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Comment by rvz | Hacker News Reader

Firstly, the Verge is trash source, no better than the Daily Mail in their reporting alongside their affiliate marketing grifting with clickbait.

Secondly, a better solution is a multi-billion dollar fine for TikTok's egregious invasion of privacy and the like, worse than the other tech companies and they also got massive fines.

Either TikTok pays a multi-billion dollar in the US or they exit the US market. This is much better than a ban and a win-win-win for TikTok, US gov. / regulators and the users and the ball is in TikTok's court.

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The threat is the CCP using TikTok for algorithm-directed propaganda, extortion based on video history, and anything else you can imagine.

A one-time fine doesn't fix that, and you can't get the oversight to make sure consumer data is protected because you're dealing with a state actor. But maybe you're thinking of some sort of recurring fine, like a "Sell Americans As A Service?" SAAAS? Innovations like that could help with the national deficit.

It can be recurring for repeat offences. Still spanning in the billions.

> Secondly, a better solution is a multi-billion dollar fine for TikTok's egregious invasion of privacy and the like, worse than the other tech companies and they also got massive fines.

Where is the evidence that TikTok has been much worse than their peers in this regard?

If you watched the congressional hearing, the evidence of this was already presented here [0] and here [1].

[0] https://futurism.com/tiktok-spy-locations-specific-americans

[1] https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/emilybakerwhite/tiktok-...

Could not have been more clearer and is worse than the rest of the US social networks.

The congressional hearing was hilarious. I thought the TikTok CEO did great, and the vast majority of questions Congress asked were pants-on-head ridiculous. They are so out of touch.

To be honest it sounds like you've only read the titles of those articles.

Your Futurism article directly contradicts the claim that any of this behaviour is unique to TikTok:

> This isn't the first time that a major social platform has been caught spying on specific individuals. In the past, Facebook and Uber have both been in the hot seat for tracking the locations of journalists and political figures.

The byline of your June 2022 Buzzfeed article implies that TikTok was already actively working to remove foreign access to the data:

> an external auditor hired to help TikTok close off Chinese access to sensitive information, like Americans’ birthdays and phone numbers.

This largely appears to have born out based on the PBS article regarding the recent congressional hearing[0]:

> As of October (2022), all new U.S. user data was being stored inside the country. The company started deleting all historic U.S. user data from non-Oracle servers this month, in a process expected to be completed this year, Chew said.

> access to U.S. data is managed by U.S. employees through a separate entity called TikTok U.S. Data Security, which is run independently of ByteDance and monitored by outside observers.

The hearing itself was mostly evidence of how unfit many of your elected officials are for office. From a previous comment of mine:

> Buddy Carter confidently believes that TikTok is tracking it's users emotional response through pupil dilation but has no comprehension of why you'd need to identify someone's eyes to put a motion tracking filter over them[2]. According to Mr. Carter, TikTok isn't doing enough to protect younger users but thinks that asking a user their age and checking whether or not the users public videos align with the age they declared is "creepy".

> Dan Crenshaw used his time to state that Chinese law requires it's citizens to co-operate with their national intelligence agencies. That might have been a good point if not for the fact that TikTok's CEO, the person Crenshaw was questioning, is not Chinese.

> Richard Hudson proved himself unable of forming a coherent question as to whether TikTok attempts to access other devices on a WiFi network. Instead asking "So if I have a TikTok app on my phone and my phone is on my home WiFi network, does TikTok access that network?"

[0] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/watch-live-tiktok-ceo-...

[1] https://edition.cnn.com/2023/03/25/tech/tiktok-user-reaction...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sZDpJHl6amo

So TikTok not only DID admit to have foreign access to US data, but also lied and denied previously about it then according to the leak in the Buzzfeed New article.

This only proves that TikTok should deservedly get a billion dollar fine from the regulators as I said before, rather than trying to evade responsibility and join the likes of Facebook who did get fined for privacy violations, if they want to continue to operate in the US.

If Facebook can't get away with the fines, neither should TikTok.

> So TikTok not only DID admit to have foreign access to US data, but also lied and denied previously about it then according to the leak in the Buzzfeed New article.

They never claimed their own employees didn't have access to the data. They claimed that access to the data was controlled and it was stored in data centres not subject to China's jurisdiction[0]:

> First, let's talk about data privacy and security. We store all TikTok US user data in the United States, with backup redundancy in Singapore. Our data centers are located entirely outside of China, and none of our data is subject to Chinese law. Further, we have a dedicated technical team focused on adhering to robust cybersecurity policies, and data privacy and security practices.

Furthermore, the Buzzfeed article acknowledges that the "foreign access" was typically in the service of restricting that access:

> In the recordings, the vast majority of situations where China-based staff accessed US user data were in service of Project Texas's aim to halt this data access.

The actions of TikTok don't appear to be that of a bad faith actor. They responded to concerns about data privacy by moving customer data from their own data centres to those of an American cloud provider and have shown that they're working to restrict access to that data further.

> This only proves that TikTok should deservedly get a billion dollar fine from the regulators as I said before, rather than trying to evade responsibility and join the likes of Facebook who did get fined for privacy violations, if they want to continue to operate in the US.

What regulation did TikTok break?

> If Facebook can't get away with the fines, neither should TikTok.

Facebook wasn't fined for allowing internal employees in other countries access to internal data. They were fined for spunking that data all over anyone that winked at them. In the absence of a data breach, I'm not aware of which US law TikTok would have been breaking by allowing specific employees access to internal data.

[0] https://newsroom.tiktok.com/en-us/statement-on-tiktoks-conte...

> They never claimed their own employees didn't have access to the data. They claimed that access to the data was controlled and it was stored in data centres not subject to China's jurisdiction[0]:

That is a clear denial by TikTok since they were already under investigation at the time and denied having such access to US data overseas, then the leak demonstrated that they can (and already did) have access to that data. Showing me a 2019 newsroom post already tells they haven't learned their lesson about overseas data access.

> The actions of TikTok don't appear to be that of a bad faith actor. They responded to concerns about data privacy by moving customer data from their own data centres to those of an American cloud provider and have shown that they're working to restrict access to that data further.

So making it possible for them TO access non-public US user data overseas after saying they couldn't? (and admittedly they already did). Which they did again, when employees accessed the data to trace the source leaks on US journalists and reporters overseas. [0]

With such access overseas also explains why those employees at ByteDance got fired, confirming that ByteDance is able to do it regardless.

> What regulation did TikTok break?

US privacy regulations, like they already have done years before [0]. They are no stranger to getting fined by the FTC, as with Facebook who already faced and paid a massive multi-billion dollar fine.

> Facebook wasn't fined for allowing internal employees in other countries access to internal data. They were fined for spunking that data all over anyone that winked at them. In the absence of a data breach, I'm not aware of which US law TikTok would have been breaking by allowing specific employees access to internal data.

Both cases are unprecedented with the way that user data was handled and accessed. TikTok's case alone is worthy of an extensive investigation by the FTC, since not only they have denied this and then later found to have lied after the leak, it even more deservedly should receive a multi-billion dollar fine with this case as with Facebook has done.

There are no hiding places or defences left for TikTok to fall on. If they can't pay, well they can exit the US market themselves.

[0] https://www.engadget.com/bytedance-tiktok-employees-us-user-...

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/02/27/us-gove...

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