On the eve of the camp
horror-show that is Halloween, I am thinking of a different but also
pseudo-horror our legislator have taken to sound alarm to.
You might be tempted to divide
humanity not by nations, races, genders or whatever else. Instead, think of the
TIK TOK app, and do it this way:
1.
The billion who love it
2.
The billion who see it as dangerous
3.
The billions who don’t know what it is and
why others make such a fuss.
Call me old (you wouldn’t
be wrong) and put me in the third category. Neither the charm nor the existential
calamity of Tik- Tok manage to reach my consciousness.
Data sharing? All the
tech apps and the companies behind them already do that. This includes this platform,
Blogger, owned by Google. It seems no one does it better than Google, and who
they sell it to is not an open book.
I wonder if this brouhaha
isn’t a way of distracting Americans from real issues, only one of them having
to do with China as a menace. These issues include but are not exclusive to our
right to privacy, which (big news) is long gone.
The wild world of the
Interwebs and smartphones have changed everything. We gave them this power.
Tik-Tok is but a dot in a vast international matrix.
Yup, we gave them this power willingly for the sake of convenience...
ReplyDeleteWell, I'll admit my ignorance. I'm in group 3 and know nothing about Tik-Tok. I doubt that's a great loss.
ReplyDeleteI, too, steer clear of TikTok and similar apps. I have other things I prefer to do with my time and energy.
ReplyDeleteMirka, you mention China as a menace. If you want to know how much of a menace, read “The Chief Witness” by a Kazakh woman about the concentration camps in China for ethnic minorities. The author managed to escape and now lives with her family in Sweden. She mentions China’s goal of having global control, not just of everyone in China and Asia, but beyond.