I refuse to use TikTok, Instagram, WhatsApp, etc. I only have Facebook because 90% of my friends and family are there and it’s the primary way I stay in touch with them, but I’d like to get rid of that too.
Regarding TikTok, I was serving in the US military as an IT sysadmin when it became popular. But we discovered that the app embedded itself deep in your phone’s hardware, granted itself full administrative access to your phone, then started trickling all your data to servers in China. And you couldn’t fully uninstall it once you’d installed it once. Your phone was completely compromised if you ever installed that app.
It became a huge security risk and we were told to never use it. It was a horrifyingly effective spy tool China could use to easily collect data on us. That’s why President Biden pushed to ban TikTok in the US.
But of course, TikTok became super popular among our civilian population and they refused to give it up, which led to a lot of pushback against the ban. It never held, and now people are still using it and sharing all their private information with China.
Meta does something similar with Facebook/Instagram/Whatsapp, but we at least can keep tabs on what they’re doing with your private data, since they’re an American company. They mostly use your information to build advertising profiles on you, to better catch your attention with ads. But that information could easily be used against you if federal organizations wanted to. ICE could use it to identify non-white Americans and their daily habits and easily intercept them.
Still, if you don’t want your private information being potentially stolen by these companies, it’s best to dump these programs. I don’t install them on my phone or tablet and I keep Facebook’s website isolated on my computer, since it likes to read other open windows and use those sites to fine-tune advertising data for you.
Google has turned into one of these companies that collects data on everything you do, so I’m in the middle of de-Googling my life right now. But it’s really hard because they’re embedded everywhere.
We’re living in a dark time where the only way to prevent corporations and governments from collecting information on you is to stay offline. Which is nearly impossible nowadays. We don’t get privacy in this modern Information Age. Not while Capitalism is still a thing.
When you install TikTok, it fabricates its own independent SoC within your phone. Sometimes you can tell because the case bulges slightly, but it depends on the model.
This isn’t strictly forbidden by Android and iOS APIs (yet), but there are limitations – this most notably affects the capacitors on the new SoC which degrade quickly and can make a faint clicking noise, hence the name “TikTok”.
I don’t know the veracity of the statements about tiktok, but I do remember a hubbub back in the day about facebook nestling into parts of your phone and not being uninstalled with the app. A quick search later, and it looks like it was because it was a ‘default app’ on samsung phones. So yeah, for this I definitely want to see the proof of concept and at least some relevant info on tiktok specifically.
can confirm. my samsung phone has a “meta services” system app i had to root to yank out. they apparently had a deal to put that spyware in. i’m also not aware of a similar deal with tiktok.
Make it addictive like a drug, make it a core element of common culture, and most importantly, make it have some kind of socializing network effect that generates a knee jerk disgust in normies when anyone dares to question its widespread and regular use.
It is extremely funny to me when someone asks me to install say discord or insta or whatsapp, and I say I don’t use them for security and privacy reasons…
Then I ask them to install signal, and they say ‘I’m not going to install a whole app just for you.’
Apparently entirely unaware of, oblivious that they literally just asked me to do that.
whooooosh
Then they get angry and begin to babble on about some kind of idiot nonsense about how either I don’t know how to do digital security or how its just impossible so why try, or both.
If I mention that I literally did handle PII in corporate databases and thus do actually understand a decent chunk of cybersecurity…
They tend to become emotional and defensive.
Try to explain anything in detail to them and they have a bunch of sophomoric / dunning krueger instant retorts and thought terminating cliches, because they don’t want to listen or possibly learn anything, they want to justify their digital drug addiction.
Former military person, fear mongers about magic evil of TikTok tech mining everything and sending it to the scary Chinese, says that FB does the same but also claims that somehow “we at least can keep tabs on what they’re doing with your private data” (lol), while also admitting to still being on FB and using Google’s services. Not at all suspicious and incoherent I’d say.
We discovered that the app embedded itself deep in your phone’s hardware, granted itself full administrative access to your phone, then started trickling all your data to servers in China
Ok bud, that doesn’t sound stupid AF at all. This random military IT sysadmin knows this but all other cyber security experts in the world have somehow missed this crucial bit of info. And for some reason, this info hasn’t travelled up the chain through the intelligence agencies. Remarkable.
I refuse to use TikTok, Instagram, WhatsApp, etc. I only have Facebook because 90% of my friends and family are there and it’s the primary way I stay in touch with them, but I’d like to get rid of that too.
Regarding TikTok, I was serving in the US military as an IT sysadmin when it became popular. But we discovered that the app embedded itself deep in your phone’s hardware, granted itself full administrative access to your phone, then started trickling all your data to servers in China. And you couldn’t fully uninstall it once you’d installed it once. Your phone was completely compromised if you ever installed that app.
It became a huge security risk and we were told to never use it. It was a horrifyingly effective spy tool China could use to easily collect data on us. That’s why President Biden pushed to ban TikTok in the US.
But of course, TikTok became super popular among our civilian population and they refused to give it up, which led to a lot of pushback against the ban. It never held, and now people are still using it and sharing all their private information with China.
Meta does something similar with Facebook/Instagram/Whatsapp, but we at least can keep tabs on what they’re doing with your private data, since they’re an American company. They mostly use your information to build advertising profiles on you, to better catch your attention with ads. But that information could easily be used against you if federal organizations wanted to. ICE could use it to identify non-white Americans and their daily habits and easily intercept them.
Still, if you don’t want your private information being potentially stolen by these companies, it’s best to dump these programs. I don’t install them on my phone or tablet and I keep Facebook’s website isolated on my computer, since it likes to read other open windows and use those sites to fine-tune advertising data for you.
Google has turned into one of these companies that collects data on everything you do, so I’m in the middle of de-Googling my life right now. But it’s really hard because they’re embedded everywhere.
We’re living in a dark time where the only way to prevent corporations and governments from collecting information on you is to stay offline. Which is nearly impossible nowadays. We don’t get privacy in this modern Information Age. Not while Capitalism is still a thing.
that’s gonna need to be sourced.
is tiktok really exploiting phones to root them, then covertly installing itself “deep in your hardware”?
When you install TikTok, it fabricates its own independent SoC within your phone. Sometimes you can tell because the case bulges slightly, but it depends on the model.
This isn’t strictly forbidden by Android and iOS APIs (yet), but there are limitations – this most notably affects the capacitors on the new SoC which degrade quickly and can make a faint clicking noise, hence the name “TikTok”.
I don’t know the veracity of the statements about tiktok, but I do remember a hubbub back in the day about facebook nestling into parts of your phone and not being uninstalled with the app. A quick search later, and it looks like it was because it was a ‘default app’ on samsung phones. So yeah, for this I definitely want to see the proof of concept and at least some relevant info on tiktok specifically.
can confirm. my samsung phone has a “meta services” system app i had to root to yank out. they apparently had a deal to put that spyware in. i’m also not aware of a similar deal with tiktok.
Yep, I am like this too.
How do you effectively promote spyware?
Make it addictive like a drug, make it a core element of common culture, and most importantly, make it have some kind of socializing network effect that generates a knee jerk disgust in normies when anyone dares to question its widespread and regular use.
It is extremely funny to me when someone asks me to install say discord or insta or whatsapp, and I say I don’t use them for security and privacy reasons…
Then I ask them to install signal, and they say ‘I’m not going to install a whole app just for you.’
Apparently entirely unaware of, oblivious that they literally just asked me to do that.
whooooosh
Then they get angry and begin to babble on about some kind of idiot nonsense about how either I don’t know how to do digital security or how its just impossible so why try, or both.
If I mention that I literally did handle PII in corporate databases and thus do actually understand a decent chunk of cybersecurity…
They tend to become emotional and defensive.
Try to explain anything in detail to them and they have a bunch of sophomoric / dunning krueger instant retorts and thought terminating cliches, because they don’t want to listen or possibly learn anything, they want to justify their digital drug addiction.
Oh well, works as an idiot filter for me.
Suffer no fools.
Former military person, fear mongers about magic evil of TikTok tech mining everything and sending it to the scary Chinese, says that FB does the same but also claims that somehow “we at least can keep tabs on what they’re doing with your private data” (lol), while also admitting to still being on FB and using Google’s services. Not at all suspicious and incoherent I’d say.
Ok bud, that doesn’t sound stupid AF at all. This random military IT sysadmin knows this but all other cyber security experts in the world have somehow missed this crucial bit of info. And for some reason, this info hasn’t travelled up the chain through the intelligence agencies. Remarkable.
honestly sounds a bit like right wing slop.
These days I only go on facebook for marketplace and a few community groups.