I asked someone who had done high level work at TikTok what he thought of the CCP conspiracy theories driving the Trump/Biden ban pushes. He said something to the effect of "ByteDance isn't coordinated enough to pull off being that evil."
Google has been incomprehensibly big for decades at this point. They know regulators are watching. Mistakes like the SSID logging controversy in Germany get interpreted as malice, and company-wide trainings go out drilling into people not to log more than they have a contemporaneous business reason for.
If there's anyone I trust to be honest and upfront about what data they're collecting and how it might be used, it's Google. They have the experience, motivation, and resources to do it right.
Companies with a lower pedigree - either from countries that don't take individual rights seriously, or from small teams that don't have the resources to cover all their bases - are the ones that give me pause.
What does your contact at ByteDance think the CCP staff does in the ByteDance offices all day? Why does the CCP need a board seat?
These companies are coordinated enough to keep out mentions of Tiananmen Square or Xi as Poo from Chinese users. If they can drop politically sensitive content in particular regions, they can boost political content in other regions, right? Whether or not they actually try to put their thumb on the scale today doesn’t really matter. That’s the nature of a security risk.
The Conversation had a pretty good article earlier this year on how (in some ways) there's no real separation between the government and companies in China.
Google has been incomprehensibly big for decades at this point. They know regulators are watching. Mistakes like the SSID logging controversy in Germany get interpreted as malice, and company-wide trainings go out drilling into people not to log more than they have a contemporaneous business reason for.
If there's anyone I trust to be honest and upfront about what data they're collecting and how it might be used, it's Google. They have the experience, motivation, and resources to do it right.
Companies with a lower pedigree - either from countries that don't take individual rights seriously, or from small teams that don't have the resources to cover all their bases - are the ones that give me pause.