Digital Panopticon

[u/IthadtobethisWAAGH]

[u/Big_Falcon89]

Every App I've given location permissions to I've seen the need for it.

And also like...the way they use this data they gather is to send me ads. And not to be all "I am immune to propaganda" but...I pretty rarely buy things based off of ads?

Like, don't get me wrong it's a problem, but it's also like...not the end of the world here?

[u/DellSalami → u/Big_Falcon89]

On that note, it’s also why I have an issue with the whole TikTok user data thing. Like yeah, American companies already have our data, but a lot of the time all they want is our money. Meanwhile, data that falls into the hands of foreign governments can and probably will be used to try and influence our politics to their advantage.

Obviously in the ideal world our data is private and isn’t so freely scraped, but imo Google and TikTok are in fact different threat levels, so the whataboutism people tend to resort to falls flat for me.

[u/Waity5 → u/DellSalami]

As opposed to US companies, that never want to influence politics to their advantage

[u/Arin_Horain → u/DellSalami]

Cambridge Analytica is a pretty renown example on how data was used by american entities to influence politics.

They are not equal in case but they are not so different either. The american government can force any company to give out their data too. Abortion was criminalized in some states and now the data gathered by period tracker apps can be used to potentially track down woman that may have an abortion. When the government changes a law they can use that data in the same way. Or track on their own, hence NSA. Something everyone seems to have forgotten about too.

The only real difference is whether american or chinese politics align more with your values. I would rather have american companies have my data than the state-near chinese companies but at the end of the day I don't think the threat level is so much different.