Article 43
Friday, March 24, 2023
Blaming TikTok For Our Lack Of Privacy Protection Laws
AT&T’s new privacy policy for its Internet and video services is way out of line - an insult to genuine security efforts and a brassy attempt to make its profits your problem… AT&T has also extended its claims on your information by claiming that it can monitor your video usage.... The new privacy policy basically lets AT&T do anything it wants with your information. (Remember, according to the company, it’s its information.) The specific claim is that AT&T can do whatever it wants with your/its data “to protect [the company’s] legitimate business interests.”
- Phone Records For Sale, 2006
Many of the big American players have set up shop in Shenzhen, but they look singularly unimpressive next to their Chinese competitors. The research complex for China’s telecom giant Huawei, for instance, is so large that it has its own highway exit… Sometimes called “market Stalinism,” it is a potent hybrid of the most powerful political tools of authoritarian communism - central planning, merciless repression, constant surveillance harnessed to advance the goals of global capitalism… In 2006, the Chinese government mandated that all Internet cafes (as well as restaurants and other entertainment venues) install video cameras with direct feeds to their local police stations… But the cameras that Zhang manufactures are only part of the massive experiment in population control that is under way here. “The big picture,” Zhang tells me in his office at the factory, “is integration.” That means linking cameras with other forms of surveillance: THE INTERNET, phones, facial-recognition software and GPS monitoring…
- Rise of the Golden Shield, 2008
EMBARQ may use information such as the websites you visit or online searches that you conduct to deliver or facilitate the delivery of targeted advertisements. The delivery of these advertisements will be based on anonymous surfing behavior and will not include users’ names, email addresses, telephone numbers, or any other Personally Identifiable Information. You may choose to opt out of this preference advertising service. By opting out, you will continue to receive advertisements as normal; but these advertisements will be less relevant and less useful to you.
Embarq, WOW Bury Snooping In Terms Of Service, DSL Reports, 2008
Charter Communications, one of the largest ISPs is the country, confirmed Tuesday that its partnering with a company called NebuAd, which pays ISPs to let it install a monitoring box on their networks to sniff customer traffic.
- NebuAd’s Make Believe Opt-Out, 2008
OnStar’s latest T&C has some very unsettling updates to it, which include the ability to sell your personal GPS location information, speed, safety belt usage, and other information to third parties, including law enforcement… OnStar has granted themselves the right to collect this information for any purpose, at any time, provided that following collection of such location and speed information identifiable to your Vehicle
- OnStar Snooping, 2011
Selling Bell Labs and Lucent in 2006 to foreigners was a forgotten moment in US history. The company’s subsidiary - LUCENT GOVERNMENT SOLUTIONS - is a sobering reminder of what’s going on, along with AT&T outsourcing its IT infrastructure, or US carriers selling every TAT cable to foreigners. These expressions that capitalism trumps all - even national security - are a lot scarier to me than fear mongering about HUAWEI and CHINESE TELECOM MANUFACTURERS, that our friends at 60 Minutes did a piece on last night.... Like the guy says at the end of the Forbes article - “It’s much easier to bash China.”
- Bad Moon Rising Part 57, Huawei, 2012
Back in Hitler’s day, the rich were targeted; their wealth stolen and the lives snuffed out, but THIS TIME its the poor who are being sent to the Gulag… The NSA in America, similar to Nazi’s attempt to discriminate based on data collection… The SCAPEGOATS being marked for death and imprisoned this time are the poor.
- PRISM & Purity: NSA follows Nazi tradition, 2013
Thanks to a new VERMONT LAW requiring companies that buy and sell third-party personal data to register with the Secretary of State, we’ve been able to assemble a list of 121 data brokers operating in the U.S. It’s a rare, rough glimpse into a bustling economy that operates largely in the shadows, and often with few rules.
- Data Brokers, 2019
[N]ow we see that the surveillance capitalists behind those services regard us as the free commodity. We thought that we search Google, but now we understand that Google searches us. We assumed that we use social media to connect, but we learned that connection is how social media uses us. We barely questioned why our new TV or mattress had a privacy policy, but we’ve begun to understand that “privacy policies” are actually surveillance policies.
- The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 2020
The class action complaint is based on a report by researcher FELIX KRAUSE - who claimed Facebook and Instagram apps for iPhones inject JavaScriptcode onto websites people visit. A similar complaint was filed in the same court a week ago… The class action lawsuits say the Facebook app bends Apples privacy rules by opening the links in an in-app browser rather than the users default browser… The Facebook app is a major offender when it comes to privacy so it’s worth at least deleting that - and Instagram - from your iPhone.
- Facebook Keeps Giving Users More Reasons To Delete Their Accounts, 2022
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America’s online privacy problems are much bigger than TikTok
Concerns of Chinese data access highlight Congress’s own failure to protect Americans personal information
By Will Oremus
Washington Post
March 24, 2024
For a brief moment in a FIVE HOUR HOUSE HEARING on Thursday, TikTok’s CEO Shou Zi Chew let his frustration show. Asked if TikTok was prepared to split off from its Chinese parent company if ordered to do so by the U.S. government, to safeguard Americans online data, Chew went on offense.
"I don’t think ownership is the issue here. With a lot of respect: American social companies don’t have a great record with privacy and data security. I mean, look at Facebook and Cambridge Analytica,” Chew said, referring to the 2018 scandal in which Facebook users’ data was found to have been secretly harvested years earlier by a British political consulting firm.
He’s not wrong. At a hearing in which TikTok was often portrayed as a singular, untenable threat to Americans’ online privacy, it would have been easy to forget that the country’s online privacy problems run far deeper than any single app. And the people most responsible for failing to safeguard Americans data, arguably, are American lawmakers.
The bipartisan uproar over TikToks Chinese ownership stems from the concern that China’s laws could allow its authoritarian government to demand or clandestinely gain access to sensitive user data, or tweak its algorithms to distort the information its young users see. The concerns are genuine. And yet the United States has failed to bequeath Americans most of the rights it now accuses TikTok of threatening.
While the European Union has far-reaching privacy laws, Congress has not agreed on national privacy legislation, leaving Americans’ online data rights up to a patchwork of state and federal laws. In the meantime, reams of data on Americans shopping habits, browsing history and real-time location, collected by websites and mobile apps, is bought and sold on the open market in a multi-hundred-billion-dollar industry. If the Chinese Communist Party wanted that data, it could get huge volumes of it without ever tapping TikTok. (In fact, TikTok says it has STOPPED TRACKING U.S. users’ precise location, putting it ahead of many American apps on at least one important privacy front.)
That point was not entirely lost on the members of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, which convened Thursdays hearing. Last year, their committee became the first to advance a comprehensive data privacy bill, hashing out a hard-won compromise. But it stalled amid qualms from House and Senate leaders.
Likewise, worries about TikToks addictive ALGORITHMS, its effects on teens’ mental health, and its hosting of propaganda and extreme content are common to its American rivals, including GoogleҒs YouTube and Metas Instagram. Congress has not meaningfully addressed those, either.
And if Chinese ownership is the issue, TikTok has plenty of company there, as well: A glance at Apple’s iOS App Store rankings earlier this week showed that four of the top five apps were Chinese-owned: TikTok, its ByteDance sibling CapCut, and the ONLINE SHOPPING APPS SHEIN AND TEMU.
The enthusiasm for cracking down on TikTok in particular is understandable. It’s huge, its fast-growing, and railing against it allows lawmakers to position themselves simultaneously as champions of American children and tough on China. Banning it would seem to offer a quick fix to the problems lawmakers spent five hours on Thursday lamenting.
And yet, without an overhaul of online privacy laws, it ignores that those problems exist on all the other apps that haven’t been banned.
“In most ways, they’re like most of the Big Tech companies,” Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.) said of TikTok after the hearing. “They can use Americans’ data any way they want.” She and several other committee members said they’d prefer to address TikTok as part a broader privacy bill, rather than a one-off ban.
But the compromises required to pass big legislation can be politically costly, while railing against TikTok costs nothing. If Chew can take any consolation from Thursday’s hearing, it’s that congressional browbeating of tech companies are far more common than congressional action against them.
For an example, he has only to look at the one he raised in that moment of frustration: For all the hearings, all the grilling of Mark Zuckerberg over Cambridge Analytica, Russian election interference and more, Facebook is still here - and now Congress has moved on to a new SCAPEGOAT.
Section Privacy And Rights • Section Broadband Privacy •
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