longfang

sevenfeet said:

Last week I went to a security conference at Vanderbilt University, focused on the threat from China.  Speakers included the top leadership from the NSA, CIA, DEA and FBI Director Christopher Wray, among many others. And many of the speakers were asked about TikTok. It didn't matter who it was or whether they were liberal or conservative, or if they worked in the Biden, Trump or Obama administrations. ALL OF THEM said that Tiktok had to go because of national security and specifically the spying on Americans they already knew was going on by the CCP.

robin huber said:

Anilu_777 said:

America needs to out-compete China, not ban it like they did with Huawei and now with TikTok. They can call it what ever they want (national security or national whatever) but if US companies had a better product then Americans would use it. Sad image for the US. 

It can be tough to compete with an opponent who cheats. Government subsidies, product dumping, etc.  

manfred zorn said:

The sources further said that TikTok as a whole represents only a small part of ByteDance's operations. Shutting the platform down in the US would have limited impact on ByteDance, and would mean that it retains its algorithms.

A separate source told Reuters that US users represented around a quarter of TikTok's global revenues in 2023. Two of the sources speaking to Reuters said that ByteDance revenue for 2023 was almost $120 billion, meaning TikTok earned at most $30 billion in that year.

How do you get from small part of ByteDance to a quarter of ByteDance revenue? Someone's math is not adding up.

sbdude said:

longfang said:

9secondkox2 said:

longfang said:

9secondkox2 said:

Tik tok is basically heavily invasive spyware on behalf of China. 

It literally crawls your entire device and sends the data back home. 

Yikes. 

Good that it is either banned or sold to someone who must comply with consumer protections. 

And I should care why? Chinese, American, all of you are spying.

Basically it works like this: Civilian Americans care about Americans being spied on by adversarial nations - the same nations that force American companies to hand over all data traffic to said governments in order to enable censure and spying on not only its own citizens, but those they communicate with.

I asked why I should care. Makes no difference to me what happens to muricans. 

I think you answered your own stupid question. Begs the question of what you're doing on an American website and an American forum.