The social media network has over a 100 million viewer’s…..
From kids to adults ….
The network does exactly what other social media outfits do….
Check who is on their site, record that, send that info to advertising outfit’s for a percentage, and use that info to find more people to sign up…
The issue that is growing for government official’s in the West is that the data gained is also seen the Chinese government, which IS working 24/7 to gain the lead on America and the West economically and politically….
Shutting down the network will not be easy….
But efforts have accelerated to do so……
TikTok makes money by collecting data on its users and feeding them exactly what they’ve been profiled to respond to, including the goods and services of advertisers. That’s the business model of every free-to-use social media platform, and TikTok is particularly good at it. Nearly 70% of American teenagers use the app, while only 30% of the same age group use Facebook. By some estimates, young people open the app up to 19 times a day.
The company’s 5,000-word privacy policy sets out in grim detail just how much data is collected: essentially, it’s everything. The terms are also clear about the use of that data to personalise and customise your feed, fulfil purchases, personalise ads and measure their effectiveness.
But the business model that TikTok shares with its US rivals does not seem to bother policymakers that much. Their anxieties are about whom that data is shared with. TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, is Chinese – and the security concerns are real. There is China’s weak rule of law, human rights concerns regarding the oppression of Uighur Muslims, and the use of technology to enforce social and political conformity to think about. There are also worries about its national security laws, which compel companies to share data with the government. Put together all the data, including device, location, IP address, content viewed, duration and frequency of use, engagement with other users and an authoritarian state, and you have a combustible mix.
We also can’t forget the lessons learned from the 2016 US presidential elections and the Brexit referendum onward, which indicate that hostile actors can and do manipulate algorithms designed for advertising, and subvert them for political ends. With TikTok, where the user population is young and vulnerable to exploitation and manipulation (whether towards terrorism, political radicalisation or harmful body-image anxiety), those risks are acute.
As the bans mount up, TikTok has been rushing to implement confidence-building measures. The detail of its initiatives, Project Clover in the EU and Project Texas in the US, seems compelling. User data will be kept onshore in the EU or US, data practices will be vetted by trusted third parties – such as Oracle in the US – and there will be a default 60-minute screen time limit for young people.
But, as with Huawei, this is not going to be enough because this was never about the details. As was clear from Congress’s aggressive questioning of TikTok’s CEO, in which he was often interrupted and talked over, US policymakers don’t think they need more information. They want to communicate their distrust of China in the context of worsening geopolitical and economic tensions…..
The view of Washington lawmakers dealing with TikTok…..
Muddled…..
The contentious session has added steam to a trio of congressional proposals that are vying to head off the perceived threat.
But competing visions over the Biden administration’s role in the plans and a lack of consensus on the bills means there’s no clear path unifying lawmakers, beyond their shared ire at TikTok….