FCC commissioner wants TikTok removed from app stores over spying concerns
I&#x27;ve used TikTok for the past year, it&#x27;s really not as smart or brilliant as all the hypemasters would have you think.<p>The data it gathers (outside of location, facial recognition, and speech capture) has been really off target for being matched to content. The algorithms across most of these sites are really not useful in building a valid service from what I can gather... Most of the people that use social apps wear out quickly once they realize the level of free work they are doing, and how it goes unrewarded.<p>I personally can do without it, because youtube and other things still exist to host the same exact type of video content, but the entire social app landscape is frought with platforms that are too big to really reward creators with any real growth, and it&#x27;s overrun with deceptive advertising. I know I sound like I&#x27;m jaded, but I&#x27;ve learned some valuable skills in film and editing, so I&#x27;m really not.<p>Apps that will win from this point forward will realize that they need to be more niche based, while also integrating into a larger eco system that allows for content to be shared across the Internet, the way the Internet was meant to work... The common tactics of limiting content reach and squeezing creators for ad money are short lived, most of these apps have a huge amount of inactive and outright abandoned user accounts...<p>TikTok is in essence just another video &quot;doom scroller&quot; app, that allows pretty much useless likes follows and shares, it&#x27;s really put a bunch of suggestive psychology on top of that, but in essence it&#x27;s the same thing other platforms have been doing just with vertical video and a different UI. It&#x27;s not replaceable, especially when it takes it&#x27;s user base for granted and works hard to gather data on users and to manipulate the majority into doing lots of work for them for free (with a really weak creator fund). We can live without it.<p>If there are a hand full of people on the platform that have millions of followers on the same platforms where most of the user base has only hundreds of followers, it&#x27;s pretty telling that it&#x27;s a free work exploitation scheme, and it&#x27;s really the first indication that it&#x27;s really not going to survive the long haul.<p>As far as the data gathering debacle goes, there is also nothing different happening with many other major social app platforms we all use, instead though, our data is being collected and used against us by private companies across the world instead of by foreign governments. Removing one app won&#x27;t solve the problem of personal privacy violation. We each need to be a lot more careful about the level of information we share online, and we need to stop being so eager to work online for these greedy and abusive operations for free or it&#x27;s our own damn fault.