People don’t like it because:
- It’s the new thing. If alcohol were introduced today it would be banned in every country on earth. People tolerate Facebook, Twitter, Insta because that’s what’s been around. They all do the same thing, but TikTok is new and scary.
- Short form video is scary! It’s a new form of entertainment, and old people don’t like new forms of entertainment. See: every newly introduced form of entertainment in history, books included.
- They are misinformed about what data a mobile application can and cannot do, and the level of security built into both iOS and Android. Rest “assured”, they are collecting as much data as they can – just like every app creator on the planet. What they aren’t doing is capturing mic data while you’re sleeping (that’s not how microphones in phones work), stealing your passwords from your clipboard (OS’s notify users about clipboard paste)
- China bad. This primes people to consider negative press about it with a less skeptical eye, feeding the above points. (Don’t misconstrue me as being pro-China, I’m not, and that’s not what this post is about.)
Agreed. Also if you put a firewall app on your phone and watch how often various “closed” apps attempt to phone home. Twitter (or X now if I have to call it that) and Hulu make far more frequent requests, even when closed, than TikTok does. Not that every request is necessarily related to data harvesting, but a good amount of data about your location can be gathered just by tying the IP addresses your phone connects to their servers from to your account. The amount of fearmongering over TikTok in comparison to other apps seems absurd to me, and I haven’t even looked at any of the apps from Facebook.
Meanwhile, proving my point, downvotes all over the thread. Which, to be fair, is exactly what I expected when posting this. Not a single challenge to the idea that it’s not capturing what the fear mongering says it is. Just people perpetuating the moral panic.