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Comment by jrexilius | Hacker News Reader

A good, albeit somewhat impotent, move. The companies wont yank it from the app stores in the US for fear of reprisal, but that is the better next step.

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On what grounds would Apple/Google remove it from their app stores?

Did they remove Facebook after it was fined $5bn by the FTC for privacy breaches?

As if they've ever needed valid grounds to remove other less influential apps

TikTok's client had some pretty bad vulnerabilities like not using TLS in the past, but maybe those are patched by now.

Why is this good? why are people suddenly down to ban software? I don't use tiktok and never will but seeing all this discussion about how it should be banned is depressing.

If US companies want it to be less popular how about they compete and make a better product? Why are so many people carrying water for social media companies?

To get ahead of the criticism I'll likely get for this comment: I don't think tiktok/china do anything that US companies and every other social media platform have already been doing for years. Why ban tiktok and not every other social media app?

Its not banning software. Its banning a surveillance arm of the Chinese state. Or an attempt to.

> If US companies want it to be less popular how about they compete and make a better product?

They don't want it to be less popular; the US encourages media monopolies. The larger the better. US government belligerence towards TikTok served the same purpose as US government belligerence towards Twitter and Facebook: leverage in order to be able to censor it and emphasize US narratives.

They won, TikTok is fully censoring based on US government "suggestions," and this state/local-level political grandstanding are people jumping into an operation that is already over.

>why are people suddenly down to ban software?

>Why ban tiktok and not every other social media app?

If we banned all software that tracks users, capitalizes on their data, and doesn't respect privacy/GDPR/whatever - the world would be a better place.

Seems to me that Google and Apple could simply not provide hardware API access that leaks privacy info. But that would hurt all the other 'legitimate' uses of that information (targeted advertising), and no one wants to be the first person to jump off that gravy train.

> better place

..definitely a lot more expensive, but better.

Hm. Is it ok if we will actually block poor people from using internet?

Nothing "good" about this move. It's a nothing burger. Everyone's phone literally tracks them with every other app, basically in the same way. Hell, the cell phone carriers are even tracking you, along with the U.S. government. So yeah, great job removing tiktok which ultimately does nothing for your opsec or privacy.

It's completely and utterly political. Just like banning twitter would be, although that actually has more merit than the banning of tiktok.

Sorry to burst your bubble.

Its GEO political and the smart move. It's bad enough having local actors surveil citizens, let alone foreign actors, let alone foreign malicious actors.

The companies wont yank it from the app stores in the US for fear of losing their cut of ad revenue but that is the better next step.

Fixed that for you.

The revenue from TikTok is minscule compared to losing access the Chinese market. That is the bigger risk they face.

Google has zero revenue from China. They pulled out of China when told they would have to censor search results years ago. Android phones in China don’t use Google’s android.

In 2018, Google made $3 billion in China from Chinese companies buying ads.

I guess then I should say they made nothing in China - those Chinese companies buying ads would have been for ads outside of China.

Either way, it's about as big a contrast as is possible with Apple who are all in on China in every way.

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