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?

  • skulblaka@startrek.website
    503·
    9 months ago

    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.

    • sheogorath@lemmy.world
      16·
      9 months ago

      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.

      • skulblaka@startrek.website
        5·
        9 months 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.