With the change in TikTok ownership, TikTok users in the U.S. are collectively freaking out over the company’s updated privacy policy after being alerted to the changes through an in-app message.
The revised document details the U.S. joint venture’s conditions for using its service, including the specific location information it may collect.
Many users are also posting to social media about language found in the policy, which says that TikTok could collect sensitive information about its users, including their “sexual life or sexual orientation, status as transgender or nonbinary, citizenship or immigration status.”
TikTok showed it couldn’t be trusted when it performatively kissed Trump’s ass.
Do you own a Tok Tok account?
Fuck you.
Sorry for the bluntness… But that’s how we feel. Fuck you, you fucking shithole.
Maybe the lawyer isn’t lying but it doesn’t matter why the data was collected. Once it is collected it can be used for anything.
Here’s a hint:
STOP USING THE APP
Or just stop using the platform altogether. The reason that most of these things are “apps” is so that they can track you better, not for the “experience”.
JFC.
Around two or three years ago, I was on a sales call/app demo as a potential customer–not for TikTok, of course. It’s an American company and I’m based in Canada. I asked the sales guy about their data storage, encryption, privacy, and the like; he didn’t know. I said I needed to know that if our group uses the application to communicate internally about, for example, helping refugees, the government won’t be able to access it. The guy asked me if that really was a concern.
Well, you tell me now, sales guy, is it really a concern?
Most of America is like this. Infuriating.
It feels like yelling at clouds, especially when we say this on Lemmy
I agree, but the bad thing is, a lot of people (especially kids) are addicted to TikTok and other apps. They crave it. So similar to smoking, they know it’s bad but still can’t quit.
I don’t think your message here on Lemmy will reach the right audience.
Amen. Unfortunately I feel like there’s a whole generation that has come up with a different mindset. Not that you want to stand up for your rights, but that you will do whatever you want and complain about it if it violates your rights or your privacy, but not actually stop doing it.
I feel like the idea of proactively standing up for your rights or what you believe in rather than just complaining or posting online is no longer in in common parlance.
There’s also a matter of small businesses and artists that despite what people here might think need platforms like this because regular people are too fucking stupid to go to a website.
Or I guess we could all just fucking starve to death and you could all just go shopping at Walmart.
Yeah, I wonder what percentage of various generations would be able to explain who EFF is or what they do. As a for instance.
I’m glad to see that it’s fairly common to see people talking about/using things like a VPN, for instance, but…if you then “log in” to whatever brand for a “better experience”? Okay, you hid your traffic from your ISP but, not much else. All that data is flowing into that company(ies) servers, never to be deleted. If you trust that company as being “one of the good ones” right now, doesn’t mean it will stay that way. Look no further than something like Xitter - many people believed they were “good” (lol) before fElon’s takeover, most people sure don’t think so now. All that data you gave up is now his.
For real. TikTok should be regarded as a de facto intelligence service for the DOJ.
the most apt punishment for these fascist supporting billionaires is to tank their investments to the ground by not using them
Won’t matter we have to tank the entire market at this point.
Freak out, they say, well that’s a interesting way of describing it. It sounds like a pretty good thing to freak out about. Maybe it’s not freaking out at all, maybe it’s reacting with a modicum of common sense at something that’s incredibly scary.
Yeah, remember when Trump “saved” Tiktok? This is what he was doing. You fucking idiots celebrated when you should have been taking it as a sign to leave that app and never return.
It does seem like a Leopards Ate My Face situation
Do you really think the same people most affected by this were the ones celebrating
Absolutely they were. Every one I knew did! Maga/non maga. I was on an island shouting about this bs.
In part, yes.
Well in part, humanity is nazis…
Every situation since 2016 has been one of those.
There was no good outcome to that situation. Let’s not blame the victims here
Honestly, TikTok was corrupt and malicious from the moment its servers in beijing went online.
All the corporate controlled social media is complicit, including Meta and obviously X. They make it so easy and entertaining, just like Fux News. There are much less invasive alternatives like Mastodon but people are lazy/stupid.
I’ll never understand why Americans would prefer TikTok be US owned than China owned. What is China going to do? Propaganda is the worst they can realistically do. The US government can send ICE agents to arrest, beat, and torture you, in your home, without a warrant
I just expect China to share that shit regardless tbh. Maximum chaos on the American empire.
We did that is why we are here. You need to be saying this on tik tok
No one should be going anywhere near tik tok after reading this. They shouldn’t have before, but especially not now.
Something tells me the royal “you” you’re mad at isn’t on the fediverse
There were people here celebrating Donvict doing that?
Just don’t do it
Now THAT is spyware!
And people are like: yeah, i need that
That is insane
What do other “social media” apps look like for this same screen, I wonder?
Good question!
Facebook
Instagram
Mastodon
Voyager for Lemmy
PeerTube
Edit: Federated is the way
Thank you. Pretty much what I had expected, haha.
Facebook
What is this view? This looks like a good way to audit apps
Apple’s AppStore.
it’s a screenshot of the iphone app store
It’s information availible on various app store front ends
side note the instagram app says it wont work on my android phone from 2021 lol
I called this shit 7 months ago. (Check my very first post.)
Now, at that time, there was discussion of “public-private” cooperation concerning the cybersecurity of that data so it could (paraphrasing) “stay in the hands of American people.” Lolol.
No doubt a similar agreement is in place and this shit is vectored directly to the US gov.
(Sorry, I start getting long-winded here.)
Fuck the technocracy. Bunch of cowardly assholes using and clearly planning to use Americans’ personal info against them en masse. The algorithms have manipulated us, pitting wage slave against wage slave. And all that extracted data will continue being utilized in siccing the brownshirts they rabbit-holed and radicalized onto conveniently corralled targets. Us.
We have to fight their algorithm manipulation with not only data poisoning and/or removing ourselves from the tech altogether, but good ol’ fashioned interpersonal psychological manipulation. And what I mean by that is physically talking to humans outside our bubble. Find some common ground. Believe it or not, it still exists. Use seemingly innocuous quips to plant seeds of doubt. Try to reach the human that may or may not still exist in that withered husk you work with, that maga uncle with a maga son so in the closet it hurts, the ones just acting like it’s all okay. Help them see the writing on the wall that they, too, will lose.
By completely disengaging with people we think are beyond redemption, we are possibly allowing so many with a shred of heart left to continue down the rabbit hole in private. People are stupid. And we know this division is by design. Fight it with well-placed words before they do something irredeemable and we have nothing left to fight with but arms.
A vast number of maga figureheads and followers sure seem to be living in a world of shared psychosis. And when you’re in a psychosis, it genuinely feels like everyone’s out to get you for reasons you can only justify with increasingly difficult mental gymnastics. But it’s all manufactured by the very real psychopaths in power, the ones ensuring the cult psychosis keeps perpetuating.
I guess what I’m saying is there’s still time to pull some of these followers or in-betweeners out of it by shifting the focus of what they think they have to fear by showing them what they really need to fear. A spin on killing them with kindness.
Idk tho. I’m just mad all of this dystopian hatred shit didn’t just stay inside all the books I read growing up.
They think we’re bad people. Even when we’re being good people and being nice and very sweet and etc., etc. etc. they get told by fucking Fox News were bad and that’s all they care about.
It’s not going to be that easy. I talked to them plenty because my husband won’t let me get the fuck away from his family. Oh they seem so fucking nice. They’ll agree with every fucking thing you say. And they’ll sell you right the fuck out for Trump. No doubt.
They would literally tell you how awful everything that is going on today is and then fucking put you on a list tomorrow.
I know I’ve watched until their own fucking daughter how they regret her going to college because she learned woke values. How she’s a bad person and I don’t even know why to be honest. She did everything her parents expected of her To do literally graduated right before Trump became president. The moment he became president she was a bad person.
Explain that—these people doing that to their own daughter and she’s the golden child of the family. They would sell out their own kids they will sell all of us out.
It’s a cult, it’s literally using cult trapping tactics, that’s why people are so delusional. Knowing that, might help in how you approach, should you choose to try.
Look after yourself, too. It’s all a lot to take on, and they want everyone stuck in fight or flight, because it literally shuts down your critical thinking. The most empowering thing to do, right now, is beat their game against you, and find ways to bring yourself down out of fight or flight, after seeing the stuff going on, because your fight or flight can’t tell the difference between being there and watching a video. Complete the stress cycle after you see this stuff, hum, sing, dance or go for a walk, are some options.
Find ways to decompress. Maybe it’s going to get hard, having good strategies to help yourself cope, and learning tools and techniques to undo the damage seeing this does, is going to make this an easier ride. We can beat them. They know that. They are scared of us. We will get through this.
Please remember this name; Larry Ellison. He’s the biggest bogeyman most people aren’t even aware is there.
He’s quite bad. Peter Thiel is worse imo.
The fact you think that kind of proves my point.
(I don’t mean that in a snarky way. )
I’m fully aware of who Ellison is. Thiel is worse than Ellison.
thiel also believes in his own bs, thats why hes dangerous.
Oracle = One Rich Asshole Called Larry Ellison
The good news is that everything Larry Ellison touches dies slowly and painfully. Oracle’s touch of death is well known in the tech community… Java, MySQL, etc.
if people still have paramount + just to watch shitty nutrek shows they are complicit as well.
They have no idea how to run anything that requires community goodwill. It’s actually impressive how awful they are.
It was quite instructive to see how many people resigned right after Sun was acquired.
Not to mention how quickly Hudson was forked to Jenkins.
Eh, Java is probably bigger than ever, but there’s been lots of open source/alt forks and try as they might, I don’t think Oracle has monetized it all that well after they bought Sun.
Same with MySQL - I don’t know that its use has slowed down all that much, even if most people are using MariaDB and calling it MySQL.
So it’s more like once Ellison acquires something, people do their best to get his stench off of it if they can. Or at least fork it and not give him any money. But even if all they made was just their DB, they’d still be more or less printing money, given so many things running on Oracle and how much it can cost to use it at the enterprise level.
I’d argue that Java is not bigger than ever, it’s more of an established legacy language used almost exclusively in business applications today. Comparing it to COBOL in that sense would be mean but there are similarities. When I started with Java in the late 90s it was something completely different. It became popular because it was open and easy to learn. Java gained a huge community quickly. Now there are some technical reasons why Java lost its popularity among the general tech community over time but as I witnessed it the major downfall happened when Sun Microsystems was acquired by Oracle and the new licensing model was just horrible. Many of us didn’t want to use a language that wasn’t open and moved on. Others created open source forks like you said. I remember we were forced to move to OpenJDK in the company where I was employed. At that time OpenJDK was was neither fast nor complete. It was a shitshow and I can assure you we did not have a good time. Eventually we phased out Java entirely and built the next version on a new stack. And today there are a lot of open and modern general purpose languages available so there is no need to use Java for new projects unless you want to integrate it into an existing Java ecosystem.
And it was basically the same story with MySQL. You actually said it - “people do their best to get his stench off of it if they can”. In most cases that means moving on to something that isn’t owned by Oracle.
I’m trying but there’s so many fucking evil names 😞
Ellison is evil
he definitely looks the part
He’s 81
Anyone who uses tiktok is kind of an idiot to be honest, and it’s kind of amusing that they’re shocked that this would happen. Wtf did you expect?
they want that gen-z population to turn conservative, they are primiarly the TIK TOk consumers.
It seems like each new wave that gets on the 'net seems to be dumber and dumber about a lot of things, TBH.
I’m always quite amused when I see younger generations think that they “get” technology better than older generations just because they signed up for private platform brands like this and learn how they work as a user. It’s like a rat being released into a maze, thinking they “get” the maze.
I’m generalizing of course. I’ve met some very actually tech savvy people across many different generations, including on down to Gen Alpha. Thankfully.
“HA! Stupid scientists can’t even do the maze. I always get to the cheese first! Hey, why is my drugs button not working?” press press press press press press press
Seeing if they use adblock is a big tell of whether someone is even meets the bare minimum of being tech literate from what I’ve seen. If they use internet without protection their minds are already mush after being bombarded with ads and being trained to tolerate it and even want it.
Yeah, I’m Gen X and have been trying to resist ads ever since I can remember.
Had two other roommates, and we’d be surfing the 53 channels or whatever on cable. Two of us had very similar watching patterns that we seemed to arrive at independently - we had a “primary” show and maybe a secondary one. When the primary went to ads, we’d either 1) slap that mute button ASAP and maybe chat a bit or 2) surf to the secondary show and watch a bit, use the last channel feature to snap back every little while to see if primary was back from ads or 3) go to the guide feature that scrolled current content.
Other roommate finally asked us one time why we do that. We said to avoid the ads because they are annoying AF.
He said: “why?”
When we paused and thought about how to answer this, he followed up with: “I love a lot of the ads, they can be really funny.” [1]
Year later, when Tivo came along, it was like it was something designed for the other roommate and I’s watching patterns and made it even better.
Anyway, these days I make copious use of streaming platforms and Plex and things like Invidious to avoid ads like the plague. I agree with you 100% - when I see someone employing all the tools to the best of their ability to not only restrict viruses and malware, but also putting up mental firewalls to the propaganda - I can usually assume that person is firing on all cylinders and we can probably talk as equals.
[1] To this day, I still just don’t understand this type of person. The people that don’t like football, but will watch the Superbowl “for the ads”. All I ever think of when I see ads is the stuff my hippie boomer parents taught me and that it’s probably all lies. Or that Chomsky said that programming execs consider the ads the content. Or, most effectively, the scene in The Trip where the protagonist played by Peter Fonda is thinking about what he does for a living - advertising - and at one point a woman says “lies” in part of his trip. I wish I could find a cut of that scene on YT…
It seems like the next generation is being trained to find ads endearing with sponsored ad segments delivered by content creators who can have a very big emotional attachment to. And is delivered by the people they may look up to or obssess over. And thats the new generation of finding ads fun.
In some ways I wonder if ads are even worse now with them now having a bigger capacity for stronger emotional manipulation with it not being a random segment, but being even more targetted than before.
And even people who use adblock defend sponsored segments, so its like the ad machine is finding ways to train and adjust their perception of ads by playing to emotional attachments of those they have a fondness for. It’s like no matter what its finding a way to worm its way back in through new tactics.
Heh, yeah, they always find a way. I think it was the book “The Conquest of Cool” that covers the concern that ad agencies had about the boomers and how they were too resistant to messaging.
I found it rather interesting as a read, since there seemed to be a bit of an echo for Gen X - the advertising execs seemed to be quite perplexed about trying to reach Gen X and sell them useless shit, too.
Well, spoiler alert - they figured out a way to reach both, at least in the aggregate, LOL.
In the mid 00s, I was reading that the new rage was trying to use “peer-to-peer marketing” and trying to find ways to exploit blogs, and possibly podcasts, if I recall correctly. These days I’m quite sure they’ve done a lot to try to refine things on many platforms so that someone’s guard tends to be down.
I do homelab stuff - I keep meaning to set up Pinchflat so I can further curate Youtube for the house…using SponsorBlock, it apparently can expunge even some of the creator-inserted endorsements. :)
Yeah, I’ve not liked most youtubers, streamers, and influencers and talking to you made me realize its probably because they feel so much like living ads. These ads as people even if they get hooked up with a $60 million contract are still trying to squeeze every last penny from their viewers who need the money more than their millionaire idol. All for the rush of thank you username for your donation.
Its like the whole past celebrity endorsement on steroids with people seeming to be more emotionally attached to what are really sales people with the perceived greater access to their idols so they “know them”.
New generations and older lonely generation is very susceptible to this type of marketing scheme, since it does a good job of not seeming like the entire product is itself an ad and more personal.
thats a strange addiction for the roomate, probably gets some kind of “high” of watching it or its a comfort thing.
I lost contact with him, but I later pictured him using things like Tivo/DVRs and NOT skipping over ads, LOL.
I’ve since been in the room with people using DVRs where they either jumped back to watch an ad or someone else asked the person fast-forwarding to go back. It’s not like that roommate was the only one.
Passively watching (linear) television was mostly the norm back then. I would know lots of people of all kinds of ages that would turn their TV on and mostly leave it on all day. Doing what I think of as more mindful/active watching required a fair bit of work and attention. Especially for college kids getting baked, LOL.
These days with all the options to chop things up with computers, do the homelab thing and rip/download and curate your own content with Jellyfish, Plex and Kodi, not to mention all the streaming services and platforms like YT, TikTok, etc.,…it’s definitely more the norm to take an active role in what you are watching and how you watch it. It’s definitely a lot easier. Although maybe today’s users that just endlessly scroll through things with very short formats served up by the algorithm are today’s version of those people that’d turn their TV on and leave it on all day, I don’t know.
You kinda have to be on tiktok to be surprised by that. It’s like an iq test that you can fail
Yeah there was privacy concerns when it first launched. People didn’t care or thought it wouldn’t matter because China owned it not realizing that corporations comply with countries they are operating in just like Google does in China. Just showing how ignorant people chose to be despite headlines of how companies operate.
When it comes to corporate spyware chasing after billions of dollars whether it is the west, east, or the upside down capitalist companies will sell you out to any country domestic or abroad.
It’s so much easier just to call anyone racist who raises concerns about the Chinese government. Nevermind the fact that they’re actually oppressive and authoritarian. Oh and the people on tiktok were having their minds subtly manipulated by algorithms set by the CCP-controlled company, so it’s no wonder they waved away all valid concerns.
Concern over tiktok always got deflected by calling it racism. Now american tiktok is owned and operated in the US, so people can’t call it racist anymore when someone calls out their unethical practices. And now everyone is shocked that it’s a corrupt platform.
We used to be anonymous on the internet. We had screen names, didn’t show our faces or tell people where we lived.
This is what we get when sharing your face becomes the default.
I call it the sickness. You catch it from turning the lens onto yourself for too long. Once you have it, it’s terminal.
The sickness asks how will this play not what do you think?
And what happens is the difference between the lens the self and the audience begins to blur until you are no longer pretending anymore.
A rule of journalism: Unless it’s meant literally, when a news headline includes words like blasts, blisters, bombshell, burns, claps back, drags, epic self-own, explodes, freaks out, goes viral, humbled, humiliated, melts down, mind-blowing, rages, rips, roasts, shocking, skewers, slams, staggering, stuns, or trolls, find a better source.
Lemmy user blasts news source and humiliates editor over viral headline.
Absolutely slammed it.
Thank you. Once my eyes hit a word like that I don’t even continue reading. It’s a major reason I left reddit, because they barely have any non-baiting news anymore.
Thank you, I get so tired of the blasts rips shreds ragebait headlines
“(SUBJECT) RIPS AND TEARS, UNTIL IT IS DONE.”
(heavy metal intensifies)
