Avoid TikTok New Ownership in America
Due to numerous privacy and security concerns we are advising all professional and personal American based people to avoid TikTok. This means you should consider deleting the App and your account for their service. Yikes, yeah it’s that bad! Do keep in mind that your business is your business, we aim to keep it that way. That’s why we strongly advise you to avoid certain tech like TikTok, because we cannot guarantee they will treat with you that same level of privacy and respect.
Under New Managment
In short US law required the original owner ByteDance (a Chinese company) to sell their entire US operations to an American Company. The transaction completed last week with Oracle, Silver Lake, and MGX holding the majority shares. MGX reportedly is based in the United Arab Emirates, which makes us wonder about the law requiring American ownership, but we’re not here to weigh in on legal counsel.
This new management has enacted new policies for operations which have raised numerous red flags. They fall under: Privacy Concerns, Surveillance, and content exploitation to fuel someone else’s AI, Censorship and Government/Corporate Control of speech.
Keep in mind that if you were concerned about ByteDance and Chinese influence, the only thing that’s changed now is it is elitist Americans individuals that are controlling and running the platform. We personally don’t trust corporate and government elitists from anywhere with our privacy, and neither should you. If you have rights you should not give them up in order to engage with tech.
Privacy Concerns
The biggest red flag is TikTok US now requires detailed GPS tracking of your device. This is accurate to the level of which apartment you live in. You do not need to know that information for me to use your App. If it’s me, sorry I’m a “hard pass, delete now.”
Surveillance Concerns
Additionally the updated terms of service collects data like: race, religion, sexual information, health information, financial information, government issued ID’s, and citizenship status. We can think of no reasonable request that a Tech company should ever need this data and you should not feel compelled to provide it. If you are engaging with a healthcare organization, financial institution, or certified government agency they might collect this data, but they usually do it through different and official means.
Exploitation to Fuel Someone Else’s AI
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is in a fascinating place right now. There’s a couple of glaring problems with it: it requires lots of resources to run and it’s unclear how it makes money. Starting with the former it uses lots of energy, computers, land, water, financial capital, and most importantly: data. The last one is where you come in. When you’re on many of the free to use social media platforms they actively collect all the data they can to train their AI model to be better. Nothing wrong with that except I don’t remember the last time I got a pay check for them taking that resource from me. Do you? They are going to continue to take that data as often as they can get away with to help solve that other problem of making money. We say fair compensation for fair value or it’s no deal.
Censorship and Control of Speech
Numerous creative people have already commented on the drop in views of content. Often around a political topic or sensitive topic, nevertheless proving that if they can do it for some speech they can and will do it for any speech.
Alternatives
We prefer Loops as a free as in freedom and free as in no cost alternative. “All the fun of short-form video, none of the corporate control. Loops is federated, open-source, and designed to give power back to creators and communities.”
Sure there’s others out there but many of those are also owned by large corporations already and while they may not be doing anything egregious today, what’s to stop them from violating your rights and freedoms in the future?