BY C STONE | STONE NEWS NETWORK
About 170 million Americans use Tik Tok daily, and it looks like this Chinese-made application will be banned soon.
It'll likely be replaced by a Tik Tok-alike application, and goodbye to data harvesting and what else is done with that application. Once your messages or videos leave Tik Tok, you really have no idea who, or what is viewing them.
Let's face it: Social Media data is a gold mine. Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, and Google all know this. They've even created artificial intelligence ecosystems to support their users. But not everything that glitters is gold, as it's said.
I once had Tik Tok on my phone - for about 2 days, before I realized it was nothing more than a time waster. Being 55, I've seen a lot of technology changes over the years - and this isn't a new technology.
And if you were a foreign country, and developed an extremely addictive and entertaining application for mobile devices - wouldn't you want to know EVERYTHING about your users? I mean, that service has to come at a cost, right? And indeed it does.
The data harvesting is nothing new. Facebook, X, Google, Microsoft, Amazon - they all do this. And yes, some have nicely appearing 'privacy warnings' and useless 'opt out' pathways - but they're difficult to find and use.
Tik Tok isn't the most difficult application to put down these days. I would say, without a doubt, Twitter used to have this #1 spot for years. But now Tik Tok came along. A quiet application, that allowed you to make unlimited videos, gather a fan base, have total strangers freak out when they see you in person - gets old, doesn't i?
The Supreme Court couldn't be slowed down by President-elect Donald Trump's request to "stand by". But it wasn't up to him. There are laws in the United States that prevent foreign countries from controlling data and observing their citizens. ByteDance must sell the company or face financial annihilation by the United States of America.
If you think the United States justice department is toothless, you should ask Bernie Madoff how he was doing in jail before he died.
And as January 19 rolls around, you're going to face the music hard-core and witness something of history: Tik Tok going away.
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