I’m not here to claim that Tiktok is completely harmless, or that it’s even a good site. I’m sure they absolutely do collect as much personal information as they can, and I’m sure they give it to the Chinese government whenever they ask. But I don’t understand how Meta and Facebook are meant to be any better? There’s always a lot of hoo-haa going on with politicians promising to ban tiktok, and (at least back on Reddit) everybody’s vowing they will never use tiktok because it’s such a privacy invasive site. Yet I never see anybody going up against Facebook, at least the average person, but they collect just as much personal info and I’m sure hand it over whenever any government agency in the US asks them to

It kind of feels to me like this is some sort of country thing. China is bad, so they shouldn’t have your personal info. But the US is the last bastion of free speech and privacy, so their companies would NEVER dare to invade your privacy, and their government would never abuse their power to get people’s personal info

I’m aware Lemmy probably isn’t the best place to ask since most people here seem to be deep into open source software and often privacy focused (so I suppose wouldn’t use either) but this also feels like the only place on the internet I might actually get an answer that isn’t just “TIKTOK BAD”. If you refuse to use tiktok but are ok with Facebook - why?

  • shellsharksAEnglish
    79•5 months ago

    China. Also, no one is saying FB is fine, but since it’s American then gov pretty much shrugs. It was FB after all feeding the NSA yeah?

    • @Baku@aussie.zoneOPEnglish
      13•5 months ago

      Not so much saying it, but I personally know several people who’ll argue that Tiktok is a privacy invading god awful website that should be banned then 5 minutes later proceed to doomscroll Facebook

      • deweydecibelEnglish
        9•5 months ago

        That’s entirely anecdotal, and confirmation bias to boot. How many people do you know that use neither? I’ll bet it’s sizable.

        Yeah, there are some that don’t use TikTok but use Facebook, but that’s not evidence of a trend. Especially when Facebook has legitimate uses that you can’t easily replace with the other platforms

        • @Baku@aussie.zoneOPEnglish
          4•5 months ago

          You’re not wrong, it indeed is anecdotal, but I’m not a data analyst, and I’m not going to run a global survey asking anybody who’ll answer whether they use one but not the other. All I can go on is what I’ve seen, and among my friends who use Facebook (most of them), I’d say 70% or so either believe, or act like they believe Facebook is less of a data theft machine than tiktok

          Not sure what else you want me to say

          • @loakang@lemm.ee
            0•5 months ago

            Well there’s also the thought “well I was already on Facebook from the beginning so they already have my data anyways, whereas TikTok is a completely new entity that would be collecting massive amounts of new information” It’s like going from 90 to 100(Facebook) versus 0 to 100 (TikTok).

            Also Facebook didn’t start off being advertiser focused which is like a frog in slowly boiling water situation, but with TikTok the water started off boiling.

      • @Azzu@lemm.ee
        1•5 months ago

        I mean then it’s very likely just China bad, US (or familiarity) good.