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5·2 months agoI have no doubt that China can and does buy data from data brokers. I think it’s unlikely, however that any of the major players are going to be willing to sell all their data on anyone- being able to target ads to individuals is their entire value proposition after all. On top of that, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram have fallen pretty heavily out of favor with folks in their teens/early 20s (i.e. the demographic most ripe to be sources of bad OPSEC).
But even assuming that an adversary could buy all the data they could possibly want, doing so could tip off anyone who cared to be watching about the sorts of data they’re interested in. This is generally not something you want as it can reveal your own strategic concerns/intentions.
Having your own app that can collect whatever you want, where you can promote whatever information/view that you want is a pretty big advantage over buying data.
If the argument is about privacy, I think banning tik tok is complete bullshit. If it’s about limiting intelligence gathering and influence campaigns, I think it makes more sense.
Yes and no. Without endorsing them, the arguments for banning Tik Tok are subtler than Chinese = security risk. The fears, however reasonable you may find them, are largely that it presents a danger of foreign information gathering of detailed behavioral/location/interest/social network information on a huge swath of the U.S. population which can be used either for intelligence purposes or targeted influence/psyops campaigns within the U.S. When you look at the history of how even relatively benign data from sources not controlled by foreign adversaries has been used for intelligence gathering, e.g. Strava runs disclosing the locations of classified military installations, these fears make a certain amount of sense.
Temu, et al., on the other hand are shopping apps that don’t really lend themselves to influence campaigns in the same way (though, if they are sucking up data like all the other apps, I wouldn’t be surprised if folks in the U.S. security apparatus are concerned about those as well.
Ultimately, I think the argument fails because it assumes an obligation for Congress to solve every tangentially related ill all at once where no such obligation exists.
It’s worse than that. It’s arguing that her estate and surviving husband can’t sue because he had a trial subscription to Disney+. It’s fucking absurd.
Ah yes, tracingwoodgrains.com- everyone’s source for hard-hitting, unbiased news coverage. 🙄
This story got shot down for the whiny trash it is two days ago. What made you think people would forget?
Personally, I take comfort that the executive will be weakened as it looks more and more likely that we’re about to have a wannabe dictator coming to office.
If only there had been another widespread, wasteful prior use of expensive and power hungry compute equipment that suddenly became less valuable/effective and could quickly be repurposed to run LLMs…
Is there a good reason I don’t know about to prefer this over Aegis?
OSes are for losers. Anyone who isn’t braindead runs a homebrew array of 555 chips running handwritten binary. Fuckin noobs.