Global digital rights advocates are watching to see if Congress acts, worried that other countries could follow suit with app bans of their own.

  • atrielienz@lemmy.world
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    6 months ago

    No. It isn’t that. Google absolutely will build a profile around you with “your anonymized” data for the purposes of ad aggregation. They collect information about everyone who uses their services. They do this in order to push ads not agendas. That’s a major difference. In addition you can and many people do go out of their way to degoogle or not use any Google services. Making it so that Google does not have an effective or even viable way to build a profile on those people. You can’t do that with tik tok.

    Even if you’re like me and have never actively used the tik tok website, app, or service, everyone you know who has the tik tok app is feeding it your information. It has system level permissions to a lot of apps. Asks for a lot of access to things the app doesn’t need in order to run. Each time they use the app it takes information from all the other apps on the device. Including things like your texts phone logs, what banking apps you use, what medical apps you use. And it buys data from other brokers to build profiles on not just its users but anyone it’s user’s know and communicate with using that device. It then collates that data to build better profiles of non-users.

    This information doesn’t have to be stored on American servers because it’s not the information of users. It’s the information of non-users. And even if it were it would still be accessible by the company and the CCP.

    We already know that some bad actors in the company have tried to use the data bytedance collect in order to track journalists with the intension of finding out who their sources are. The company called that bad judgement. I call it a major red flag to add to the stack.