Comment by medhir
16 hours ago
In a more functional democracy we would see that mass data collection of any sort, by any company (foreign or domestic), is a national security risk.
Have witnessed first-hand the threats by foreign state actors penetrating US-based cloud infrastructure. And it’s not like any of our domestic corporations are practicing the type of security hygiene necessary to prevent those intrusions.
So idk, the whole thing feels like a farce that will mainly benefit Zuck and co while doing very little to ultimately protect our interests.
We would be much better off actually addressing data privacy and passing legislation that regulates every company in a consistent manner.
> In a more functional democracy we would see that mass data collection of any sort, by any company (foreign or domestic), is a national security risk.
You obviously don't mean "democracy," but some other word. We don't see mass data collection as a problem because most Americans don't care about privacy. The only reason this Tik Tok thing is even registering is because of the treat of China, which Americans do care about.
There's nothing preventing China from buying mass data from Facebook or one of the many data brokers. This is about censorship and the ability to control public narratives.
You're falsely equating mass data. If anyone can buy the data from brokers then it's effectively public and could be weaponized by anyone. If TikTok collects their own data and doesn't sell it, then it's not public and can be weaponized exclusively by the Chinese government. And that's separate even from algorithm manipulation, which is another liability that's difficult to catch & prove definitively.
Yes there is. Facebook has never done anything like this and never would, that's what is preventing it.
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It's questionable what a more functional democracy would actually do, since there hasn't really been one in history. There's been other forms of democracy, but they've all had their flaws, and none of them so far have acted in the interests of all the people in that country.
I am not an "America bad" type of fellow, but US democracy is clearly reaching a local minimum. I suspect "never more functional" is an idea with which even your representative would disagree. There are multiple major issues that Congress should have addressed decades ago and instead they've only become more intractable. The country is more than its government, but the core democratic component, Congress, simply gets very little done. I do not think it can go much longer before some series of events forces broad compromises and realignment.
Everyone obsesses about the US president but congress has had a terrible terrible approval rating for decades now.
https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2F...
We'll probably pull a Rome and go from republic to dictatorship, kick off a civil war or two, and eventually it'll settle down into empire. I'd say we have 25 years left.
I mean, however flawed the EU may be, I think they are earnestly trying to protect the average person from the current paradigm of abusive data collection. Perfect can’t be the enemy of good.
That is blatantly wrong.
The EU has been trying to ban encryption for the last 3 years so that it can read all your text messages, listen to your conversations and monitor the images you send to your loved ones/friends without requiring a warrant from the authorities, therefore granting them an unlimited access to everyone's private life without offering any possible recourse.
The EU's pro-privacy stance is a just a facade, they want as much data as the US government, they just don't want to admit it publicly.
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Isn’t the EU trying to ban encryption? Do you really think they give a crap about average person
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Claiming that “mass data collection” by our own government is inherently a natural security risk is not an assertion based on rational evidence.
It's absolutely a risk because these databases are unregulated honey pots. They're a total liability