Why is TikTok seen as privacy invading and bad, but Facebook is fine?

Baku@aussie.zone to No Stupid Questions@lemmy.world – 156 points –

I'm not here to claim that Tiktok is completely harmless, or that it's even a good site. I'm sure they absolutely do collect as much personal information as they can, and I'm sure they give it to the Chinese government whenever they ask. But I don't understand how Meta and Facebook are meant to be any better? There's always a lot of hoo-haa going on with politicians promising to ban tiktok, and (at least back on Reddit) everybody's vowing they will never use tiktok because it's such a privacy invasive site. Yet I never see anybody going up against Facebook, at least the average person, but they collect just as much personal info and I'm sure hand it over whenever any government agency in the US asks them to

It kind of feels to me like this is some sort of country thing. China is bad, so they shouldn't have your personal info. But the US is the last bastion of free speech and privacy, so their companies would NEVER dare to invade your privacy, and their government would never abuse their power to get people's personal info

I'm aware Lemmy probably isn't the best place to ask since most people here seem to be deep into open source software and often privacy focused (so I suppose wouldn't use either) but this also feels like the only place on the internet I might actually get an answer that isn't just "TIKTOK BAD". If you refuse to use tiktok but are ok with Facebook - why?

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Neither of them are fine, but only one is owned by an oppressive regime.

Whether or not the US is oppressive is a matter of debate I don't want to get into, but they definitely spy on their own people. And I imagine they're a lot more likely to act on information about someone living in the US than China is.

Great comment. I can't figure out which "one" you are talking about, because I find Facebook/Meta oppressive.

How are they oppressive? Are they committing a genocide as we speak, like the Chinese government?