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?

  • /home/pineapplelover@lemm.ee
    342·
    10 months ago

    They’re both bad but tik tok is on steroids. There are a bunch of security researchers out there that have uncovered the crap ton 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.

    • nao@sh.itjust.works
      3·
      10 months ago

      By blocking you mean outgoing requests from your network to tiktok servers? Couldn’t it still scan the network and upload the results later?

      • /home/pineapplelover@lemm.ee
        1·
        10 months ago

        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.

    • s38b35M5@lemmy.worldEnglish
      53·
      10 months ago

      You can replace tiktok with Facebook in your comment, and it’s all still true. If you really believe that tiktok is somewhow worse than FB, you aren’t paying attention.