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AverageCowboyCentaur t1_j13etx6 wrote

Reply to comment by RunDNA in Five ways TikTok is seen as threat to US national security by Sorin61

You're going to get down voted to hell, but you're not wrong. There's really no difference between TikTok and Facebook Instagram WhatsApp, hell those servers directly connect to the Utah data center which is literally down the road. TikTok feels like a made up Boogeyman. You want to get concerned look at Firefox, the amount of external contacts and data that it transmits to and the tracker libraries installed is an absolute nightmare compared to TikTok, that's something to think about. FireFox talks to 7 different companies in close to 30 servers. Plus it fingerprints itself and sends that off, It's a very strange program.

TikTok communicates to three servers exactly. tiktokv.com tiktokcdn.com and one to ibytedtos.com. It's all hosted in America everything's here, they don't even have to guess. If the government was really worried they'd already be fire hosing the data. The only tracking libraries in TikTok are Facebook, VK and Google related. There's not even a fingerprinting library installed. And what spying, snap/meta/insta all share openly and record everything. Hell we know meta listens to key words. This is an OS problem not an app problem go after Android and iOS and harden it against spying, or would that hurt the alphabet agencies more than American citizens?

It comes down to needing hard proof of wrongdoing instead of conjecture. Nobody can prove TikTok is doing anything, until they can I don't see a reason to freak out.

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jnemesh t1_j14pmio wrote

There's a huge difference. The US government doesn't own a stake in FB. Also, the Chinese ARE harvesting US user data and sending it straight to the CCP and transmitting the data overseas with no oversight or regulation. There is plenty of "hard proof" but some people are more distrustful of a democratic US government than an authoritarian dictatorship for some reason.

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fitzroy95 t1_j14rn3i wrote

> democratic US government

a Failed democracy perhaps.

US politicians are brought and sold by billionaires and corporate executives even before they get elected, and those "donors" are expecting a return on their investment, otherwise those donations dry up and they don't get re-elected.

You can vote for anyone you like, just remember that their allegiance is to their corporate backers, and not to the electorate.

almost any nation using some form of Proportional Representatio has a much more effective and democratic system than the US, 2-party, corporately owned, first past the post system.

and the Govt don't control the media, instead corporations own both the politicians and the propaganda that gets pushed through their media outlets. US corporate media has just as much propaganda and misinformation as anything out of China, Russia etc, and provides just as much tracking and surveillance as either of those nations.

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major-PITA t1_j148i2l wrote

Where did you get that info on Firefox? I've been using it for almost a decade because Chrome has been such a hog. So if FF is crap too, what is the next best alternative?

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AverageCowboyCentaur t1_j14np04 wrote

I just isolated the process and watched what it communicated to. It's really easy if you have an Android, check out an app called TC slim. But that's just what the Android app does If you want to see it in Windows look into Nirsoft and Sysinternals and use what makes sense for you. There's a lot of utilities there between those two that can help you figure out what they're doing. When I get home I'll get the name of the program I use on Windows.

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major-PITA t1_j18uo5i wrote

I appreciate any info you're willing to provide. I'm running NetGuard on my Note 20 with DuckDuckGo as my browser.

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