TikTok: Is Joe Rogan the Person to Blow the Whistle on Chinese Surveillance?
August 3, 2022
TikTok has been around since 2015 as A.me and Douyin. If you want to scrape below the shiny surface of the TikTok rags-to-riches story, there something called Musical.ly which surfaced in 2014. In 2018, the Musical.ly management team decided that selling to ByteDance was a super great idea. Then TikTok was created to entertain and log data. Few talk about the link to certain entities in the Chinese political structure. Even fewer think that short videos were bad. Sure, there were allegations of self harm, addiction, erosion of self worth, and students who preferred watching vids pumped at them by a magical algorithm. Nobody, including some Silicon Valley real news people with an inflated view of their intellectual capabilities said, “Yo, TikTok is a weaponized content delivery and surveillance system.” Nope. Just cute videos. What’s the problemo?
Who is now concerned about TikTok? The NSA? The CIA? The badge-and-gun entities in the US Federal government? Well, maybe. But the big voice is now a semi-real sports event announcer. “Joe Rogan Warns Americans about TikTok: China Knows Every … Thing You type.” Hey, Joe, don’t forget psychographic profiling to identify future insider operators, please.
The article reports:
Rogan listed the other data being collected by the popular platform. “‘User agent, mobile carrier, time zone settings, identifiers for advertising purpose, model of your device, the device system, network type, device IDs, your screen resolution and operating system, app and file names and types,’” he said. “So all your apps and all your file names, all the things you have filed away on your phone, they have access to that.” He continued: “‘File names and types, keystroke patterns or rhythms.’”
Hot intel, Mr. Rogan.
Where did this major news originate? From Mr. Rogan’s wellness infused research?
Nope. He read the terms of service.
The estimable newspaper pointed out:
… the tech news site Gizmodo reported that leaked internal documents from TikTok showed the extent to which the app sought to “downplay the China association.” The documents, labeled “TikTok Master Messaging” and “TikTok Key Messages,” detail the social media giant’s public relations strategy during a period of mounting scrutiny from regulators and lawmakers over its parent company ByteDance and its ties to the Chinese Community Party.
Gizmodo? Is this Silicon Valley type “real news” outlet emulating Cryptome.org?
According to the cited New York Post story:
TikTok has pledged to “publish insights about the covert influence operations we identify and remove from our platform globally to show how seriously we take attempts to mislead our community.”
That sounds good just like a cyber security firm’s PowerPoint deck. Talk, however, is not action.
Maybe Mr. Rogan can use his ring announcer voice to catch people’s attention? I am not sure some of the TikTok lovers will listen or believe what Mr. Rogan discovered in the super stealthy terms of service for TikTok.
That’s real open source intel. Put Mr. Rogan on a panel at the next OSINT conference, please. I mean TikTok has a 10 year history and it seems to be quite new to some folks.
Stephen E Arnold, August 3, 2022
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