Baptiste Robert (fs0c131y)

Let's face it: it has nothing to do with "treat people the way they treat you." It's just Trump trying to win/secure the votes from his loyal supporters.

Does TikTok grab user data and analyze them for ads, recommendations, etc? Sure, so do Instagram. But does TikTok send those data back to Chinese government so that it would potentially threaten U.S. national security? We need proof, but so far none. Here's an article of French hacker Elliot Alderson (@fs0c131y) analyzing TikTok code: https://medium.com/@fs0c131y/tiktok-logs-logs-logs-e93e8162647a

So IMHO the two real reasons Trumps banned TikTok and WeChat are:
1. His supporters are mad that everything is made in China. It violates some basic economics principles but that's fine.
2. What happened to that Oklahoma rally, Trump really took it personal.

This ban put hundreds of thousands of Chinese people (including those who are already U.S. citizens or green card holders) in the U.S. to a difficult position. They don't have other ways to communicate with there friends/families in China other than WeChat. But I guess, those people (including myself), are the least important factors Trump worries about, if he even cares at all.

Regardless of what you think about TikTok, the banning of an app in the interest of "national security" is largely unprecedented.

The jump from banning Huawei from building critical public infrastructure to banning an app that hasn't even conclusively been proven to behave in any uniquely dangerous ways seems to be an intense, unjustified escalation of this conflict. [1]

You may disagree with me on the strict security-related merits of banning TikTok, and I am willing to concede all of them, however this will, either way, establish a precedent of an app's coverage by 1st amendment free speech protections, and of what standards the government needs to do to ban an app, whether it be a Chinese social media app or an end-to-end encrypted messaging app. [2]

If the standard is simply to claim that it's "a national security threat" without requiring any further evidence (besides the fact that it's Chinese) then that might be cause for concern.

[1] https://medium.com/@fs0c131y/tiktok-logs-logs-logs-e93e8162647a

[2] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/08/tiktok-ban-seed-genuine-security-concern-wrapped-thick-layer-censorship

You mean educate myself with a post from an anonymous random Redditor who never actually proved any of their claims?

https://www.reddit.com/r/tiktok_reversing/comments/i3d9qw/somebodys_gotta_say_it

I feel like this is the tech equivalent of QAnon...

To be clear, I don't think Facebook is any better than Tiktok. But I've seen zero actual evidence it's any worse. Frankly, the whole thing stinks of sinophobia dressed up as privacy pearl clutching...

Edit: and if you want an actual analysis with real evidence and data:

https://medium.com/@fs0c131y/tiktok-logs-logs-logs-e93e8162647a

"As far as we can see, in its current state, TikTok doesn’t have a suspicious behavior and is not exfiltrating unusual data."

> [Jean-Noël Barrot, French digital minister]: «My team and I have been using it since July 2022. In December, the entire government will be using [Olvid], the world's most secure instant messaging system» ... // Tchap, the government-developed secure messaging and collaboration app, launched in 2019, is also allowed

The first question is, how can the rest of the public be sure that those two new systems indicated are free from backdoors.

Olvid was briefly discussed by the community apparently only at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29779230 two years ago.

Tchap was examined in 2019 at https://medium.com/@fs0c131y/tchap-the-super-not-secure-app-of-the-french-government-84b31517d144

I hope their security is better than in 2019 when the French Tchap service based on Matrix was immediately compromised by a trivial attack [1].

Matrix.org has also been breached in the past [2].

That's ignoring the fact their project was born out of a company that operates front offices for one of the world's most aggressive spy agencies...

[1] https://medium.com/@fs0c131y/tchap-the-super-not-secure-app-of-the-french-government-84b31517d144

[2] https://matrix.org/blog/2019/04/11/we-have-discovered-and-addressed-a-security-breach-updated-2019-04-12