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?
Coming from someone who uses neither currently but has used Facebook before, I think it’s more to do with the fact that people are used to Facebook, Google and other companies collecting data. Facebook does a ton of lobbying to tell you just how much they value privacy.
Facebooks data policies are supposed to follow US law. As you already mentioned, I won’t go any further on that. With a foreign country that isn’t exactly super friendly with the US, they could use this same data against citizens. You have no real GDPR, or US privacy laws to protect you if China decides to target a diplomats family or whatever.
For most people, it’s probably not going to affect you either way, but because data is something we really don’t understand the full value of. As an Example, ethnic groups could be targeted and tiktok can be used as a data source.
With the whole Facebook being used to potentially manipulate elections, Tiktok could be as well and the US/other countries have even less they can do to stop it.
But a lot of the hate that you’re seeing on the news is playing into China bad and not really casting light that they are okay with US companies collecting the same data. See: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/06/everything-we-know-about-facebooks-secret-mood-manipulation-experiment/373648/
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/apr/17/brexit-voter-manipulation-eu-referendum-social-media
https://www.businessinsider.com/tiktok-censor-china-critical-content-uighur-uighurs-2020-11?op=1