I’m not here to claim that Tiktok is completely harmless, or that it’s even a good site. I’m sure they absolutely do collect as much personal information as they can, and I’m sure they give it to the Chinese government whenever they ask. But I don’t understand how Meta and Facebook are meant to be any better? There’s always a lot of hoo-haa going on with politicians promising to ban tiktok, and (at least back on Reddit) everybody’s vowing they will never use tiktok because it’s such a privacy invasive site. Yet I never see anybody going up against Facebook, at least the average person, but they collect just as much personal info and I’m sure hand it over whenever any government agency in the US asks them to
It kind of feels to me like this is some sort of country thing. China is bad, so they shouldn’t have your personal info. But the US is the last bastion of free speech and privacy, so their companies would NEVER dare to invade your privacy, and their government would never abuse their power to get people’s personal info
I’m aware Lemmy probably isn’t the best place to ask since most people here seem to be deep into open source software and often privacy focused (so I suppose wouldn’t use either) but this also feels like the only place on the internet I might actually get an answer that isn’t just “TIKTOK BAD”. If you refuse to use tiktok but are ok with Facebook - why?
Neither of them are fine, but only one is owned by an oppressive regime.
Great comment. I can’t figure out which “one” you are talking about, because I find Facebook/Meta oppressive.
How are they oppressive? Are they committing a genocide as we speak, like the Chinese government?
Right now? Probably.
In the past, definitely: https://techcrunch.com/2022/09/29/amnesty-report-facebook-rohingya-reparations/
One other reason that I’m surprised not to have seen anyone has already brought up is the degree of government involvement. There’s the perception (whether it’s true or not) that a business run in China is necessarily on the lookout for the government’s best interests and possibly directly interfered with by the government. The same perception says that’s not true in America, where the only time the government is involved is through direct known legislation & regulation, or via espionage operations done against the company’s will. There’s an absence of fear that, for example, the company will be manipulating its algorithm for the government’s gain. (Instead, it’s purely manipulated for the company’s shareholders’ gain, which is oh so much better, right? Right?)
fb is evil
It isn’t fine for us. It might be fine for US politicians because Facebook is a US company subject to US laws.
Facebook is most definitely not fine. However, as far as I know Facebook hasn’t pushed known RCE (remote code execution) exploits into their product updates, which TikTok has. Politicians don’t care about this but literally everyone else should.
Got any source for that TikTok RCE exploit? All I could find was a single bug 3 years ago.
At this point it’s possible that it’s been fixed. I remember hearing about it a couple years ago, in the context of the bug, but I also remember hearing about how a component of their updater, when the app was broken down and deobfuscated, would just run whatever remote code package was handed to it without alerting the end user.
Even if the RCE has been fixed or removed though, the rest of their security theater is unreasonably bad, and I don’t trust them near enough to ever install their app.
Facebook collects far more than we think it does. I don’t understand why they aren’t getting hit hard with HIPAA violations yet.
I’m in my late 30s and nobody I know thinks Facebook is fine, including the few people I know that still use Facebook.
Who said Facebook is fine ? Threads was illegal in the EU due to privacy concern.
- Facebook is old and shown itself more and more shitty over time. TikTok happened to be this way from the start, as it’s how users could allow it to be when it launched.
- TikTok is viral, no one cares about Facebook outside of Facebook.
- Rational and irrational dislike of distant China. Local issues aren’t reacted on as much as they are routine.
- Both harm to the kids as it’s popular with them most and cross-generational confusion between zoomers and older people.
- TikTok is not a classic social network with friends, groups, chats, blogs but more of a content platform with it’s own distinct format of content, genres, them not being to everyone’s taste.
I don’t use neither. Not for security first, but rather because I can’t find there something interesting for myself. Not my things.
They’re both bad but tik tok is on steroids. There are a bunch of security researchers out there that have uncovered the crap tone of shit tik tok collects. It’s basically a spyware app that also comes with a social media app. From the ground up it was meant to collect personal information and every little bit about your device. I block it on my network because any tik tok device also scans the entire network and I don’t want that to happen.
By blocking you mean outgoing requests from your network to tiktok servers? Couldn’t it still scan the network and upload the results later?
I block it on dns level but I guess you’re right. If it’s done locally and stored, I guess I’ll smash every phone I see with tik tok loaded up.
facebook is a US company and has a high incentive to reasonably adhere to US regulations and consumer protection laws, especially when it comes to US citizens. Tik-Tok is not a US company and is not incentivized to reasonably adhere to US regulations and consumer protection laws.
Both companies might share your information, but if you live in the US you would have SOME legal standing if a US company did something out of line with your data. If Tik-Tok decided to publicize all your messages I don’t imagine there is much you could do. If facebook did you could probably get a reasonable lawsuit going.
Haven’t seen this mentioned, but Meta hired marketing consultants to present to the government how dangerous TikTok was just so their Facebook/IG reels or whatever they are called can take their place. This spawned a ton of news articles and opinion pieces about the government talking about this new dangerous TikTok thing and how bad it is. Also, it was very clear that an anti TikTok campaign was happening on Reddit like a year ago, so the marketing didn’t stop with presenting things to the government.
And I’m not saying it isn’t a breach of privacy. I also use Google maps too, so I’m not too terribly concerned with it. But it does just seem like a marketing smear campaign centralized around the facade of xenophobia and “think of the children”
I think the issue with this question is the fact that you asked it on a decentralized platform. If you asked this same thing on a centralized social media platform, you’ll definitely get far more pro-Facebook and anti-TikTok comments and less “uh…both are bad CHECK PLEASE”
Facebook is definitely not “fine” when it comes to privacy. It’s less worse than TikTok because it’s an American-based company, so in theory there’s a more accountability compared to TikTok (owned and operated by China).
Facebook is certainly not fine, it’s just talked about less, especially among the younger generations. Teens and twenty-something’s haven’t been drawn to Facebook for quite some time, while TikTok is currently the place to be if you’re in that age range. You don’t need to convince a Zoomer to avoid Facebook, because Facebook is where their grandma does social media, but TikTok is currently dominating their attention.
China is the enemy, therefore when they do it it’s bad.
