a rival superpower to the US wouldn't be terribly relevant. Not that the US in general avoids trading with China either.

justicezyx isn't saying Google would turn down a Chinese company's business. justicezyx is saying a Chinese company cannot become popular among US consumers. I don't exactly agree with that argument, but we should at least understand what the argument is.

I gather that from their later replies. I imagine you can see why I interpreted the statement that way in the first place though.

> large US corporations don't act as an extension of the government

Have you read this? https://wikileaks.org/google-is-not-what-it-seems/

Yes, but we are discussing "compared to" scenario here.

I agree Chinese companies are basically branches of government if that's what you are saying however I also think the relationship between corporate USA and the federal government is a lot closer than most people realise.

"A lot closer than most people realise" != the same.

Huawei (a Chinese company) was paying Google a bunch of money in 2019 until they were banned by the government. You may argue that this was justified for national security reasons, but the decision was ultimately up to the whims of the president, and not subject to any sort of actual process or oversight by elected officials.

What was Huawei paying Google for? If anything, Google was paying Huawei to be the default search engine on its phones outside of China.

Trump, like it or not, is an elected official and I doubt he understands very much about tech to make that decision on his own.

What are you talking about?

I am saying TikTok has to base its engineering entirely in US soil, given its prospect to become main stream.

Tiktok is just a rebranded version of the app called 抖音 (Douyin). It's made in China

TikTok is already mainstream.

The US government and corporations are basically one and the same. The USG will extend deals that favor corporations. China is an "enemy" to the extent that it will harm the profitability and flexibility of US corporations or the military empire that supports US market dominance.

To think that a country half a world away would factor into calculations in any other way is a misunderstanding of great power politics. There is no military threat to anything a normal person would consider domestic interests.

> The US government and corporations are basically one and the same.

Not really. Corporations and the government fight about all kinds of stuff, like encryption, and handing over private information about their users. Companies try to buy influence through lobbying, sure, but that's a far cry from 'basically one and the same'.

This is a mere tactical disagreement. The government and the security state are extensively intertwined to an extent that the place where one begins and the other ends is hard to distangle given the revolving door of employees and defense contracts.

The extent to which the buisness community as a whole has the ear of the government vs the people is evident given the extremely large disagreements between public opinion polls and implemented policy. If corporations want something, they don't always get it, but if the people want something and corps disagree the people almost never get it.

Study:

Gilens and Page. "Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens". American Political Science Association. 2014. pgs. 564-581.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-poli...

BBC Article about it: "Study: US is an oligarchy, not a democracy" https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-echochambers-27074746

There's been a sudden inrush in the last few days of tons sinophiles posting constantly. I wonder what's causing it.

What's causing it is clear: the community is divided and people have different opinions. This has been the case for a long time, so it's no sudden inrush. There's natural fluctuation, so it sometimes can feel that way.

I posted about this a lot in the last couple of days. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23835613 and the subthread underneath it (which you'll have to uncollapse). You can find other explanations at:

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...

The evidence is extremely clear, by the way. If we'd found any undue influence, we'd say so, but the private data confirms what's already clear from the public record (if you look at other users' commenting histories): people just disagree. The voting patterns don't show anything that the commenting patterns don't.

Hmm interesting. These other people not only seem to disagree but seem to rely on different facts entirely. Perhaps there’s ongoing external disinformation campaigns and many are simply misinformed.

Regardless of whether accusations of spying are true, I think these moves (including pulling out of Hong Kong) will do nothing. The politicians and a large part of the public have already decided Tiktok is guilty, with no way to prove innocence. A ban is just a matter of time.

According to Chinese law, the government can quietly demand any information they want on anyone. A warrant in China? Hah.

All they have to do is say "Give us the data stored on GCP host" and TikTok is legally obligated to comply.

To be fair, it's not much different than in the United States unless the data belongs to a US citizen, which is why many companies are attempting to domicile cloud data in their own country.

The Chinese National Intelligence Law applies to any and every company operating in China right now, including Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, IBM, etc., not just TikTok.

Ironically enough, Google is one of the few major tech companies that can't be compelled to hand over information to China.

> Ironically enough, Google is one of the few major tech companies that can't be compelled to hand over information to China.

Interestingly enough, Google gets bashed most on HN than all the other companies in this list combined.

And Apple get lauded for its privacy efforts. If you point out the hypocrisy, you quickly get down voted.

There is some difference though. You can turn off iCloud and then device lock an Apple phone and make it rather secure. No such option exists for an Android phone. I agree with your general idea though, but I want to nuance. Apple gets too much credit for their privacy efforts, and Google gets too little shit.

Apples efforts only look good compared to Amazon, Google and Microsoft, but that's because they are so bad.

Android does not have an iCloud equivalent, so naturally Android is not going to have a setting to disable sharing cloud data with the Chinese government. Google Drive doesn't work in China because Google isn't kowtowing the way Apple is.

Both are PRISM partners so meh.

Just a small correction, Facebook is also not in China, IIRC.

It lead to some truly fantastic moments with Zuck grandstanding while every other company was being bashed for bowing down to China last year. Truly bizarro world.

The subsidiaries of these companies are subject to the intelligence law and whatever data these subsidiaries owns. If apple keeps US data away from the apple subsidiary in China then Apple is physically impossible to hand the data to Chinese government

Apple keeps data in China. [1] They specifically made the move because of China's National Intelligence Law. [2]

>To comply with the law, for instance, Apple announced that it would transfer the operation of iCloud in Mainland China to a government-sponsored data company named Guizhou-Cloud Big Data.

[1] https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2018/03/apple-privacy...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_Internet_Security_Law#Ef...

Yes, but they only store data in China for Chinese customers (as per the registered region of the Apple ID). [1]

[1] https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208351

Right, which is still Apple complying with the Chinese National Intelligence Law and giving up private customer data to the Chinese government.

This is effectively what TikTok is (claims to be) doing as well https://www.bytedance.com/en/#corporate-structure

Tiktok' parent is bytedance is incorporated in Cayman islands. It has a US and a Chinese subsidiary. Chinese subsidiary runs douyin is subjected to the intelligence law. The US subsidiary runs tiktok and is managed by US employees and is not subject to the same law. The intelligence law would be problematic if bytedance is incorporated in China but it's not. The data and the code for tiktok is stored in the US and Chinese subsidiary cannot view that data.

>The intelligence law would be problematic if bytedance is incorporated in China but it's not. The data and the code for tiktok is stored in the US and Chinese subsidiary cannot view that data.

But the issue is that bytedance is still physically located in China, and is probably subject to CCP pressure. eg. "it'd be a real shame if your beijing offices were shut down because of fire code violations". Or they go straight to the CEO and demand that they backdoor their US servers or he gets sent to the gulag. According to wikipedia, the CEO of TikTok reports directly to the CEO of Zhang Yiming, so there isn't really separation in terms of control.

From TikTok's privacy policy (via stratechery article)

> We may share your information with a parent, subsidiary, or other affiliate of our corporate group.

So I really don't see what your point is here.

>The US subsidiary runs tiktok and is managed by US employees and is not subject to the same law.

Which leaves us with the question as to whether or not the government cares what the law says or whether they would back down if employees in China said they can't easily hand over foreign data.

Eventually tiktok will run anything that is remotely sensitive inside us soil. That has already began.

Has there been any 3rd party audit that shows your claims to be true?

Wouldn't it look suspicious if they did that though? I'm curious to know. If they ever were audited wouldn't that stand out?

I dont see why. Accessing data on a service you are renting? Seems like normal everyday kinda stuff

I was thinking about the volume of the data and the type. But yeah they probably could easily obfuscate it. Wouldn't it just be cheaper to buy it at that rate though? Am I missing something?

If its just the IP address and basic info of some dissident, that wouldn't be alot of traffic

> According to Chinese law, the government can quietly demand any information they want on anyone. A warrant in China? Hah.

Which Chinese law?

https://thediplomat.com/2019/02/the-real-danger-of-chinas-na...

Unlike Zoom which is an American company (and everyone feels like they need to pull an Andrew Yang and try extra hard to prove their American-ness for some reason), unless I'm mistaken I don't think TikTok really made any effort to "appear" "American". ByteDance might have downplayed their Chinese-ness and worked more than typical Chinese companies to cater to American audiences (like hiring Disney CEO in the same way Huawei has an America CSO), but I don't think they're making the case that they're an "American" company.

I'm not sure I understand your reference to Andrew Yang. Every presidential candidate I've seen in the late 20th and 21st century has gone overboard in showing their American-ness. What makes Andrew Yang stand out?

In that he specifically called out Asians to out-american others to prove their Americanness. For illustration picture Obama calling on African Americans to do more to prove that they're Americans.

Why would it matter if it's an American or Chinese company? It's a sad world where we need to decide about company, product, person, idea, book or whatever based on their perceived country, colour, race, ideology, ...

Well I guess at the minimum. China blocks American services in their country like Facebook and Twitter.

For a foreign company to operate in China it needs to be majority Chinese owned.

It can be argued that if foreign companies are not allowed to profit in China, then they shouldn't be able to do so abroad.

Of course being the manufacturing capital of the world, they have a lot of leverage.

It matters whether the company executives live in a democracy with rule of law or an authoritarian one-party state.

I have no qualms doing business with American, Canadian, Indian, Japanese, or European (minus Hungary) companies...

I would be very cautious doing business with Chinese, Russian, or Saudi firms.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com