In an interview with news channel CNN, Woz was asked about Apple’s so-called “walled garden” approach to protecting users, and in response he said he was glad for the protection that he gets, and that Apple does a better job in this respect than other companies.

“And tracking you – tracking you is questionable. But my gosh, look at what we’re accusing TikTok of, and then go look at Facebook and Google and that’s how they make their businesses,” he added. “I mean, Facebook was a great idea. But then they make all their money just by tracking you and advertising, and Apple doesn’t really do that so much.”

Earlier this month, the US Congress passed the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act, which aims to force TikTok’s Chinese owner ByteDance to either sell off its US-based biz or face being banned from operating in the country.

“I don’t understand it, I don’t see why,” commented Woz. “What are we saying? We’re saying ‘Oh, you might be tracked by the Chinese.’ Well, they learned it from us.”

Similar points are made in an article in Nikkei Asia, which states that US social media apps have formed a key part of Washington’s global influence operations for many years, and have provided “unparalleled intelligence collection opportunities” and “helped to project certain American political and cultural values into foreign societies.”

Woz continued by saying that “If you have a principle [that] a person should not be tracked without them knowing it, you apply it the same to every company, or every country. You don’t say, ‘Here’s one case where we’re going to outlaw an app, but we’re not gonna do it in these other cases.’ So I don’t like the hypocrisy, and that’s obviously coming from a political realm.”

The engineering brains behind Apple’s early products such as the Apple I and II personal computers, Woz also became an early member of digital rights group the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF).

He revealed in the interview that he largely avoids “the social web,” but gets a lot of fun out of watching TikTok “even if it’s just for rescuing dog videos and stuff.”

The Apple co-founder was also reported to have been hospitalized in Mexico City last November with a suspected stroke following a speech at the World Business Forum, but has apparently made a full recovery.

Source: The Register

The post Woz calls out US lawmakers for TikTok ban: ‘I don’t like the hypocrisy’ appeared first on Policy Print.

Indonesia has dealt a critical blow to TikTok’s bold plan to turn millions of users into shoppers.

On Wednesday, TikTok, which is owned by the Chinese technology firm ByteDance, suspended its shopping platform in the Southeast Asian country to comply with new government regulations. TikTok Indonesia said in a statement on Tuesday that its “priority is to remain compliant with local laws and regulation” and as such will “no longer facilitate e-commerce transactions in TikTok Shop Indonesia”, starting 5:00 pm local time on Oct. 4.

Last week, Jakarta announced that it would require tech companies to separate their e-commerce offerings from their social media apps, thus banning users from buying and selling goods on platforms like TikTok and Facebook.

Indonesia, Southeast Asia’s largest economy, is home to some 125 million TikTok users, making it the platform’s second largest market after the U.S. ByteDance bet big on the country, choosing it as the first non-Chinese market for its social e-commerce service in April 2021. As late as June, TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew said the company would invest billions of dollars in Indonesia and other countries to further expand its footprint in the region.

Yet last month, Indonesian president Joko Widodo complained that social media-based e-commerce threatened the country’s micro-, small- and medium-sized enterprises. Officials have previously accused TikTok of allowing predatory pricing on its platform and said it harmed local businesses. To give an idea of the business landscape, Indonesia has more than 64 million micro-, small-, and medium-sized enterprises that contribute over 60% of the country’s GDP.

How important is e-commerce to TikTok?

E-commerce is big business for ByteDance. In China, consumer spending on Douyin—the Chinese version of TikTok—increased by 76% year-on-year in 2022 to hit $195 billion, The Information reported.

Yet Bytedance could struggle to replicate its Chinese success globally. In addition to Indonesia, TikTok Shop is also available in other Southeast Asian countries like Singapore and Vietnam, but it faces competition from other players such as Shopee and Lazada, the latter of which is majority owned by another Chinese tech giant, Alibaba.

TikTok is also trying to generate e-commerce revenue from the U.S. TikTok Shop officially launched in the U.S. in mid-September. Yet low-quality offerings and the company’s policies on sharing consumer data are turning off some of TikTok’s prospective partners, Fortune reported during the week of the service’s launch.

The app is also in the crosshairs of U.S. lawmakers who see TikTok as a national security risk. The U.S. already bars the app from government devices, and some officials and legislators are considering an outright ban of the social media app.

Source : Yahoo

The post Tiktok Pledged to Invest Billions in Indonesia and Southeast Asia. Now Jakarta’s New Rules Deal a Blow to the Company’s E-Commerce Dreams appeared first on Policy Print.

In a conversation Tuesday with Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts on “The Kevin Roberts Show” podcast, Kara Frederick discussed what TikTok’s ties to the Chinese Communist Party mean for the everyday American ahead of the TikTok CEO’s appearance before the House Energy and Commerce Committee on Thursday.  

“It’s extremely problematic, because that parent company, ByteDance, headquartered in Beijing, is subject to the People’s Republic of China laws and policies,” Frederick said.  

Almost 70% of American teenagers use TikTok. Though the content teenagers scroll through masquerades as harmless short videos, many of the videos contain content fueling self-harm, suicidal ideation, eating disorders, and more, Frederick said.  

“It’d be bad enough if China weren’t involved,” Roberts said. “The fact that China is involved makes it that much worse.”  

TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew will be asked to answer some tough questions in the House hearing on Thursday, Frederick said, noting that TikTok’s PR strategies have attempted to downplay the platform’s relationship with China.  

“We can talk all day about the noxious content on these platforms,” Frederick said. “But when China can actually have a mapping of the patterns of life and a network of Americans, especially these young children, then you have a hard security problem, as well as the cognitive ones.” 

Frederick hopes the hearing shows everyday Americans that TikTok is a perfidious enemy.  

“If Americans, in watching this, can emerge with the knowledge that this platform is essentially under the auspices of the Chinese Communist Party, ByteDance, I think that’s a win,” she said. “If they can communicate to their children that this is not just harmful to us, this is not just something that you do for fun, this is an adversary competitor, an actual enemy trying to get your information and preventing you from doing what you want to do with a child in the future anyway, because of the blackmail potential, the espionage potential.”  

As a new mother, Frederick said she worries about how TikTok is changing the social fabric of our nation and hurting children, especially young girls. She said parents need to be on board with opposing TikTok.  

“We are going to lose the next generation of citizens if they are captured by these platforms,” she said.  

Source: The Daily Signal

The post TikTok Threatens America’s Social Fabric, Tech Policy Expert Says appeared first on Policy Print.

“There is a lot of political fervor over TikTok and its connections to the Chinese government, and this is coming out in the form of these perhaps symbolic bans,” said Kurt Opsahl, general counsel for the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “Those limitations suggested that Auburn was making more of a statement than a new policy.”

Cancel culture of both the left and right meet at the convenient doorstep of the other, China, in the halls of what arguably should be the most protected zone for free speech in the United States: its colleges and universities. Censorship has its requisite foe. With the magician’s sleight of hand, these bans transform bald-faced censorship into a sudden awareness of security risks.

Wow.

Let’s discuss. A legal guidance is necessary to make clear whether government bans on the use of TikTok on government devices and networks apply to higher education. That broader legal question has long been a slippery slope for state institutions. Decades went into the question, for example, on whether Americans With Disabilities Act regulations for the federal and state government required compliance among state colleges and universities. I am not sure that issue ever got fully settled until the Obama administration pushed regulations clearly down the Title path of the legislation to sections II and III, effectively ending the debate.

Psycho-political analysis might help us see how this stampede is taking shape. Real and perceived American concerns about the People’s Republic have coalesced into the only issue upon which our benighted political parties can find common ground. No surprise that the first committee formed in this new Congress centers on this point, House Select Committee on the Strategic Competition Between the U.S. and the Chinese Communist Party. Anti-Communism held the Republican Party together through much of the second half of the 20th century. As we watch the GOP ricochet between its big money elites and its angry grassroots, why not resurrect a tried and true formula to keep the peace? And signal a bipartisan gesture as flourish?

Histrionics are the problem with this composition. Real issues do exist in the calculus between the U.S. and the PRC geopolitically, socially and economically. Overheating about a popular application on the internet distracts from the deeper thinking that needs take shape around how to address military testiness and global competition. Far be it from the Republican Party to be histrionic, however, and I am being as sarcastic as I know how to be in print. From the local congressional race I personally experienced to the masters—Trump, Bannon, Jordan—99 percent of what comes out their mouths is nothing but drama, obscuring and displacing the possibility of more nuanced thought. Democrats, eager to appear “bipartisan,” better watch their step not to compete in seeing who can scream the loudest.

Enter hypocrisy, if not idiocy, of the highest order. Myriad groups, for example the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and individuals (and yes, I count myself among them) have been preaching privacy and security issues from the rooftops for at least a generation of sustained discussion on this front. Now, all of a sudden, we have awareness on the part of Congress, state elected officials including governors and higher education administrators that roosts on blocking the ports to a popular app on the internet? With nothing else to say about precisely what those security and privacy issues are apart from generalizations about how applications scrape and use data? Someone in China has access to what a coed at Auburn University likes to watch on TikTok? With no rules around how that data is gathered technologically (i.e., algorithmic design), managed professionally (Sold to advertisers? Delivered on silver platters to Chairman Xi?), or secured administratively (what are the rules?). We might hear echoes of our own circumstances. These challenges are exactly what we face in the United States in the gap that exists between consumers and tech companies. Mirror, mirror on the wall …

Had I not dedicated the lion’s share of my career life to higher education, I might just sit back and laugh. But I cannot. I actually took my career direction seriously (and wrote a dissertation, let us not forget, on Catholic women’s higher education, which was an enterprise that knew something about devotion) and therefore must speak out. Students, faculty, administrators, alumni, stand up in protest to this ridiculous and dangerous rhinoceros. If ever there was an educational moment for us to learn and teach about privacy and security, TikTok provides a most excellent example. We in higher education should take every opportunity to exploit it. We set a very bad precedent, however, to leap over the unique work we can do to educate and instead jump on the censorship bandwagon. Jump off, Auburn, and any other institution headed down that path. Remember your missions! Freedom of thought and speech are both drivers and values necessary to make those missions work. And don’t you let any politician knock you off that mantle that is yours and ours to cherish.

Source : Inside Highered

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The Platform Accountability and Transparency Act is intended to make the companies’ internal data more accessible to the public by requiring the submission of necessary data to independent researchers. The bill is sponsored by Sens. Chris Coons, D-Del., chair of the Judiciary Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology, and the Law; Rob Portman, R-Ohio, ranking member of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee; Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn.; and Bill Cassidy, R-La.

Under the proposal, social media companies would be compelled to provide internal, privacy-protected data to researchers who’ve been approved by the National Science Foundation, an independent agency. The bill protects researchers from legal liabilities associated with automatic data collection if certain privacy safeguards are followed.

Some content, such as comprehensive ad libraries, content moderation statistics, viral content data and a platform’s ranking and recommendation algorithms would be made available to researchers or the public on an ongoing basis, according to the bill.

The Federal Trade Commission would enforce the new policy, and companies that fail to comply risk a potential loss of immunity under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which generally protects them against libel for content posted by members.

In a statement, Coons said the bill will address a “dangerous lack of transparency about how these platforms impact our children, families, society, or national security” and help to answer questions about threats to national security and possibly harmful content.

Earlier this month, lawmakers floated a bill to ban the popular social media platform TikTok in the U.S. after years of speculation about the Chinese government’s influence on ByteDance, the China-based company that owns TikTok.

On Tuesday, federal law enforcement issued a public safety alert on the rise of “sexortion,” the online extortion of minors for sexually explicit imagery.

“I have a number of concerns about Big Tech — from facilitating sex trafficking to burying content about the origins of Covid-19 — and I want to ensure that any response by Congress is effective in addressing those concerns,” Portman said in a statement.

Coons also pointed to Twitter, which was recently taken over by Tesla CEO Elon Musk, as a “cautionary tale” of how a social media company’s transparency policy can change with little notice and few safeguards.

“Twitter was the one platform that was relatively transparent and had made some investments and efforts around guardrails and accountability and some transparency around its metrics,” Coons said, according to The Washington Post. “All of that has been blown up by the change in ownership.”

Source: Consumer News and Business Channel

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