I've always said as a regular citizen I'm far less worried about Chinese spying than domestic commercial surveillance. I don't live in China so I care far less if they are collecting my social media metadata vs the stuff going into Five Eyes databases simply for crossing some 'foreign' pipe in the US/Europe/Canada.

Although I doubt much is different in practice with the US version as far as ICE is concerned. Much of this stuff ends up in commercial data brokers which the government buys, these TikTok posts are already public, private data was already subject to warrants, and TikTok has always deranked politically controversial stuff.

I’d be surprised if this data wasn’t already available through American dominated companies like Meta the same way.

More and more, I’m starting to think this was never really about “privacy” itself. Coming from the US government, it even sounds a bit ironic given the laws that are currently in force. Nothing is truly private in today’s world. And if the article is right, a lot of this data is already brokered and sold online, so China can buy it the same way anyone else can.

So I assume it’s about something that’s harder to sell to the public. For example, giving China a bigger opening to shape public opinion or influence elections, or other national security angles. I’d consider that a real threat too.

And of course ordinary greed helped. For pennies, US tech effectively acquired one of the biggest social platforms on the planet, basically through state pressure.

Heh, who would’ve guessed that the old saying "data is the new oil" would be so... literal.

> ICE is now utilizing advanced social media monitoring to perform “sentiment analysis.” By scraping TikTok and other platforms, they can monitor the emotional and political temperature of entire geographic areas, identifying resistance hot spots. This completely undermines the particularity requirement of the Fourth Amendment.

How’s this not a dystopian mass surveillance tech tyranny!? Where are the people crying about “not wanting to end up like Chyna” or whatever?

So for the average person, simply to counter or at least hinder the above, they have to stop using social media completely, and implement ad blockers on the dns level. They can still use federated social media I believe without issues, especially if it’s used from the web browser and not through a smartphone app, to avoid the MAID mentioned.