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?
Facebook is NOT FINE
And most people that have an issue with TikTok will also have an issue with Facebook. Not sure where OP got the idea there’s a general consensus that one is ok and not the other.
We’re talking more about TiKTok now because it’s newer, growing, and on of the most prevalent platforms at the moment.
The fact Facebook is a privacy invading monster is old news. We’re not talking about it as much because it’s declining and everyone already knows.
A good deal of Facebook usage also tends to be begrudging because groups and relatives refuse to move off it.
China. Also, no one is saying FB is fine, but since it’s American then gov pretty much shrugs. It was FB after all feeding the NSA yeah?
Not so much saying it, but I personally know several people who’ll argue that Tiktok is a privacy invading god awful website that should be banned then 5 minutes later proceed to doomscroll Facebook
I tolerate Facebook on my network, but tiktok is an absolute no for me, null routed.
That’s entirely anecdotal, and confirmation bias to boot. How many people do you know that use neither? I’ll bet it’s sizable.
Yeah, there are some that don’t use TikTok but use Facebook, but that’s not evidence of a trend. Especially when Facebook has legitimate uses that you can’t easily replace with the other platforms
You’re not wrong, it indeed is anecdotal, but I’m not a data analyst, and I’m not going to run a global survey asking anybody who’ll answer whether they use one but not the other. All I can go on is what I’ve seen, and among my friends who use Facebook (most of them), I’d say 70% or so either believe, or act like they believe Facebook is less of a data theft machine than tiktok
Not sure what else you want me to say
There’s a non-zero chance that China would sometime want to use Americans’ data against them. All Facebook cares about is selling it to marketers and the US government.
This is the first time I’ve ever seen the phrase “Facebook is fine” ever written out.
Who said Facebook is fine ? Threads was illegal in the EU due to privacy concern.
Facebook is most definitely not fine. However, as far as I know Facebook hasn’t pushed known RCE (remote code execution) exploits into their product updates, which TikTok has. Politicians don’t care about this but literally everyone else should.
Facebook is bad but TikTok is bad^bad. I use neither, Soo ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
For real tho, when me and my partner decided to delete our social media our mental health and relationship improved immensely. It even improved our social lives too, if I wanted to know how someone is doing I’ll just shoot em a text or call em and catch up or setup an outing together.
if I wanted to know how someone is doing I’ll just shoot em
How to say you’re American without saying you’re American
Similar situation: https://youtu.be/ZI64OnOKRoM?feature=shared
Got any source for that TikTok RCE exploit? All I could find was a single bug 3 years ago.
At this point it’s possible that it’s been fixed. I remember hearing about it a couple years ago, in the context of the bug, but I also remember hearing about how a component of their updater, when the app was broken down and deobfuscated, would just run whatever remote code package was handed to it without alerting the end user.
Even if the RCE has been fixed or removed though, the rest of their security theater is unreasonably bad, and I don’t trust them near enough to ever install their app.
