A rant that outgrew the Link Log...
Let me begin by saying that I, personally, will never miss Tiktok. I have about 200 tabs full of videos that people posted instead of writing blog posts like human beings, and how many of them I'll be able to watch before Google loses the tabs--much as I want to keep up with these people's news--I have no earthly idea. Videos take too long. I tolerate "vlogs" as background noise here on the screen porch because no one else objects to them and because the "vloggers" are older bloggers whose eyes can't read screens as they once did. They're walking around without white canes, but there is a real possibility that, if they read and wrote real blogs, that might cease to be the case. They have to decide what their old eyes are going to see, these days. But I am not interested in the videos young people post because they're too lazy to learn to type. I seldom leave the tab playing the video on the screen; I'm not going to spend those minutes looking at anybody's foolish face. I want people to type at least tweets, or Blue Sky "skeets." Life is too short to sit through videos.
But although Tiktok has already exposed all the personal information young Americans so foolishly shared to people in China who might become our enemies if socialism does enough economic damage in their country, while telling them how rich we are...although a hostile Chinese person who wanted to steal a Tiktokker's identity for evil purposes might already have digital "verification" of that Tiktokker's real first name, where person goes to school, per friends' and crushes' and teachers' names, per face, per voice, per way of walking, and per fingerprints as scanned from a touch screen...as a mechanism for gathering data Americans, and I include everybody on at least the northern continent, should never have typed or scanned into a computer, and using that information to harass people, and claiming a need to censor "hateful" and "hurtful" content as an excuse for censoring valid information that "hurt" sales and political campaigns of people who couldn't dispute the facts, Tiktok's record is outclassed by Meta's. The fact that Meta is US-based in no way means that Meta is either pro-American, or less than un-American.
Meta is the company that started out as Facebook, then added most of Facebook's former competitors to its competitors. Meta currently owns Beluga, Instagram, Messenger, Onavo, Reality Labs, Snapchat, Threads, and Whats App, and has been allowed to "manage" some operations for Yougov, which is why Yougov's US standards have gone so far downhill. For a while Meta was "managing the US interface" of Live Journal; my understanding is that Meta failed to reduce the frequency or annoying quality of LJ-glitches and settled for alienating the majority of LJ bloggers with an obnoxious ad format, then abandoned ship.
This web site has had little to say about Meta because the position of this web site is that, if you are surfing the'Net and a site or person asks for your real-world name, or any kind of real-world live-contact information, bank information, medical information, basically any information you would hesitate to give to a stranger on the street, you should close the tab and have nothing to do with that site or person. Sites you want to visit are of two kinds: informative, and interactive. Informative sites display the same information to every visitor, like a newspaper. Interactive sites should ask you to choose a screen name, share an e-mail address, and optionally disclose your web site (if you have one) or set up a password. Laws forbidding sites to ask for a phone number are overdue. If you still have a phone, nobody in cyberspace needs to know about it. If you have or have ever had a credit card, nobody in cyberspace should ever know about that, either. So you should have no interaction with any site owned by Meta, whose business is all about gathering and misusing the kind of information this web site has consistently warned you not to share with anybody online.
Does your school have a right to know your real name? Does your mother? Does the IRS? Of course they have but that does not mean your real name should be in a computer. You should never touch a computer screen with a fingertip. You should never post a picture of your face or participate in video chat that allows other people to see your face. If someone says you're "secretive" or "paranoid," a useful thing to say is "Yes, I even lock my doors." You should be "secretive" and "paranoid" in cyberspace because it's a precise equivalent of locking doors.
Meta has little or no information about intelligent Americans but, for evil purposes, enemies may prefer information about stupid Americans who post pictures of their homes, inside and out, and pay bills, and put their whole genealogies online. Science fiction used to speculate that biometric "security scans" would give criminals an incentive to murder innocent people for their fingertips. That wouldn't be altogether impossible but it's turned out to be easier for criminals to hack the scanning devices, inserting other people's data, including biometric data, in place of their own. By sending hair to genealogy sites for DNA tests, fingering touch screens that recognize our fingerprints, even turning a video camera on our faces while we sing or dance, we supply biometric data to people who may want to use it against us...whether that be government or corporate interests that want to punish us for dissent, or foreign enemies that want to pretend to be us when they hijack planes or plant bombs.
Meta belongs to US citizens who enjoy the power of granting access to that information exclusively to the US government--now--but Meta is not omnipotent. Sooner or later Meta will be hacked and that information will be available to those who hate the US.
Everyone always thinks "Oh that's silly. I'm not rich or famous; who'd want to pretend to be me?" until someone does. Like someone disputing a will who wants to get per hands on someone's legacy to you. Or someone who already has a six-figure credit-card debt and wants to enjoy the benefits of your solid credit. Identity theft can be petty, even trivial: you'd probably use your library card to check out books for someone who's not a local resident, even someone who doesn't find it convenient to pay a library fine, but you'd probably draw the line at lending your card to someone who doesn't even ask you before checking out a book, even if it's only the one book and the person returns it on time. Or even someone with noble intentions, like a student who can't afford the extra expense of being a foreign student at a US university, looks a bit like you, and wants to learn how to help people in per own, poor homeland...whose use of your identity will keep you from getting the tuition grant you need if you want to finish a degree. Accept it. If you are a US, Canadian, or Mexican citizen, even if you are currently homeless, you're better off than a lot of people in this world. Some of those people look enough like you to be able to convince people that an old photo of you is an old photo of one of them. Some of them would pay well for the use of your identity if you'd sell it to them, and some would just as soon keep your identity and take you on a one-way ocean cruise.
So Meta has the full legal names, home addresses, face photos, fingerprint scans, in some cases the DNA scans, bank and credit information, medical test reports, prescriptions, children's names and photos and school records, and list of all the passwords, for all the vain and foolish people in North America and a good number of them around the world. And for people, like Grandma Bonnie Peters, who had enough sense to stay out of Facebook, but who did not anticipate that an employee would "helpfully" set up Facebook accounts for them. There is no way this can possibly end well. The best possible outcome might be for the federal government to criminalize possession of that kind of information and melt down all of Meta's computers but the information is undoubtedly already stored in China, Russia, Nigeria, and other places.
So who hates Tiktok most? Who's the competitor that's failed to buy a piece of it? Who is guaranteed to profit from Tiktok's demise? Who's detested and distrusted by some people who like Tiktok? Funny, isn't it, how these questions all have the same answer. If Tiktok is shut down, which might not be such a bad thing in et per se apart from being unconstitutional, Meta grows even bigger.
I think that a ban on Tiktok could be framed and enforced as legitimate, constitutional protection of any more gathering of data for evil purposes...but only if it's followed by a ban on Meta. Punishing Tiktok in order to reward Meta for doing the same bleep thing is altogether unethical. Ignoring both companies is the sort of thing the Biden administration would do. Shutting both down is the sort of thing serious swamp drainers would do. The shutdown should be based on the inherent risk of storing identifying data and the need to keep such data out of the Internet. It should require businesses to store information about customers, like home addresses, on paper or on devices that cannot be connected to the Internet.
Sabrina Salvati doesn't seem to be very conscious of the evils of censorship, and may have emotional feelings about foreign countries that I would not describe as "smart" or even "funny." (If you have not lived in a country, the only kind of emotion you can intelligently attach to it is curiosity.) She sounds as if she's most concerned about the incomes of her foreign e-friends. And I can see no reason why a woman would ever defend rapists and baby killers, nor why anyone would embed the clips of the foul-mouthed young man's rant in a video and publish them under her own name. But she's right about the badness of what is, as it stands, in force as a "Facebook Aggrandizement Act." Here is her video, and yes, vlogs do languish on my waiting list for nine months or more. Use it if you need audiovisual communication. I recommend muting the sound when the young man comes on.
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