OF COURSE what would really help with data privacy in the US is if there were more robust laws to protect consumers.

OF COURSE Meta, Twitter, and Google do a ton with data that is way beyond what the average person even understands.

OF COURSE the US has installed spying tools all across our own telecommunications, monitoring pretty much everything we do online.

That can be true and it can also be true that TikTok has been unable to properly assure anyone that data flowing through the app isn’t able to be read/shared with the CCP. In fact, there has been little driblets here and there that suggest the opposite. Namely, that Chinese-based personnel snooped on America journalists and Chinese-based developers have complete DB access.

In short: China is a black box. There may be absolutely no real concern here. There may be a massive spying campaign. Odds are it’s somewhere in between.

The problem is that we can’t know. It’s like how they handled COVID—we still don’t know the origin, we’ll never know the origin because China will never cooperate, and it’s clear they lied for quite awhile about the seriousness of the issue, even after everyone knew about it…even still today.

We can’t trust that a person who resides in China isn’t completely and utterly beholden to the CCP’s whims on this.

This should have happened a long time ago.

It’s no more an artificial intelligence than the code that ran the opponent in Pong.

No. It’s just a lot of people wanting to market themselves or their businesses.

Think about a term like “near AI”. How would you know you’re close if we don’t have actual fully-fledged AI?

I got this one: you would have no way of knowing.