People don’t like it because:
- It’s the new thing. If alcohol were introduced today it would be banned in every country on earth. People tolerate Facebook, Twitter, Insta because that’s what’s been around. They all do the same thing, but TikTok is new and scary.
- Short form video is scary! It’s a new form of entertainment, and old people don’t like new forms of entertainment. See: every newly introduced form of entertainment in history, books included.
- They are misinformed about what data a mobile application can and cannot do, and the level of security built into both iOS and Android. Rest “assured”, they are collecting as much data as they can – just like every app creator on the planet. What they aren’t doing is capturing mic data while you’re sleeping (that’s not how microphones in phones work), stealing your passwords from your clipboard (OS’s notify users about clipboard paste)
- China bad. This primes people to consider negative press about it with a less skeptical eye, feeding the above points. (Don’t misconstrue me as being pro-China, I’m not, and that’s not what this post is about.)
Upvoted because this is indeed unpopular. I agree though, particularly that people get stuck on #4. We don’t know what China is doing with our data, any more than we know what Cambridge Analytica (now defunct) or the US gov is doing with our data. It could all be “harmless” ad-targeting, it could be more sinister, we don’t know. Until we know what is being done with the data, then Meta or Google collecting my data is just as bad as China collecting my data.
Edit: Some sources related to the matter to help others form conclusions:
https://pirg.org/articles/demystifying-tiktok-data/ they collect essentially the same amount of data, in some cases Facebook collects more.
https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2022/02/08/tiktok-shares-your-data-more-than-any-other-social-media-app-study.html YouTube and Tik Tok share similar amounts of data, YouTube (under google) uses most of it for their own purposes (not sure what those are) while Tik Tok mostly sells it to third parties (who knows who they sell to or what they do with it)
A nation maintaining a database of a different nation’s citizens is pretty scary stuff. We don’t know the reasons.
A nation maintaining a database of its own citizens is also scary, but less so because it can be excused as data collection for marketing purposes. That could also be a lie.
I hate all of those social media applications personally. It’s perfectly reasonable to hate them for different reasons.