> For starters, where do you see that the apps can be uninstalled? Since when system-installed apps can be removed by a user without rooting or replacing the system?
Which is an issue that affects pretty much every smartphone with a default Android ROM: Google is baked deep in there, often there's a ton of additional smartphone vendor bloat and trackingware.
A lot, if not all of that data can be accessed by US intelligence agencies trough the third-party doctrine [0].
The same applies to the biggest social media companies out there, they are all US based: Billions of people, all over the world, tell Facebook their deepest secrets and most personal and private details.
For any non-American that's a massive OpSec risk just waiting to happen, its making large parts of populations suddenly very transparent and vulnerable to all kinds of nasty tactics like blackmail [1].
Which is one of the main reasons why countries like Russia and China push domestic alternatives: It's not all just about controlling the platform, the biggest part of it is giving their citizens a local alternative that doesn't mass-scale dox them to an "adversary state".
In that context, I consider it kinda weird how US Americans freak out over TikTok being Chinese and some app by Russian developers sending data to Amazon servers, supposedly being "massive security risks".
But when other countries don't want to give up their populations data wholesale to the US, that's suddenly made out as pure oppressive authoritarianism.
You are not wrong, but right now the consequences are materially different.
As a Russian citizen it is not uncommon to go to jail for two years for expressing anti government views online, that kind of thing does not happen int he west - for now.
It doesn't happen in the West, because the West rather makes it happen in the Middle East [0], to such a degree that whole generations of people have been scarred for life [1].
While at home we jail people for viewing "terrorist content online" [2], which is so vaguely defined that it regularly ends up being "The other sides PoV", if that PoV even manages to penetrate to the everpresent layer of moderation on social media [3].
After terrorism, the next thing is now "hate speech" [4], and as much as US Americans think they are immune to such trends, they really are not. US millennials increasingly welcome and actually demand more moderation because they think that's gonna solve their right-wing extremist problem.
> It doesn't happen in the West, because the West rather makes it happen in the Middle East
Uh, I get that you want to highlight the hypocrisy of the west, but that was an astoundingly poor argument: By killing Pakistani the west silences criticism at home? And then as proof this happens you link to examples of domestic criticism?
Which is an issue that affects pretty much every smartphone with a default Android ROM: Google is baked deep in there, often there's a ton of additional smartphone vendor bloat and trackingware.
A lot, if not all of that data can be accessed by US intelligence agencies trough the third-party doctrine [0].
The same applies to the biggest social media companies out there, they are all US based: Billions of people, all over the world, tell Facebook their deepest secrets and most personal and private details.
For any non-American that's a massive OpSec risk just waiting to happen, its making large parts of populations suddenly very transparent and vulnerable to all kinds of nasty tactics like blackmail [1].
Which is one of the main reasons why countries like Russia and China push domestic alternatives: It's not all just about controlling the platform, the biggest part of it is giving their citizens a local alternative that doesn't mass-scale dox them to an "adversary state".
In that context, I consider it kinda weird how US Americans freak out over TikTok being Chinese and some app by Russian developers sending data to Amazon servers, supposedly being "massive security risks".
But when other countries don't want to give up their populations data wholesale to the US, that's suddenly made out as pure oppressive authoritarianism.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-party_doctrine
[1] https://theintercept.com/2014/02/24/jtrig-manipulation/