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?

  • TropicalDingdong@lemmy.world
    0·
    8 months ago

    Xenophobia mostly. Facebook is not fine. Neither is google. None of it is.

    All your data in those major providers gets vacuumed up directly by the NSA.

    • TrickDacy@lemmy.world
      01·
      8 months ago

      Yeah what made me so racist against the Chinese was reading about tiananmen square. Being cautious about an authoritarian government is definitely being a horrible bigot! /s

  • My Password Is 1234@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    8 months ago

    That’s because all those boomers don’t use TikTok so it’s easy for them to say that “it’s bad and privacy invading”. However, when you have to accept that the platform you rely on so much is bad, it’s not so easy to say “it’s bad and privacy invading”.

      • TheInsane42@lemmy.worldEnglish
        0·
        8 months ago

        Nop, Wikipedia shows that the term is dependent on the country and/orregion woth for the US being the '40-'50 the period, most ending tha boomer period before the '70s and fance being the only one as late as '73 to end that period.

        That it’s highly misused by the last generations as they don’t understand the earlier ones. It would be just as bad to call everybody born after '65 milennial.

  • TrickDacy@lemmy.world
    01·
    8 months ago

    Facebook is not fine, no one is saying that, and because you’re lying to say that’s being said I stopped reading.

    TikTok is bad because the Chinese government directly owns part of it and they are an insanely authoritarian and oppressive government. Do you really not know that?