Apple and Google can’t protect their smartphone OS from tiktok because the attack surface on a smartphone OS is apparently too large for tiktok as an installed app. That’s what the news articles are saying anyway.
As for banning tiktok on their app stores, Google and Apple aren’t built to handle the public backlash the way that congress is. If congress bans something, young people can blame the boomer voting bloc or the electoral college or democracy, or even just blame congress, everyone already hates congress but likes their district’s congressmember. But if google or apple ban it, then it’s just google or apple’s fault.
This is an unusually serious matter, since apparently ~50% of gen z uses tiktok every day and the democratic party faces a big backlash if they contribute to a ban. If tiktok is the standard optimization system that “youtube shorts” copy/adapts clips from, then I wouldn’t be surprised if lots of people would be very mad about losing access to tiktok, as the few youtube shorts that I’ve encountered seemed heavily optimized for addiction and outcompeting other media formats like netflix and twitter.
It seems like being able to ban tiktok at any time would give more bargaining power against bytedance, probably achieving objectives without suffering the pain of banning it (unlike a law that bans tiktok, which suffers the pain of banning it without achieving any objectives).
As for what the bill would facilitate, in addition to counteracting foreign influence, I myself couldn’t tell from the language of the bill how broadly it would probably be enforced. The use of legal force is outside my area of expertise.
Apple and Google can’t protect their smartphone OS from tiktok because the attack surface on a smartphone OS is apparently too large for tiktok as an installed app.
While an app that runs on Windows is usually able to do whatever it wants, on smartphones an app has to ask for a variety of permissions to do different tasks.
Apple and Google could basically say: You can install TikTok, but you are not allowed to use any permission to access any data on the OS.
They could say “TikTok used location data to spy on journalists, so TikTok is not allowed access to the location data of their users anymore”.
Apple and Google can’t protect their smartphone OS from tiktok because the attack surface on a smartphone OS is apparently too large for tiktok as an installed app. That’s what the news articles are saying anyway.
As for banning tiktok on their app stores, Google and Apple aren’t built to handle the public backlash the way that congress is. If congress bans something, young people can blame the boomer voting bloc or the electoral college or democracy, or even just blame congress, everyone already hates congress but likes their district’s congressmember. But if google or apple ban it, then it’s just google or apple’s fault.
This is an unusually serious matter, since apparently ~50% of gen z uses tiktok every day and the democratic party faces a big backlash if they contribute to a ban. If tiktok is the standard optimization system that “youtube shorts” copy/adapts clips from, then I wouldn’t be surprised if lots of people would be very mad about losing access to tiktok, as the few youtube shorts that I’ve encountered seemed heavily optimized for addiction and outcompeting other media formats like netflix and twitter.
It seems like being able to ban tiktok at any time would give more bargaining power against bytedance, probably achieving objectives without suffering the pain of banning it (unlike a law that bans tiktok, which suffers the pain of banning it without achieving any objectives).
As for what the bill would facilitate, in addition to counteracting foreign influence, I myself couldn’t tell from the language of the bill how broadly it would probably be enforced. The use of legal force is outside my area of expertise.
While an app that runs on Windows is usually able to do whatever it wants, on smartphones an app has to ask for a variety of permissions to do different tasks.
Apple and Google could basically say: You can install TikTok, but you are not allowed to use any permission to access any data on the OS.
They could say “TikTok used location data to spy on journalists, so TikTok is not allowed access to the location data of their users anymore”.
My bad, I was thinking about an exploit from a couple years ago. News articles are NOT saying this (currently).