India bans TikTok, WeChat, and dozens of other Chinese apps

https://techcrunch.com/2020/06/29/india-bans-tiktok-dozens-of-other-chinese-apps/

by samdung • 6 years ago

1483 785 6 years ago

president2• 6 years ago

Glad to see India understanding the threat to national security posed by these apps. I would like to see the US do the same.

markovbot4• 6 years ago

I would find it very problematic if the US government attempted to interfere with it's citizens downloading whatever software they want. I absolutely do not trust the US government to be the arbitrator of what app's are "safe".

ppeetteerr7• 6 years ago

This is a common sentiment: distrust in the US government. Given that 30% of income goes to the feds, might be time to change the government to be more trust worthy. Good thing elections are coming up.

systemvoltage9• 6 years ago

What are your thoughts about China banning anything but local apps/services for domestic use but the rest of the world is OK with allowing Chinese apps/services to compete with the domestic apps/services? I think there is some level of asymmetry here, not sure how best to resolve it without giving up the citizen's freedoms as you expressed. This asymmetry is problematic because western democracies are barred to profit from Chinese market (1.3 billion people) and the Chinese companies which are in bed with the CCP would benefit domestically + internationally. That's unfair I think.

One compromise would be to promote democracies around the world and incentivize apps/services developed, operated and controlled in democratic environments.

Avamander6• 6 years ago

Well, the US goverment has interfered with it's citizens downloading whatever software they want, and is currently doing so via embargoes.

I think banning spyware is less problematic than the rest of the current and past interference and might actually have some positive effects.

kahlonel• 6 years ago

Problematic for whom? The average citizen doesn't realize the threats and has no idea of safe/unsafe, so there must be someone to decide for them. People who are aware of threats, and are willing to accept the risks can surely find their way around the bans.

nostromo• 6 years ago

The US however could enact privacy laws, which could force TikTok into compliance.

kumarvvr6• 6 years ago

The average citizen is dumb enough to not be able to discern spyware from innocent apps.

It is the duty of the government to protect its citizens from foreign influence and banning apps is a legitimate exercise of the govts power in fulfilling that duty.

ralmidani• 6 years ago

While I share your skepticism toward the US government, phone apps are different from books and even from websites; I don’t trust apps made by a company subject to CCP influence and/or control, nor do I think the usual arguments against censorship apply.

d0100• 6 years ago

I would to.

However, I wouldn't oppose there being a "cyber martial law" if there was some sort of "cyber declaration of war" that would enable the US government to declare software/hardware products from another country to not be used in native soil (while in "cyber war").

The US doesn't have to allow a malicious player to map their whole infrastructure and technology usage habits.

Democracy is very hard, why would the US have to allow other countries to be able to have such a strong profile and possible blackmail on its citizens?

pvelagal11• 6 years ago

https://www.hawley.senate.gov/senators-hawley-scott-introduc...

Barrin922• 6 years ago

banning the usage of WeChat for public officials or national defense companies and so on would make some sense, I fail to see however how TikTok is a security threat. It's just a response to the clash over the border and nothing else, and not really a particularly effective one at that.

riffic• 6 years ago

Have you seen any of the recently posted analyses of the TikTok binaries?

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastWeek&page=0&prefix=fal...

rpastuszak• 6 years ago

I'm not sure where to draw the line between security and privacy and whether this distinction should be made at all, but: http://archive.is/WYLKa

TL;DR TikTok looks waaaaaay more shady than FB with their Android SDK.

(seems like archive.is is down atm, tried to load via wayback machine, but they don't have this site cached, ugh)

saltedonion4• 6 years ago

Tiktok can be a huge threat because their recommendation algorithms are black box. This makes them capable of controlling how potentially dangerous information is disseminated in the United States, including topics influencing elections.

glaive123• 6 years ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23634138

shaan12• 6 years ago

have you ever wondered why China blocks all apps from other countries ?

connectsnk• 6 years ago

Sooner or later it will happen

rllearneratwork• 6 years ago

while I absolutely won't allow any of those apps on my school-aged children phones and would never install one myself, it would be absolutely wrong for US government to dictate what software we can and can not use. Same goes for books and movies.

bg243• 6 years ago

How about changing from "dictate" to "recommend or advise" for betterment of Americans?

pphysch7• 6 years ago

CCP, NSA, tomato tomato.

KingOfCoders• 6 years ago

Yes and Europe doing the same to Chinese and US apps.

ketzu3• 6 years ago

If we started taking gdpr more seriously, the apps basically ban themselves!

pvelagal11• 6 years ago

US Senators already introduced a bill ! https://www.hawley.senate.gov/senators-hawley-scott-introduc...

sanmon3186• 6 years ago

This ban is primarily to satiate anti-China sentiment.

The global economy is too interwined with China. No country can afford to put a blanket ban on things that matter, without a viable plan-B.

cm2187• 6 years ago

Overnight, I agree. But I think the decoupling will happen. The outsourcing to China took about 10 years (mid 90s to mid 2000s). It will likely not take a lot longer to decouple. 10y is very rapid.

chrisco2552• 6 years ago

We in the U.S. should have partnered more closely with India in the first place. India is democratic and hold values closer to our own. The CCP not so much.

sremani• 6 years ago

If we walk into the past a little in 2000 world is not intertwined with China, and very likely 2040 world is not intertwined with China.

If only people read about PBOC, CNY/CNH and how currency is a political tool within China, you realize they have successfully exploited the "free market" impulse to effectively use state capitalism and dumping to create the world we are in Today.

Just because the supply chains got complex and intertwined with China does not mean it will that way forever -- it is going to be a painful 5 - 10 years, just like the ramp up, the tear down will take time.

kumarvvr6• 6 years ago

De coupling with Chinese economy is good for India in the long run.

This is the first step.

India should engage more with democracies.

puranjay6• 6 years ago

What democracies do you think are capable of meeting India's vast demand for consumer goods? Anything in the developed world is going to be prohibitively expensive. Anything outside is most likely a "democracy" just in name, or already within China's sphere of influence.

The trade alliance with China has been materially good to Indians. We've been able to afford more goods at cheaper rates. While we should try and move things back home, it's not going to happen overnight.

In the meantime, a population that was already struggling with income inequality, wage stagnation, unemployment and even growing poverty will see its material wealth slip further.

yumraj• 6 years ago

You have to start somewhere, this is a starting point.

It's better than just raising the hands and saying that it cannot be done.

sdinsn• 6 years ago

And yet, China bans foreign apps.

God forbid other countries give China a taste of their own medicine.

sbmthakur4• 6 years ago

For context, India and China are currently locked in a border conflict and both sides are building up[1]. There is also the issue of PRC's National Intelligence Law, which mandates every Chinese company's assistance and cooperation with the state intelligence[2].

1. https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/satellite-images-s...

2. https://www.lawfareblog.com/beijings-new-national-intelligen...

baybal23• 6 years ago

Almost all (except 1) are Chinese made.

I'm sure it has absolutely nothing to do with this https://www.ndtv.com/india-news/china-has-intruded-423-metre...

chrisco2552• 6 years ago

Yeah: https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-india-china/indians-hold-f...

China is basically using these apps as spyware.

enahs-sf• 6 years ago

This. Tiktok is clearly a data vacuum masquerading as a social media platform.

mc32• 6 years ago

Is it coincidental or incidental to their border dispute actions?

dheera• 6 years ago

I run WeChat on a separate phone with LineageOS and monitor its actions via the XPosed framework. It regularly scans my Wi-Fi network, checks the list of installed apps, randomly accesses sensors, and does plenty of other dubious things.

There was also a period of time where if you didn't give it Location permissions, it wouldn't let you login to WeChat. With LineageOS I was able to "give" it the permission but hand it fake sensor data instead of actual hardware data from the OS side.

I'd never think to run WeChat on a closed-source OS like iOS that doesn't give access to these kinds of introspection.

That said I don't necessarily think Facebook's or Google's set of apps are necessarily better in terms of spying, but at least it's possible to message people using a pure web interface without downloading anything, which WeChat doesn't let you do.

kalesh8• 6 years ago

Our (India) data is already a public property due to security breaches in Aadhaar. What more can TikTok get?

cbhl• 6 years ago

I wonder whether that's intentional?

China uses a different coordinate system inside the country (GCJ-02 vs WGS-84) and it results in discontinuities whenever you try to display a map of a border region (for example, the Hong Kong–Zhuhai–Macau Bridge).

TulliusCicero5• 6 years ago

I don't see a problem with targeting Chinese-made apps, given how much China blocks from other countries. Free trade has to work both ways.

ngold• 6 years ago

I don't see a problem with banning Spyware regardless of the country of origin.

eugeniub• 6 years ago

China restricts the freedom of its citizens, so other countries should restrict the freedom of their own citizens in exchange?

baddox3• 6 years ago

I don't understand that argument. It sounds like you're saying that the way to get freer trade is for all parties to restrict trade, since "free trade has to work both ways."

kerkeslager3• 6 years ago

The Sino-Indian border dispute is one of the most frightening things going on right now. Two nuclear superpowers are fighting with "rods and swords"[1], restrained only by, well, restraint. Covid and police violence are bigger issues right now in my opinion, but a nuclear war could get worse than either one quite quickly.

That said, I'm glad to see this not getting much press coverage in the US. The political discourse here has shown a willingness to throw gasoline on any fire, and the last thing we need is our fearless leader weighing in on an already tense and dangerous situation.

[1] https://defencenewsofindia.com/ghatak-and-16-bihar-troops-to...

puranjay6• 6 years ago

Personally, as an Indian, I don't see this situation escalating too much, especially not anywhere close to a nuclear war. Indian and Chinese leadership is mature enough to understand that a serious conflict will hurt both their ambitions. Plus, neither can really afford a war right now.

duxup• 6 years ago

That incident ... I doubt it is that.

Larger tensions and security concerns, yeah I'm willing to bet it is a larger issue.

sadfev• 6 years ago

It was brewing for a while. I am surprised that so many apps got b&. I was sure weChat and TikTok were gonna get axed but not others

geekrax• 6 years ago

"b&"

wow!

vijaybritto2• 6 years ago

China moved into Indian territory and has killed 20 Indian soldiers and this is how India is retaliating. The prime minister is not even mentioning China in his speeches or tweets. This has been a disaster for our country.

stevens3213• 6 years ago

Don't worry, apparently India has "snapped the necks of at least 18 PLA"

https://swarajyamag.com/news-brief/indian-soldiers-merciless...

vijaybritto2• 6 years ago

swarajya mag is not a news source. They're blatantly biased.

Also this news is not confirmed. Just speculation which is enough to make the public feel good.

zandroid• 6 years ago

InShot is missing.

eqtn• 6 years ago

Resso is missing

SoulMan• 6 years ago

Interestingly even before this ban, there has been a movement (at least by armchair critics in Social Media) to uninstall Chinese apps. People started installing this unknown app "Remove china apps" to get rid of the apps that Chinese phone makers like Xiomi does not let you remove.

People started removing Chinese apps not because of national security but because they thought it would stop boosting Chinese economy which in turn will come as defense budget

Bigger question is how do you stop the market penetration of mobiles like Oppo/Vivo/Xiomi etc and all the Startups like Ola/Flipkart which is backed by Chinese investment.

https://www.indiatvnews.com/technology/news-remove-china-app...

Avamander6• 6 years ago

That "Remove China" app was also removed from Google Play: https://gadgets.ndtv.com/apps/news/remove-china-apps-google-...

x87678r• 6 years ago

India smartphone marketshare:

Xiaomi 30%

Vivo 17%

Samsung 16%

Realme 14%

Oppo 12%

Others 11%

https://www.counterpointresearch.com/india-smartphone-share/

bg243• 6 years ago

Curious why can't India learn the lesson that China uses to change these statistics in 3 months? Of course, if it is related to long-term national security.

- Ban the companies for 3 months. Then allow selectively. - Reduce the tax from South Korea and Japan.

minusSeven4• 6 years ago

Because of trade deficit that is already in China's favour. I assume banning these companies means further actions on China's part that will impact India even harder.

amrrs• 6 years ago

Covid cases are on rise in India. Government didn't handle lockdown well to accommodate guest (migrant) workers and they were stranded. On top of all these, lives of Indian soldiers died recently in a clash with Chinese soldiers and China is continuously testing limits at Galwan Valley. You need a disruptive breaking news to crush all these and prove Government is in control. This is simply that. This is nothing but fueling the anti-China sentiment growing in the country. This will temporarily relieve government from answering the other growing concerns.

It's also quite ironic that so many companies with strong Chinese funding are still operating. Chinese smartphone makers are also doing great in India despite economic slowdown. OnePlus recently did a flash sale and sold out.

It'll be interesting to see what's going to happen in Long term. But this one, it's just a spicy headlines.

saltedonion4• 6 years ago

Might be a form of shifting the narrative and scapegoating for sure. But you have to admit that recent events have outlined a significant shift in Indian-Sino foreign policy. I don’t see this being reversed any time soon.

mratsim• 6 years ago

Seems like they learned from Trump and the change in visa/immigration to distract the public.

baybal23• 6 years ago

People downvoted you unjustly. Your position is substantiated.

The amount of actual impact on trade in between China, and USA is completely microscopic in relation to the amount of noise, and commotion.

One can not believe that sides genuinely oppose each other, rather than doing a theatrical performance with unspoken mutual understanding.

sbmthakur4• 6 years ago

Boycotting China is not a binary thing. Banning Chinese funded Indian startups and Chinese mobile companies which have big plants in India(and support thousands of jobs) is a complex thing.

On the other hand, banning spyware from the country you are currently in conflict is common sense and not that tricky. It's far more than spicy headlines.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23634138

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23638129

TriNetra• 6 years ago

no. there's more to it. THis stand-off, as India realizes, isn't going to end soon so country is preparing for that [0]. China is attempting to threaten/bully India for many reasons one of which is stopping India from creating near-border infrastructure. Prior governments ignored border infra on the Chinese side to appease China while China continued to develop infra on its side of the LAC. Modi has changed this policy [1].

0: https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/defence/ladakh-sta...

1: https://www.geopoliticalmonitor.com/the-end-of-indias-panipa...

kumarvvr6• 6 years ago

As i said earlier in the thread.

India must shift its trade integration into democracies and wean away from China.

Everything must have a beginning and this is the right time for India to wake up and stop its indirect economic support toan authoritarian bully.

dmix4• 6 years ago

I'm always skeptical about these government does x to distract from y arguments.

I highly doubt the indian government woke up one day and said "how can we distract the public from COVID today?" and someone replied "lets ban a bunch of highly popular mobile apps and games our citizens use to entertain themselves on the internet".

That seems like a great way to make them less distracted, not more.

saltedonion4• 6 years ago

India is absolutely right in banning TikTok as it is a significant national securities threat.

As long as the platforms recommendation and ranking algos are a black box, there is no guarantee that China isn’t conducting misinformation campaigns via the platform.

At the very least, the government should audit the algos and make sure China can’t arbitrarily alter ranking results.

ianleeclark16• 6 years ago

Are YouTube algorithms open? I don't really see a difference here. Nation state vs. private corporation is different on paper, but I don't see why. They're both going to react to material stimuli to increase their standings.

azinman23• 6 years ago

It’s about allies versus active enemies. There are shootouts on a regular basis between India and China, and they’ve intensified recently.

jankassens• 6 years ago

If India (or any other country for that matter) would be in an armed conflict with the US, they would probably also consider banning various US controlled services.

saltedonion4• 6 years ago

You have a good point. But TikTok is much more risky, and as as such requires much more scrutiny given existing body of knowledge between how chinese social media / chat companies such as WeChat enforce government censorship and aid in propagating misinformation.

This might be a shock to most people in the western world, but if you go on almost ANY news website in china, the headline news is dedicated to government propaganda.

The reality is that Chinese firms and government operates together intimately. Nearly all sizable firms have a party secretary that is involved in board level decisions, and steps in when things get political. You can ponder who has the final say.

no_wizard2• 6 years ago

Biggest difference is motives, as long as we are making the assumption you mean private corporations that aren’t proxies for their respective government(s)

A private company will optimize profit, all things being equal. Sometimes this means it’s product/platform can be used to disseminate possibly dangerous information, but it also can be regulated in response.

Another government? Not so easy

Only way to really assert influence is through a much more narrow and limited scope like diplomacy, economic sanction, war, or otherwise influence the state/affairs of the country through target regulations like the ones mentioned in the article

StreamBright3• 6 years ago

Not to mention state sponsored private firm, being private is just optics.

dathinab4• 6 years ago

Good point. But YouTube is not controlled by an authoritarian fascist-like government which has a world view in direct opposition to what you could refer handwaveingly as "western" and is currently pushing to become the dominant power in the world.

If you furthermore consider how bad the "western world" (mainly Britten and the East India Company) had treated it in the past, some aspects of the Chinese culture and the current Goverment direction western countries expecting any fair or reasonable treatment once china succeeded to become the worlds dominant power is kinda a sad joke.

mtgp1000• 6 years ago

You don't see a difference between an ideological party which interns millions of people by ethnicity (among other glaring issues), and a corporation seeking profits from a video platform?

hyko• 6 years ago

Because YouTube doesn’t have nuclear weapons and a plan to invade western allies?

Bayart• 6 years ago

YT has a legal framework that gives it protection to an extent from government interference, especially where it touches upon freedom of speech. Whether they want to use it or not is another question.

But the Party can just put officials in the Douyin (TikTok) offices and ask for any encryption key without having to divulge anything and without the company having any recourse. This in complete legality.

Large corporations becoming the end point for debate is a real problem, but I don't think it really overlaps with public/private collusion (or the lack of true private in China's case).

thuruv• 6 years ago

Politics does. That's the difference. Acting on above is solely depends on political bias instead of a concrete notice. No official research conducted and released stating the harm about the apps, right?

SuoDuanDao• 6 years ago

Let's be honest here; if India's relations with USA had soured to the same degree as with PRC, Youtube would be the one getting banned.

slowmovintarget• 6 years ago

TikTok apps add a vector for arbitrary code download and execution. What "algorithm" you get would seem to depend on what they'd like to run on your device that day.

seebetter• 6 years ago

The Chinese State is based on Marxism-Leninism and wants to dominate the world. There is a difference in that and any other country that acknowledges natural rights. If you believe rights are innate, then you can’t openly tolerate a state that denies them.

I often think what would California look like if it had the laws of Texas. Or what would China look like if it had the structure and motivations of Nevada? Both have Elon Musk and gambling.

trekrich• 6 years ago

hmm google or the ccp. Take your pick!

everdrive• 6 years ago

Nation state vs. private corporation is different on paper,

A nation state and a company are different in substance as well. I am sympathetic to the idea that companies (in America) can do more to curtail your freedoms. But, this is only true because of our system of government. In principle, a government can do much more than a company to curtail your freedoms. In practice, this is often less true. (although if you bump into eminent domain, or similar laws, then the government is much more threatening to you.)

We don't have to look far for this theoretical: the Chinese government rounds up people and puts them in camps, and disappears people for having the wrong opinions.

cocktailpeanuts• 6 years ago

China is a special case because they are among the very few number of countries in the world where the government openly controls the media and the private companies.

A U.S. company like Twitter even bans the U.S. president's posts on their platform, and so does Facebook. Something like that is impossible in China as whoever does that will instantly get shut down. Think about the implication of this. This means you have to assume that any Chinese tech company will have to comply when the government tells them to spread some propaganda through their media.

This is what has been called in a science fiction as "information warfare", and it can be even more catastrophic than a real war, but I don't think most people realize this because they've never seen one before. What's even scarier is that even as this is happening, nobody knows this is happening, which is worse than a war because, unlike a physical war where everything is visible, one country can "attack" another country without anyone else realizing, causing a huge damage to their economy.

SllX8• 6 years ago

Nation states have military, intelligence, diplomacy and police corps. They reserve the power to stop, detain, arrest, jail, try, sentence, imprison, and kill. That’s why how we go about those things is a Big Deal, and why we have so many rules about who can go about it, how, under what circumstances, what the laws are that they’re enforcing, what the processes and procedures are for enforcement and how guilt is determined.

Corporations as a rule, and there have been exceptions, but as a rule have none of those powers. Theoretically the worst crimes they’re going to commit are fraudulent in nature and crimes of negligence. They’re not just a separate org chart ultimately serving as a private arm of the State with its own private rules that it self-enforces; they’re different beasts entirely.

The problem with PRC-based corporations is that they muddy the waters entirely between what is private and public. As far as the PRC is concerned, all private life is subject to the State and should serve the interests of the State. Google and Facebook and your favorite café or tea house can and do have interests that lie entirely outside of the State and are free to pursue them. That is the difference between a free society and an authoritarian State.

rossjudson2• 6 years ago

I mean, they both are made of people, right? And those people have brains that they use, right? And brains are made of molecules, right? At the end of the day it's all just molecules reacting to stimuli, and basically there's no difference. Because they are molecules.

NicoJuicy6• 6 years ago

Xi is censoring protests on their platforms, but it's clear that Trump can't.

That's a clear proof of difference.

john45324522• 6 years ago

On YouTube at least the user has the option to search and subscribe the videos, there by controlling what is shown, it is not the same with TikTok

Nginx4874• 6 years ago

There are no private companies in China, all of the corporate entities directly or indirectly depend on CCP, which uses every opportunity to damage national security of its enemies.

zacharytelschow• 6 years ago

As long as the platforms recommendation and ranking algos are a black box, there is no guarantee that [insert platform here] isn’t conducting misinformation campaigns via the platform.

mrlala2• 6 years ago

I was skeptical about this, but I think they are surely are.

I installed tiktok just maybe 2 or 3 weeks ago.. it was kind of fun at first and was amused by some stuff on there. What it was showing me I thought was very relevant to prior stuff I had seen in some regard (just the type of humor) so I was kind of impressed.

Then all the sudden it started showing me all this pro-Trump/pro-religion/antiBLM stuff. And look, a platform like this and the age demographic the amount of pro-trump & pro-religion stuff is TINY. The amount that was coming up was baffling. And it would just be inserted at the weirdest times, where it honestly felt like I was being targeted to see this stuff.

I'm not one to be a conspiracy nut at all, but there were some flags hitting in my head that something weird was going on.. so I promptly uninstalled.

Honestly it's too bad, I think tiktok is a very unique thing, and seemed to fill some type of space where people just want to create stupid little videos that either say a little message or are just funny. But there's something weird going on.

stevens3213• 6 years ago

I don't think there's any mystery here, I also started seeing pro-Trump posts but that's because I'd watched other posts. If you start swiping immediately on those videos, they stop showing up. The algorithm doesn't care if you watched a video because you were enjoying it or were upset but couldn't turn away (or if you left a comment to support the content or argue with the creator). They tune it to glue your eyeball to the screen.

hnal9434• 6 years ago

Tiktok is just a terrible implementation of Vine. It's not unique.

bigpumpkin• 6 years ago

You are going to use the government to audit black box algos?

numpad03• 6 years ago

Since this is HN, what’s the easiest way to roll your own brainwashing machine like Facebook or TikTok? I mean isn’t it going to be fun to plant your own ideas on people...

huhnmonster2• 6 years ago

Going from what currently seems to be popular: huge botnets that carefully try to curate "real" users from random accounts. Rolling your own (Network that is, like FB or TikTok) seems pretty unlikely regarding initial investments, user base etc.

foepys2• 6 years ago

First, you need a few hundred million dollars.

mytailorisrich2• 6 years ago

Covid-19 is biting extremely hard in India. Handling has been very poor so far.

Stroking nationalism and pointing at foreign enemies in hard times is a tried and tested tactic.

seshagiric• 6 years ago

That's not true in this case. There is continued aggression by China, infringing into India borders. It would be stupid of Indian govt. not to react.

decon23• 6 years ago

I agree. Similar to using terrorist attacks to stoke nationalist feelings and distract from demonetization

hnal9434• 6 years ago

Covid-19 originated in China and is a global pandemic due to the CCP's negligence.

joshribakoff• 6 years ago

There is no guarantee any app is not doing this, should we ban all apps?

akshaybhalotia• 6 years ago

Very interesting. I would like to know more about this thought.

Is the problem, let's say, with:

- the country of origin, so if this was the exact same app from US it would have been less harmful, or,

- the amount of time people spend on it, so if people spent time on something like facebook it would have been less harmful?

giancarlostoro• 6 years ago

The amount of data they harvest off the app is scary, but I wish we'd be just as strict with Google over it. It's like the industry is slowly moving towards limiting these things, or making this type of spying much more covert as new things become exposed like the clipboard thing that TikTok does on iOS I can only imagine it's just as bad on Android, to the point where it should be a permission on a per app basis.

kevincox2• 6 years ago

I think it is the sum of the two. They don't want the Chinese government to have that much influence over their population.

It is an extreme move, but I see the logic behind it.

gdubs• 6 years ago

Just from a more farcical standpoint, the idea of one country attacking another via dance trends feels like a page out of Zoolander.

stevens3213• 6 years ago

This is a world I want to live in. Where do I sign up?

moscovium• 6 years ago

China bad

JungleGymSam• 6 years ago

Yes. That's a given.

NicoJuicy6• 6 years ago

Yeah, when I saw my neece on TikTok I was feeling really bad.

Most people don't see it, but I hate it to realize that she's being slowly influenced by hidden propaganda :(

zelphirkalt2• 6 years ago

One problem is, that often you cannot easily tell people or explain to them how bad it is, because "all their friends do it too" and the network effect is particularly strong in environments like schools. You can try at least though, asking them, whether they want to know how it works.

matsemann• 6 years ago

Have you seen what people share on facebook? The toxicity on twitter? The conspiracies on youtube?

kalesh8• 6 years ago

There is no such thing as ABSOLUTELY right. We don't even know what's actually going on at higher levels in the government. Why isn't Alibaba & AliExpress banned?

swatkat2• 6 years ago

Are kids committing suicide while using Alibaba website?

https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/bengaluru/bengaluru...

https://www.indiatoday.in/lifestyle/people/story/tiktok-star...

shripadk10• 6 years ago

Alibaba and AliExpress aren't banned because Indians aren't involved as much in drop-shipping as the West is. And US has already banned ePacket. AliBaba and AliExpress will collapse on its own if the West doesn't lift ban on commercial shipping. There is a huge backlog right now with shipping time going through the roof. You need to have a reliable agent in China to get goods out of China. It is pretty terrible state of affairs. If you are part of any drop-shipping groups on Facebook you'll get to see how drop-shippers are having a hard time getting packages delivered to customers.

quantummkv4• 6 years ago

Because the Chinese government cannot directly alter the content and rankings in AliExpress to immediately spread out it's propaganda directly to easily impressionable teenagers in the form of audio visuals.

gtm1260• 6 years ago

I kind of agree, but 99% of the videos I see on FYP are just absolutely silly, hilarious content.

gazelleeatslion• 6 years ago

Is this regulated for US companies?

slim• 6 years ago

we, non americans, think facebook is doing everything you describe and even worse.

sniperjzp• 6 years ago

This is funny, can you elaborate how come a ranking algorithm is a national security threat? It reminds me of the time when Google/FB/Instagram/Twitter still worked in China, Chinese govt used the same excuse to ban big tech social platforms.

kevincox2• 6 years ago

Propaganda is powerful. If China wanted to send a message to change public opinion around the world tweaking the recommendation algorithm to do that would be a very helpful tool.

toxik2• 6 years ago

The CCP band western propaganda platforms, which Facebook etc could be said to be. Fine, I think any set of ideologies need propaganda, like every company needs advertisement.

If you understand that, then surely you must see the symmetry in banning Tiktok etc?

dingle_thunk• 6 years ago

The great firewall should work both ways, otherwise it encourages more selective censorship.

StreamBright3• 6 years ago

Same reason the EU should ban Facebook and Google right?

suyash7• 6 years ago

It's like comparing Apples and Oranges.

BobbyJo10• 6 years ago

I mean, if they feel like the US is a threat to their sovereignty, and may use the platforms to push public opinions that undermine their stability, yes. If not, then why bother?

Governments may seem dumb and bureaucratic, but good ones tend to have some level of pragmatism.

mcs_• 6 years ago

But, if a nation can be threatened by an application, a chat, or a social network, can the ban solve the problem?

noisy_boy• 6 years ago

The app is not the entire problem so banning it won't/doesn't have to solve the entire problem either.

jlmorton4• 6 years ago

there is no guarantee that China isn’t conducting misinformation campaigns via the platform.

And who cares if they are? We live in an open society, and in the US, freedom of speech is a foundational principle. This is among the trade-offs you face when prioritizing absolute freedom of speech.

rgrs2• 6 years ago

I care

BobbyJo10• 6 years ago

Foreign propaganda broadcast and pushed by a hostile foreign government isn't protected speech. Not sure why anyone would need to say that out loud, but here we are. 2020, going hard.

coliveira• 6 years ago

The same can be said of companies like FB and GOOG. They operate black boxes with little scrutiny from society.

reaperducer2• 6 years ago

FB and GOOG don't have troops stationed on India's border.

suyash7• 6 years ago

They at least have been accountable to gov officials when called upon.

LockAndLol2• 6 years ago

Imo they are even worse than TikTok since they are actively being used by decision making bodies in nation states. The amount of classified information those companies are privy to is mind-boggling. Political parties, NGOs, companies, private citizens - they all store their information on servers belonging to American companies.

If you consider that they also run on operating systems made by American-owned companies who don't really care that much about privacy, it's even scarier.

China isn't the boogeyman here. The United States is.

learnstats22• 6 years ago

As long as the platforms recommendation and ranking algos are a black box

All platforms recommendation and ranking algos are ultimately a black box. Why is TikTok special here?

mthoms2• 6 years ago

TikTok is controlled by an authoritarian dictatorship engaged in a war against Western/Democratic values and human rights.

pvelagal11• 6 years ago

https://www.hawley.senate.gov/senators-hawley-scott-introduc...

coopsmgoops• 6 years ago

The ranking algorithm is the least of anyone's worries in my opinion.

kanox6• 6 years ago

India is absolutely right in banning TikTok as it is a significant national securities threat.

This is just a lame attempt at economic warfare and "misinformation campaigns" is a very weak excuse.

What concerns me the most is that in 2020 people are overwhelmingly in favor of governments and corporations controlling what their people watch and read and think.

Zeebrommer• 6 years ago

This is a consequence of Brexit and the election of Trump, democratic decisions that caught many people in power by surprise. Sophisticated use of social media platforms turned out to have a significant influence on public opinion. Although I agree that in principle everyone should be enabled to seek out their own information sources and form their own independent opinions, this is not what happens in the age of polarized sensationalist identity politics.

tjpnz• 6 years ago

What I fear is whether this data could be incorporated into the state facial recognition systems already well deployed throughout China. You're potentially helping the CCP in training a tool to aid in the violent suppression of ethnic minorities.

suyash7• 6 years ago

US should follow suit.

ex3ndr• 6 years ago

I bet this is just a corrupted ban for promoting local app of friends of friends of some minister.

star-trek-fleet• 6 years ago

Chinese immigrant in US here:

I don't think it's a stretch to state the risk of tiktok being mass propaganda machine, from India's perspective.

Additionally, I don't take this as a particular politically charged statement against China, as quite a few replies stated. The reason is that China and India are on a very delicate geopolitical environment. The history is long and ambiguous. The current rivalry is subtle and dangerous. You just cannot give any chance in this situation. After all, China do not have any foreign social network services anyway. There is no reason to gift the opponent an potential upper hand.

The Pandora's box was formally opened in the Arab spring already. It was a well intended start, followed with an ugly development and messy prospect left for generations to suffer and struggle.

Now the whole idea of social networking services as an actual helper of connecting people with different cultural background roughly reduces to nil. That really was a buffer.

Lastly, I don't think it makes sense for any sovereign government to force their country's corporation to serve them directly.

That would immediately destroy any chance of those organizations to expand beyond their home country. Someone might argue Chinese firms are OK to that because they had a big market already. That's a totally unreasonable imagination on Chinese business men's brain structure. I never encountered any such Chinese business man who believe loyalty to CCP is higher than their profit. Other argument is that Chinese law can coerce, but all the laws are saying the company ought to corporate when necessary for the security of the country. I cannot imagine any sane political personnel can convince anyone else that offensive propaganda in peace time is necessary for national security. At least I did not see any such behavior or even minor behavior with hint of such reasoning from past history.

ccktlmazeltov2• 6 years ago

it is a significant national securities threat

come on...

29athrowaway2• 6 years ago

A reddit user reverse engineered Tiktok and listed some of the information they collect and the extent to which they go to obfuscate their data exfiltration.

https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/fxgi06/not_new_news...

See the top comment as the video has now been removed from YouTube.

29athrowaway2• 6 years ago

^ Someone just posted this link and got 100 points. I got downvoted. Feels bad man.

Reason077• 6 years ago

"India is absolutely right in banning TikTok as it is a significant national securities threat."

I'm surprised, actually, that Trump hasn't expressed a desire ban TikTok. Especially after they trolled him so badly at that Tulsa rally!

He's managed to ban Huawei over (unproven and strenuously denied) security issues. Yet TikTok has direct influence over something much more important than 5G radio equipment: the hearts and minds of a generation of American children!

est• 6 years ago

Well technically China did it first. China banned tons of foreign apps or websites because "significant national securities threat"

moreorless3• 6 years ago

In the case of Facebook being banned, there is precedence for that.

https://www.fool.com/investing/2020/01/23/facebook-banned-in...

dis-sys4• 6 years ago

foreign apps or websites?

99.9% of them are US apps and websites. you don't need to ban india apps in China as I've never heard any of them, you don't need to ban india website as the india infrastructure won't be able to serve requests from a country like China anyway.

ascotan• 6 years ago

I doubt they can audit close source software.

billfruit• 6 years ago

But I doubt any due process was done before the ban, if any and concrete proof of wrongdoing is established before doing such things. Most of the bigger app developers will surely goto court.

If any this sounds like a propaganda move aimed at giving the people a feeling that the government has done something about it.

Some of these may relaunched as a web service, some may relaunch under a different branding, there are any number of things the app makers can legitimately do to skirt around this.

Using summary executive powers to do such is a rather undemocratic move, and which time and again this Indian Government has indicated it has no qualms of using.

This is a politically motivated move, where as it should not be. If there was established wrongdoing then ban the apps, not because it is politically convenient to do it.

Razengan• 6 years ago

India is absolutely right in banning TikTok as it is a significant national securities threat.

As opposed to Skype, Facebook, WhatsApp, Snapchat and all the others?

z9e• 6 years ago

The difference being TikTok is operated by India’s adversary.

KKKKkkkk1• 6 years ago

Honestly, I don't see the difference between TikTok and other social media apps and the old media. Why not ban Hollywood, the Beatles, and McDonald's then? Aren't they a source of pernicious American influence on this generation's youth?

ta17711771• 6 years ago

Yes.

GuiA• 6 years ago

Aren't they a source of pernicious American influence on this generation's youth?

Many countries have broadcast laws around a maximum amount of foreign programming (for one example amongst many, private French radios have to play French music for at least 40% of their programming).

grecy• 6 years ago

The difference is that China = bad and America = good.

zkid18• 6 years ago

All RS algorithms follows non-trivial logic based on the user’s feedback. They constantly adapt and upgraded. You can add some fuzzy-rules based on your moderation principles — remove porn, videos about flat earth, abusive content, and etc. But the core algorithm hard for interpreting.

Letting government step into this space creates an alternative form of censorship. I would rather ask all content platforms for transparent open-sourced moderation rules.

At the meantime, TikTok has a remarkable traction that put in a row of the greatest product of the decade. Previously ByteDance tried to move HQ away from China, but I now I guess they might even consider selling their product.

I guess it is more political decision rather than Indian government really cares about data security. Seems that US and specifically Facebook become the absolute winner in India.

gbraad• 6 years ago

At the very least, the government should audit the algos and make sure China can’t arbitrarily alter ranking results.

Can we do the same for YouTube ?!

mlang23• 6 years ago

Well, the same applies to FaceBook, just to name one prominent example. Or Google, for that matter.

ekianjo2• 6 years ago

Wasn't TikTok also caught intercepting the clipboard contents of the phones on which it was installed? Not sure about malware, but it could certainly be qualified as spyware if it actually does that.

esafwan• 6 years ago

This looks mostly like gimmick PR stunt to cover the recent setback India had with China in the border. For example see this news from a channel that supports govt. shorturl.at/acjoM This is not a comedy show, its a real prime time new show.

If India was serious about taking action it would have done something about the Chinese branded phone and Chinese infra project. All the largest phone brands in India are chinese. Same is true for Tv's. All unicorn startups in the country has considerable chinese interest. This ban carefully stays away from all apps, businesses and things that could really invite a response from China.

And it worked. As in the link above, Modi's followed have taken the bait. They are happy and all over social media celebrating this as a fitting reply for the soldiers life lost in the border.

jkingsbery• 6 years ago

My reading of the article is that it has a lot more to do with the border clash with China that killed 20 Indian soldiers with more believed to be captured (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/16/world/asia/indian-china-b...) and a subsequent desire to distance themselves from Chinese goods and services than it has to do with algorithmic transparency.

Nginx4874• 6 years ago

I hope other countries follow this absolutely wise decision. China will not hesitate to use any measures for weakening national security of countries it believes to be its enemies

happppy2• 6 years ago

like fb, youtube, twitter, linkedIn algos are audited. Just because tiktok is Chinese app, audit it?? what kind of hypocrisy is this.

bitstorm999• 6 years ago

Is it me or does this domain fail to resolve via cloudflare?

[user@host tmp]$ nslookup pib.gov.in 8.8.8.8 Server: 8.8.8.8 Address: 8.8.8.8#53

Non-authoritative answer: Name: pib.gov.in Address: 164.100.117.99

[user@host tmp]$ nslookup pib.gov.in 1.1.1.1 Server: 1.1.1.1 Address: 1.1.1.1#53

server can't find pib.gov.in: SERVFAIL

sradman• 6 years ago

The 2020 China–India skirmishes are part of an ongoing military standoff between China and India. ...numerous Indian government officials said that border tensions will not impact trade between India and China despite some Indian campaigns about boycotting Chinese products. [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_China–India_skirmishes

ericls• 6 years ago

US should’ve done this months ago.

factorialboy2• 6 years ago

Am I the only one concerned about how TikTok is promoting child pornography by serving as a gateway for young girls and boys to prostitution apps such as OnlyFans?

I think this is a bigger concern than loss of privacy.

Those comparing loss of privacy for Indians on US apps / platforms compared to Chinese apps / platforms, China and India are openly hostile.

US and India are not. This is a big difference.

crispyporkbites3• 6 years ago

I wouldn’t compare onlyfans to prostitution, it’s not the same as going out on the street. If anything it’s empowering.

factorialboy2• 6 years ago

Not for a 9 yr old.

tech_dreamer• 6 years ago

It has everything to do with current border skirmish. Also, 44% percent of tiktok users are from India.

qeternity• 6 years ago

Source on the demographics? That’s really interesting.

op03• 6 years ago

The kids are going to be pissed with Mr. Modi :) I hope he has a plan of where this goes.

yyhhsj0521• 6 years ago

Kids can't vote.

vulcan01• 6 years ago

And parents will appreciate that their kids are spending less time on social media (hopefully) :)

mathnmusic2• 6 years ago

I think this sort of response was inevitable and will be seen in more and more nations. China bans most of the popular websites and apps (including Wikipedia). The most recent trigger was the border standoff between India and China where Indian citizens could see and read both governments' responses, but Chinese citizens were only told Chinese govt's talking points.

This seems like yet another instance of the paradox of tolerance (reciprocity is a must have for a tolerant/liberal/globalized society): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance

chrischen2• 6 years ago

The China censors things so we should too stance just seems to strengthen their position of censorship...

foepys2• 6 years ago

Quite the opposite. China (the country, not China the economy) is investing billions into developing tech companies to surveil their citizens. Those apps are all centrally controlled by the Chinese government. They can freely suppress discussions without you ever knowing. Hell, they don't even need to censor it but only need to make it less discoverable.

As soon as those apps reach the western hemisphere (or just anything outside China) and become dominant communication mediums, the Chinese government will be able to dictate opinion in the West.

xster• 6 years ago

Though if you apply your argument with rigor and reciprocity was in play, more countries should ban american social media which censors geopolitical rivals

https://thegrayzone.com/2020/01/12/us-pressure-social-media-...

AlchemistCamp• 6 years ago

Venezuela, Iran and Syria do censor US media and it's far more extensive than any censorship of foreign media within the US.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_in_Iran

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_Syria

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_in_Venezuela

DeonPenny• 6 years ago

They do censor american social media. Like china and north korea obviously do

mathnmusic2• 6 years ago

It's bound to happen. See the political battles being fought for data localisation, and control of Internet governing bodies.

product503• 6 years ago

America will literally fuck with you if you start doing this at scale. India can ban Chinese app since India can do this. China needed to understand this before escalating the border tensions with India.

kilroy_jones2• 6 years ago

So you're equating the banning of accounts to the blocking of the majority of internet?

bad_user6• 6 years ago

The paradox of tolerance is bullshit though, as it's not based on empirical evidence.

It's just armchair philosophy used as justification for intolerance by intellectuals, the mental gymnastic people need to get over their cognitive dissonance.

AFAIK Plato came up with it to justify autocracy. That says it all actually.

jjoonathan3• 6 years ago

The paradox of tolerance is bullshit though

So do you tolerate intolerance?

dvt2• 6 years ago

I think you're going to get heavily downvoted (HN loves the paradox of tolerance), but I wholeheartedly agree. I think it's complete nonsense, not to mention that its spirit is much better represented by older ideas (e.g. Mill's Harm Principle). "Tolerance" is kind of a weasel word anyway, essentially giving carte blanche to the one that invokes the paradox.

product503• 6 years ago

And why should we believe you vs. Plato?

drevil-v2• 6 years ago

It explains cancel culture perfectly though.

panopticon• 6 years ago

This seems like a really wild stance to take on a paradox. Paradoxes aren't principles, laws, or theories. They're just self-contradictory or logically contrary statements; they don't require "empirical evidence" outside of the reasoning laid out in the paradox itself.

It would be better to say that people shouldn't use a paradox as evidence for something (e.g., claim aliens must exist because of Fermi's Paradox).

namelosw• 6 years ago

For me the paradox of tolerance doesn't make too much sense is because intolerance usually is recursive. There would be intolerance, and intolerance of intolerance, and intolerance of intolerance of intolerance, so on so forth. It is usually can be used as justification against other groups, since everyone is in the intolerance chain.

Maybe it should be paradox of even/odd level of tolerance? Also, in practice, it's hard to define which are the primitive intolerances and which are not.

kanox6• 6 years ago

How is "tolerance" relevant to banning apps based on national origin?

This is nothing but good old fashion economic escalation.

cmonnow7• 6 years ago

paradox of tolerance

Unnecessary use of the 'paradox' label.

If a criminal shoots a cop, that is violence.

If a cop shoots the criminal back, is that the 'paradox of violence' ?

If a surgeon cuts open a patient with a knife, to treat a tumor, is that the 'paradox of violence' ?

Violence used to curb violence is peace. Peace used to ignore violence is violence.

There is nothing 'paradoxical' about not tolerating the intolerant. That is basic justice.

class4behavior2• 6 years ago

Unnecessary use of the 'paradox' label.

No, it is not. You just didn't read up what the paradox is—or what a paradox is for that matter.

Aunche• 6 years ago

How does this have anything to do with tolerance? India has never been known to highly value tolerance, and this move is about national security rather than censorship on the Chinese apps.

kumarvvr6• 6 years ago

This is a right move, in my view.

Chinese infiltration takes a myriad of forms and data collection is one of the biggest.

And those apps form a basis for click-of-the-button hacking.

And ordinary users will find it very very difficult to determine if an app is Chinese made or not.

And the Chinese govt. will have it's fingers in everyone of them, one way or the other.

What I do worry now is that since China has been exposed, it will resort to even elaborate deceptive methods to hide itself and it's infiltration.

China is not to be trusted.

hatenberg• 6 years ago

You'll see the same attitude to the US from the rest of the world too

takeda2• 6 years ago

Actually I'm looking forward to it, it would increase pressure to care about privacy or at very least help competition to grow.

kumarvvr6• 6 years ago

Yes. Especially in South America.

However, US is not about expansionism.

Its about trade and control. It wants markets, trade and resources.

China is about expansionism and lacks moral or ethical compass.

maceurt• 6 years ago

The difference is you can just wait out US presidents. The US is significantly slower at getting things done, and for the most part everything the US does is going to be at risk of going public through whistle-blowers or the freedom of information act.

minusSeven4• 6 years ago

In a democratic country there are steps you can take against the company. With China everything is a black box. There are explicit rules that forbid you from taking any action against them. China itself has banned tiktok in their country.

cmonnow7• 6 years ago

How long will it take China to rebrand these apps under a different name ?

suyash7• 6 years ago

TikTok tried and that tactic didn't seem to work.

abinaya_rl• 6 years ago

All other democratic countries should join India in banning Chinese apps

Don’t allow Chinese apps until they open their own market to freely allow foreign apps like Google, Facebook, Youtube etc to function

privacywiki• 6 years ago

I hope many countries to follow this example, not by banning and censorship but actually banning the botnets that are no good and just for mining data.

OkGoDoIt• 6 years ago

So if WeChat is basically the only messaging app allowed in China, and WeChat is not allowed to be used in India, is there any widely available platform that Indian citizens can use to chat with Chinese citizens? Making it impossible or at least very difficult to communicate with people in another country seems like it’s only going to make any divide even worse in the long term. Think of the fallout of Facebook filter bubbles but to an extreme, by making it very difficult to even communicate with someone in a different culture with different viewpoints.

ppeetteerr7• 6 years ago

You can send a text message...

crispyporkbites3• 6 years ago

International text messages can cost a fortune to send

ketzu3• 6 years ago

So if WeChat is basically the only messaging app allowed in China

How did you get that impression? There are a ton of chinese messanging apps, e.g., QQ, which is also on the list of banned apps.

technobum• 6 years ago

Great job refuting your own point. QQ is owned by the same parent company as WeChat (Tencent). Tencent is also implementing the Chinese Social Credit Score system, and so in my humble opinion, is the tech arm of the chinese government.

jshah111• 6 years ago

WhatsApp is incredibly popular in India.

jumelles2• 6 years ago

And blocked in China.

jumelles2• 6 years ago

Would iMessage work between India and China?

sa12• 6 years ago

Facetime works.

president2• 6 years ago

Have you ever thought that maybe China shouldn't banned all foreign social media and messaging services in the first place? They literally divided the world by putting up a wall between themselves and the rest of the globe, the Great Firewall. Besides, the divide between China and the rest of the world has already happened on the ideological level.

tanilama• 6 years ago

Telegram....

hnarn2• 6 years ago

Please do some research, Telegram has never worked in China for any extended period of time.

sa12• 6 years ago

Signal works inside China, as long as you installed it outside.

kortilla5• 6 years ago

The language barrier already guarantees that. Only 12.6 percent of Indians speak English and only 6.4 percent of Chinese speak English. The overlap is worse with any other common language.

Andrew_nenakhov2• 6 years ago

Email should work. Or XMPP.

Darmody• 6 years ago

I'm absolutely against banning things but TikTok should be banned until we figure out how to protect ourselves from bad actors like the CCP.

unishark6• 6 years ago

I'm not sure that "absolutely" is the right word for you here.

ryanmarsh• 6 years ago

The public health toll of social media will not be fully understood for another 30 years it seems.

People with adolescents and teen daughters please chime in here. The rates of suicide, cutting, and psychological problems are climbing. My wife and I find a charity that offers counseling and therapy to young girls. What is common place now was nearly unheard of in my generation (X).

yellow_postit• 6 years ago

Just because it was “unheard” of didn’t mean it wasn’t happening in GenX. I don’t know if there’s a way to ever fully compare them but there are panics that accompany every new medium of communication.

koopuluri• 6 years ago

I'm curious how this will affect the local startup scene. There's definitely a great demand for these products that now needs to be fulfilled by local / non-Chinese international players.

If this ban lasts:

My concern is that Facebook will introduce India-specific products to fill this void, while my hope is that local players significantly up their product quality and reach to build a strong domestic tech scene - the way China did a decade and a half ago w/ Tencent, Baidu, ByteDance, etc. This domestic talent expansion will help build a stronger domestic tech ecosystem.

Why the concern w/ Facebook? They already have a deathly grip on Indian consumers w/ WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram. Tik Tok was the only major social platform used by Indians that wasn't owned by Facebook, and now they have a chance to potentially grab that as well. I'm not comfortable with one company owning that much attention, I don't trust their privacy policies with their data privacy track record and they don't iterate quickly enough on localized product-features meaning Indian users lag months / years behind western regions (e.g. Instagram in-app shopping experience).

searchableguy• 6 years ago

What do you think the local market needs right now?

Can you give some example?

dqpb• 6 years ago

I wonder if/how China will use the tiktok data when all these teens are adults.

stevewodil• 6 years ago

How does this ban actually get enforced? How are the apps blocked on devices which already have them installed?

khuey• 6 years ago

Sounds like it'll be a combination of pulling them from the app stores in India and ISPs blocking connections to the relevant server IPs.

YetAnotherNick• 6 years ago

Any sources? I am also curious about this.

seesawtron• 6 years ago

I am not sure when and how this ban will take into effect because right now it is still available for download in playstore. So it seems to be more of a strategic move in response to the border issues.

shaan12• 6 years ago

I think this is a good move. With China banning apps from other countries, its right for India to do. We should be doing the same thing in the US

bg243• 6 years ago

From the page: "At the same time, there have been raging concerns on aspects relating to data security and safeguarding the privacy of 130 crore Indians. It has been noted recently that such concerns also pose a threat to sovereignty and security of our country. The Ministry of Information Technology has received many complaints from various sources including several reports about misuse of some mobile apps available on Android and iOS platforms for stealing and surreptitiously transmitting users’ data in an unauthorized manner to servers which have locations outside India. The compilation of these data, its mining and profiling by elements hostile to national security and defence of India, which ultimately impinges upon the sovereignty and integrity of India, is a matter of very deep and immediate concern which requires emergency measures."

Thank you, India, for keeping national security first. Hoping it is for the long haul and the decision should not change in a meeting.

kalesh8• 6 years ago

I have a conspiracy theory here. Alibaba & AliExpress are missing in that banned list. This seems more like a direct hit on ByteDance rather than China.

Facebook recently invested in Reliance Jio. There have been other investments from Silver Lake, Vista Equity Partners etc.

TikTok is a big threat to FB, Instagram & YouTube. ByteDance apps TikTok, Vigo Video, Helo have around 300 million users in India. Facebook user base is 280 million. ByteDance had more apps planned for this year.

Banning BD is a big win for Facebook & Reliance. Government also get's to score a few points in this coronavirus mess.

mav3rick6• 6 years ago

Its more to do with the border skirmish.

kalesh8• 6 years ago

I don't understand what's the objective here. Banning these apps will have 0 or little financial impact on China. This seems more like a publicity stunt. Banning Alibaba would have been a bold move.

NicoJuicy6• 6 years ago

And it's just a conspiracy theory.

When military is getting active, they seriously don't care about a chat app.

Except if it's from the invader ofc.

acd10j• 6 years ago

Alibaba and aliexpress are not popular in india, hardly anyone uses them in India. May be that’s why they were spared banning.

tksb• 6 years ago

I've been passively thinking about this recently. Is there any pathway for individual users to (effectively) do the same for their devices or network, or both? Is IP blocking via hosts or otherwise still effective enough to be useful?

quantummkv4• 6 years ago

For networks, a Raspberry pi with pihole would be great starting step that still works

rezeroed• 6 years ago

What about Chinese phones and their customised Android?

suyash7• 6 years ago

Lot of countries are banning Chinese 5G hardware for the same reasons. Trump also issued ban on mobile device makes like ZTE etc for the same reason.

chvid• 6 years ago

Sad to see India degenerating into nationalism and populism.

pvelagal11• 6 years ago

Why does China ban Google, Twitter, Facebook and Youtube ? Why ? What are they afraid of ? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_websites_blocked_in_ma...

stevens3213• 6 years ago

I feel like this could be said for the rest of the world as well

raghava• 6 years ago

This news must be seen along with what happened early this year.

https://www.medianama.com/2020/01/223-the-great-indian-firew...

A Great Indian Firewall is shaping up. Now that the sentiment is all "anti-China!", people would celebrate instead of protesting the great firewall.

"Masterstroke!"* - Indian public.

*Basically, anything the current leader does, his PR team and his party spokespersons end up terming "unprecedented" / "masterstroke" / "genius move". Everything seems headed towards hardcore Soviet scheme of things.

zxienin• 6 years ago

India China have military asymmetry, in favor of later.

In such scenario, it is not difficult to imagine, that India use whatever strengths it has, to compensate for this asymmetry.

India is a big digital market. Consumerism is being weaponized. One can debate if this indeed is the driver or not. Yet, a statement has been made.

Boycott of Chinese physical goods is not as straightforward as digital ones. Low hanging fruit, to make a statement.

femg• 6 years ago

like this kind of bans so I know with Apps are good. haha.

sloshnmosh2• 6 years ago

To be clear, India has banned most of the apps listed for the members of their army years ago.

Also, many of the apps listed have been removed from the Google Play store several times for violating Googles developer policies and user privacy.

Anyone familiar with Android knows to avoid apps made by DU and CM.

Another little known factoid is that the “Beauty camera” line (Mitu?) has an admistrative level person that used to work at Cambridge Analytica.

balola2• 6 years ago

Surprised a free tool app would want that guy.

phoe-krk• 6 years ago

Clash of Kings? That online game? Why?

dmix4• 6 years ago

Clash of Kings is owned by a Chinese company called Elex-Tech aka "Beijing ELEX Technology Co". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clash_of_Kings

Not to be confused with the more popular "Clash of Clans" which is owned by a Finnish company https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clash_of_Clans

em500• 6 years ago

That Finnish company is now owned by a Chinese company.

vdfs• 6 years ago

Classic Pied Piper China

dang• 6 years ago

We've changed the URL from https://pib.gov.in/PressReleseDetailm.aspx?PRID=1635206 to an article that adds a bit of background. If there's a better article, we can change it again.

The site guidelines call for original sources, of course (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html), but press releases (especially corporate ones) are a bit of a grey area because they tend to leave out important context, if not outright mislead.

sloshnmosh2• 6 years ago

Here in the USA, Android phones with pre-installed Chinese malware and unremovable rootkit (fota/Over-the-air firmware update app) is given out to our most vulnerable citizens and disabled veterans through the government assistance “Lifeline” program.

wsc981• 6 years ago

Not completely related I guess, but ...

I recently bought an LG phone for mobile dev (LG V30). I need to enable developer mode to properly use this device for development. I am able to set the device in developer mode, but there is no way to select transfer protocol over USD with connected computer.

I worry this device might be hacked and this device is modified to prevent people from removing any hacks. I am also not able to do a hardware reset using the instructions I can find on internet.

On the other hand, this could just be some weird Android bug. But I think it's all quite suspicious.

By the way, part of the OS (e.g. the first menu shown after doing a soft reset) are not in English, only in Korean (I think). Also a bit weird imo.

Either way, these weird experiences with this device made me a lot more worried about security.

linsomniac• 6 years ago

This weekend "someone" was asserting TikTok was extremely malicious, but a lot of things in it raised red flags for me. I wrote up details about the supposed malicious action, and got a little discussion going over on this thread, but it hasn't gotten traction so far:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23679649

TL;DR: A tweet posts photos of "someone on reddit" saying they had analyzed the TikTok client and it was sending all sorts of data and able to execute .zip downloads, etc. Reddit thread has the poster saying "I'd provide proof, but it's in a soldered on SSD in a broken computer."

scared22• 6 years ago

With recent developments, even during covid we can see that trump visit is paying off. And India is officially trump ally.

scared22• 6 years ago

A one billion market loss

pvelagal11• 6 years ago

I am thinking why does China ban Google, Facebook, Twitter and Youtube ? What are they afraid of ? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_websites_blocked_in_ma...

systemvoltage9• 6 years ago

I just noticed that the link to the official Indian gov press release was modified to TechCrunch.

@dang - why was this changed, do you know? May be the Indian Gov Press release site hit hard by HN?

pvelagal11• 6 years ago

Everyone questioning India, should first Question China ! Why does this country ban these services ? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_websites_blocked_in_ma...

hnarn2• 6 years ago

Everyone questioning India, should first Question China

Or, you could question both. Whataboutism isn't a valid argument, so censorship of the Internet can still be wrong at the same time as China is a malevolent force both on the Internet in general terms and for specific pieces of software or services in more concrete terms.

pvelagal11• 6 years ago

Well, You have grown comfortable with double standards , somehow equating China with rest of world. Please spend sometime questioning that delusion. China is NO WAY QUALIFIED to question any country ! Western decency has been exploited by China for sometime.. But, For Indian politics it is payback time, killing innocents means crossing a red line...it will trigger response ! btw, US senators did introduce a bill way back in march to ban tiktok https://www.hawley.senate.gov/senators-hawley-scott-introduc...

riverlong• 6 years ago

I'm seeing lots of comments about national security-style concerns, and framing this in terms of the recent India-China skirmishes. That all makes sense.

Where I think a lot of folks are missing the point is that this is also a tremendous boost to local Indian entrepreneurship. One of the really clever aspects of China's Great Firewall is that it keeps out international competition, which would crush local startups. By banning more advanced, foreign competitors, India gives its local entrepreneurs a chance to grow hugely successful domestic apps, which can then compete internationally.

systemvoltage9• 6 years ago

While I agree about symmetric response to China, here is the problem:

By banning more advanced, foreign competitors, India gives its local entrepreneurs a chance to grow hugely successful domestic apps, which can then compete internationally.

If India bans international apps from competing within India, wouldn't Indian apps from these new found enterpreneurs expect the same response from other countries? There is a paradox here.

Why should any country allow Indian apps if they cannot compete in India? You realize this is the exact same situation as what India is doing with China. Now replace China with India.

What hypocrisy!

totony• 6 years ago

Thing is chija is already restricting outside entrepreneurs. I don't think that's hypocrisy, it's a two way street

vslira• 6 years ago

There's no paradox here. The balkanization of the web is a foregone conclusion. And not just between geopolitical rivals: the EU is dead set on creating a local version of FAANG companies.

affb-4d68-a853• 6 years ago

wouldn't Indian apps from these new found enterpreneurs expect the same response from other countries?

I am from India, and I don't think this would matter a lot if the company doesn't suffer from grand delusions of trying to go global etc. There are a lot of very idiosyncratic things about the culture here (just as in other countries) where it makes a lot of sense to develop India specific apps.

Also, the nature of innovation itself would change if an app is developed to cater primarily to people in India. A perfect example of this is the recently introduced UPI payments scheme, which if I understand correctly is already far ahead in terms of convenience when compared to payments services in developed countries. And I am very thankful neither Facebook nor TikTok controls it in any way, shape or form!

Otherwise, I agree with your sentiment, as it applies generally to trade policies between true allies. The only problem I have is that China is an exception when it comes to these bilateral trade policies, because they have a long history of bullying [1] smaller neighbors, and they can rarely be trusted when it comes to any kind of neighborliness. People who are pro-China should come and live a few years in these regions, and I expect they won't remain pro-China for very long.

And then throw in the rampant IP theft, and it seems to me that pro-China advocates are acting like useful idiots.

I will add a very ironic thing I read recently by one of those useful idiots, who said "Thank God this didn’t start in somewhere like India, because there’s absolutely no way that the quality of Indian governance could move to react in the way that the Chinese have done" [2]. The irony of course is that China is trying to convince the world that the virus didn't even originate in China. In other words, Mr. Jim O'Neill would likely be in Chinese prison if he had made that statement from inside of China. I bet the heavy-handedness wouldn't taste so good if you become one of the victims. Nassim Taleb would have mocked this as the statement of a guy who "has no skin in the game".

[1] https://news.usni.org/2020/01/27/panel-china-now-well-positi...

[2] https://www.cnbc.com/2020/03/11/thank-god-this-didnt-start-i...

jimbob45• 6 years ago

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(no...

India’s GDP is much much smaller than most think: its smaller than California’s GDP. That doesn’t seem so bad since they’re so close to other European countries but remember that India’s population is also considerably larger.

stevens3213• 6 years ago

Sorry, mind explaining the connection between India's GDP and the parent comment?

arjun27• 6 years ago

- Banning TikTok would move traffic to Instagram, not a “local Indian entrepreneur”

- the Indian startup ecosystem is dependent on external capital, a lot of which comes from China. This protectionist attitude will lead to a overall negative sentiment about investing in Indian tech.

buzzy_hacker• 6 years ago

Your first point actually seems pretty unclear for something stated as fact. TikTok and Instagram are both social networks, sure, but they’re quite different

moreorless3• 6 years ago

Where I think a lot of folks are missing the point is that this is also a tremendous boost to local Indian entrepreneurship.

Last I looked, a good portion of the funding for Indian startups is from China.

lioeters• 6 years ago

This is a good point, for me the most intriguing aspect of this ban.

Not only is it a good idea from security perspective - as well as privacy as a selling point - by forbidding specific, popular foreign services, it opens up the market for domestic players to grow. This is what China has done, and now India is doing the same to them.

Overall, this seems like a win for the people in India.

jdkee• 6 years ago

Your move Apple.

krn3• 6 years ago

A reddit user, who claims to have reverse-engineered the TikTok app[1], concluded:

TikTok is a data collection service that is thinly-veiled as a social network. If there is an API to get information on you, your contacts, or your device... well, they're using it.
For what it's worth I've reversed the Instagram, Facebook, Reddit, and Twitter apps. They don't collect anywhere near the same amount of data that TikTok does, and they sure as hell aren't outright trying to hide exactly whats being sent like TikTok is.

It doesn't seem surprising now, given that Zoom, which is also being developed in China, acts like a malware application, too[2].

I'm glad, that India is more aware of the possible consequences of using any software made in China than, for instance, the government of the UK is[3].

[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/fxgi06/not_new_news...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22748204

[3] https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-52126534

sethammons2• 6 years ago

I didn't realize Zoom was mostly developed in China! That seems bad.

“Our product development team is largely based in China, where personnel costs are less expensive than in many other jurisdictions,” Zoom wrote in a regulatory filing.

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/26/zoom-key-profit-driver-ahead...

alex_smart• 6 years ago

Why?

kanox6• 6 years ago

> If there is an API to get information on you, your contacts, or your device... well, they're using it. For what it's worth I've reversed the Instagram, Facebook, Reddit, and Twitter apps. They don't collect anywhere near the same amount of data that TikTok does, and they sure as hell aren't outright trying to hide exactly whats being sent like TikTok is.

I find this unconvincing and reddit comments are not trustworthy at all.

Wouldn't data collection be limited by the mobile OS anyway? I actually have TikTok on my phone and it requested no special permissions, compared to most other apps which don't even let you view content without validating a phone number.

krn3• 6 years ago

I find this unconvincing and reddit comments are not trustworthy at all.

You should probably read the original comment on reddit, not just my summary of it. I found it to be extremely detailed and technically convincing, even though it's still hard to determine the level of its trustworthiness.

gruez5• 6 years ago

Wouldn't data collection be limited by the mobile OS anyway

Maybe on iOS. But on Android of the ones that he listed, many can be retrieved without any permissions, such as

* Phone hardware (cpu type, number of course, hardware ids, screen dimensions, dpi, memory usage, disk space, etc)
* Whether or not you're rooted/jailbroken

I also suspect that they can get some or all of the network information without any special permissions either.

* Everything network-related (ip, local ip, router mac, your mac, wifi access point name)

As for "other apps you have installed", it looks like it's getting it through the "retrieve running apps" permission, although I'm not sure whether that shows up as a permission prompt or not.

demux• 6 years ago

https://penetrum.com/tiktok/Penetrum_TikTok_Security_Analysi...

cmonnow7• 6 years ago

How long will it take China to rebrand these apps under a different name ?

echelon• 6 years ago

There's also a few snippets of code on the Android version that allows for the downloading of a remote zip file, unzipping it, and executing said binary.

If these claims are true, a remote state actor can now take over 40% of young American's phones.

Imagine if they decided to shut off everyone's ability to communicate. That would be an incredible capability to possess in the event that they wanted to launch an attack or distract us. (I'm not saying that they would, but that we should be wary of the possibility.)

This is incredibly dangerous.

Furthermore, this does not seem like an accident in TikTok's design. This app is very well put together. Given the expertise involved, I can't see this as an "oops, we didn't know" oversight with respect to either alternative design choices or platform rules. It feels very deliberate.

Google should ban this app immediately for breaking the terms, and US legislators should make a law prohibiting it outright.

We have to do some more due diligence to make sure these claims are valid, but if they do turn out to be true, then we have some very serious issues to consider.

This is one of the few instances where I'll admit that I wish Facebook or Twitter had an answer for this.

thekyle2• 6 years ago

Twitter did have an answer to this. It was called Vine and was very popular before they shut it down.

LockAndLol2• 6 years ago

TikTok is a data collection service that is thinly-veiled as a social network. If there is an API to get information on you, your contacts, or your device... well, they're using it.

They might as well be describing Facebook or Google. They are data harvesting services - first and foremost. The actual applications are only the bait yet since they're owned by the country that makes those great movies and TV series, somehow, they aren't as bad.

stevens3213• 6 years ago

The scariest part of all of this is that much of the logging they're doing is remotely configurable

How is this scary at all - much less the "scariest part"? The vast majority of the bullet points also seem standard and not worth paying attention to. I also read the Penetrum paper he linked which was similarly unconvincing.

reactchain• 6 years ago

The "openness" of the west is being blatantly exploited, and yet for some reason people are still hesitant to call it out for what it is. Almost every significant US internet company is totally blocked in China. Until the US completely blocks WeChat, TikTok, Zoom and so on, China will continue to have a major geopolitical advantage.

ccktlmazeltov2• 6 years ago

the MOST SCARY stuff for me is apps that ask for your photos album permissions (so they can save to it, or upload a picture ). This permission basically gives them access to ALL your photos, including your dick pics, even when the app is in the background.

shihab• 6 years ago

About that reddit comment, when pressed for evidence, turns out that guy's own research is conveniently "lost" because of a motherboard failure. And someone in the comment pointed out that most of the things he found suspicious about tiktok is actually regularly employed by apps like fb, twitter etc.

I'm not taking sides and I don't have the technical expertise to judge everything said there. It's just that I'd be much more comfortable if all of those "evidences" came from a more trusted source & not a reddit comment from god-knows-who.

Honestly, as someone who doesn't belong to China/USA/India and genuinely curious about this, I'm tired of seeing all this "but but communist evil" and not much in the way of actual evidence.

isatty• 6 years ago

I don’t think it has anything to do with communism. The CCP is not communist except by name.

entha_saava3• 6 years ago

"but but communist evil"

Noone told that. CCP is not even communism.

Chinese apps collect a fucking lot of data and Indian People innocently use those shit apps like ShareIt because inertia and maybe network effects. If you want to share a movie / song something with an ordinary indian citizen you'd have needed ShareIt which is a piece of shit. Technical ones among us use Google Files or something like that but I have so far refused to use ShareIt because it is such shady adware. Note that most Indians don't have Laptop / PC and USB / Pendrives aren't ubiquitous.

Now that there is some friction between China and India and given the nature of Chinese Governance these apps are threat to national security.

Ideally they could have banned PUBG also, the shit is ruining many lives.

neximo64• 6 years ago

Are any of you afraid it'll happen to your app? today its China tomorrow it could be another country

quonn• 6 years ago

But it won‘t.

zigh• 6 years ago

Any of you afraid that the once unconceivable WWIII is gradually become possible because of the irresponsible politician trying to mitigate their own misconduct/misjudgement by instigating hate and xenophobia.

ausjke• 6 years ago

Please ban them in US too. WeChat in particular is used to train their censorship AI engine.

Andrew_nenakhov2• 6 years ago

This should have been done a long time ago. Chinese services have an unrestricted access to their local user base + users of the whole world, while services from any other countries might easily be blocked in China for one reason or another, thus reducing their potential user base by several hundred million of users. Even without the sinister political reasons behind the censorship by the CCP it would be an unfair competition.

kumarski• 6 years ago

Disclaimer: This is not investment advice, this is lunatic gambling advice from a systems engineer with a background in polymers who is an American born Indian.

Tibet quenches the thirst of 3Bn people through ~10 rivers in SE Asia.

Kashmir and Tibet are red hot conflict zones and this is through and through a contest of freshwater.

This is a powder keg unlike any other and this scenario is collateral shrapnel.

China has 5% arable land and its water becomes more putrid by the day. 20% of industrial waste water pollution is from textile dye that's dumped into water, and China has cornered the textile manufacturing market.

China uses water for dams. They built something like 20k+ dams in 70 years.

China uses water for agriculture, extremely inefficiently.

China weaponized water data on the Brahmaputra river and it caused downstream deaths in India.

I'm aggressively invested in $DFEN and $BA.

Boeing has 400 vendors in Inda. This will heat up.

MOD and DRDO ain't no joke.

If you were a murderous dictator like Xi Jinping, it would be prudent to kill the muslim minority to ensure a long and stable CCP indoctrinated control of Tibet and all the water brouhaha.

pm902• 6 years ago

Yes, obviously, long term intense military conflict between nuclear powers leads in incredible security.

While both countries engage in Sabre rattling, its inconceivable that there would be an arms race of the kind that would cause a significant change in the stock price of defense contractors.

A more likely scenario is the upcoming Biden administration steps in and bullies China and/or India into backing down. The hollowing out of the US State department has probably been one of the most underappreciated casualties of the Trump administration.

el_dev_hell• 6 years ago

A more likely scenario is the upcoming Biden administration steps in and bullies China and/or India into backing down.

Australian here wayyyyyy out of the US political loop. Is Joe Biden looking likely to win? Has he been promising a hard-line stance on China?

amriksohata• 6 years ago

China bans far more stuff, anyone questioning India doesn't realise what China bans.

TikTok and a lot of some Chinese apps are seriously untrustworthy

jialutu• 6 years ago

For anyone interested, here is the US National Security's view on the current standoff between China and India, from China's strategic perspective:

https://warontherocks.com/2020/06/chinas-strategic-assessmen...

Seems these repercussions are already put into consideration.

knolax• 6 years ago

This comment might be too meta/off topic but..

This thread is hilarious. You have people spamming the same link over and over again and not be greyed out, but if you look into their comment history you'll find dead comments with such controversial opinions as "spice was lucrative during the age of sail" and "Vegan Italian food is possible". HNers are a mercurial lot.

I'm looking forward to see the reactions of HN once similar bans get enacted closer to home. The free speech and free market absolutists have been silent so far, let's see how long they can maintain the cognitive dissonance.

cmonnow7• 6 years ago

How long will it take China to rebrand these apps under a different name ?

didip• 6 years ago

Well.. besides the blatant privacy concerns, it seems fair to ban Chinese apps since they themselves also ban foreign apps.

scarlac• 6 years ago

I strongly disagree. We should prefer to not divide the world if we can. The sentiment "If they can be bad, so can I" is not the recipe for a world I want to build. I believe the world would regress if we kept acting like that.

Knuthtruth2• 6 years ago

It's easy to be idealistic while sitting at home comfortably . These 2 countries are currently at the brink of war, when one country attacks you, you need to defend yourself anyway you can. I don't see anything wrong in Indias actions. China has long asked for such rebuttal from its neighbors.

balola2• 6 years ago

If you can't contain the hostile players, limiting youself is only going to speed up your own death.

thekyle2• 6 years ago

But what's the alternative? Appeasement?

1024core• 6 years ago

If China can ban websites and apps (for whatever reasons), why can't India?

What's good for the goose is good for the gander.

solutron• 6 years ago

I don't wanna sound like "that guy" but we have to take a step back and ask ourselves how we got here. The entire software industry has it's roots in espionage and war, even though the past 30 years have seen a massive expansion of consumer technology that, on the surface, completely removes us from that history. Necessity is the mother of invention, as they say. It's a wonder that we have consumer tech for entertainment and enhancing our lives and that we've built vast markets on it. But, we can't forget the fact that our experience on that end of the technology spectrum doesn't negate where and when we fit into a broader timeline spanning generations. If the doers, the technologists and creators forget this, countries like China are going to run roughshod over the United States, and use what they've learned from and about us against us and against democratic ideals abroad. I've been telling people for the past year or more to stop using TikTok and I get mostly snickers or "that's interesting". American hubris leads us to think we'll always be "on top" and that discoveries like this are fundamentally inconsequential. There's larger plays in flux at the geopolitical scale and it'd be a mistake for Americans to ignore it and pretend it's "no big deal." India has it's own reasons to conduct the ban, right or wrong, but American's should really consider following suit, especially as we head into election season and as social unrest and loose ends continue to shape America's future.

SmokeyHamster• 6 years ago

Good on India. They're smarter than we are.

gopiandcode• 6 years ago

While there may be a legitimate discussion to be had about the dangers of foriegn-state controlled mass social media, it is rather disheartening to see so many cheer the restriction of user freedom and increasing censorship.

TLightful• 6 years ago

Everyone is kissing China's netherlands for their hardware, and suddenly becoming precious over their software.

Hippopotamuses!

stevens3213• 6 years ago

Hardware is also getting a fair share of international bans

mappum• 6 years ago

This is fascinating - I have been quantitatively tracking TikTok trends and Indian songs consistently top the charts on TikTok by view counts. This will displace many Indian TikTok users and either a new platform will spring up, or Indians will get slightly better at using VPNs (just like internet users in China).

(For the curious, my TikTok data is shared here: https://tiktometer.com)

euix• 6 years ago

I rather look at this from a rational pov then moral grandstand from one soap box or another, since I have no dog in this fight.

My thinking is, this would be a good casus belli for India if they have the national ability to develop home grown alternatives.

If you look at the evolution of the Chinese market, one of the key reasons China was able to develop a vast and independent internet ecosystem was its ability to ban the U.S. based groups such as Youtube, Google, facebook all at select political moments. Had the Chinese never done this, there is no way its domestic eco-system would have developed the way it has. At best foreign firms would own a substantial minority share, instead the Chinese firms like Alibaba and Tencent were able to consolidate monopolistic positions at home and then use that as a base to expand outwards into SEA, India and other developing markets, thereby challenging what would otherwise be a U.S. based monopoly on leading information technology.

From a nation building and state capitalist perspective it was actually quite a smart move. At the time, the western content providers were all banned at one point or another based on individual political reasons (Google hacking, arab spring..etc) and while there were political reasons to do so (censor and control the discourse of Chinese popular opinion) there was vast economic benefits down the road. I am sure the high level thinking in policy making in China recognize this "two birds with one stone" aspect.

I suspect India would like to do something similar. Right now the "foreign barbarians" in India are not the technologically more advance American firms like in China's days in the 90's. It's cash rich and state backed Chinese firms (Alibaba, Tencent, Xiaomi, Douyin, and the like).

So seizing this as a good excuse to maybe not outright ban (we don't know if the TikTok ban won't be reversed at a later time) but even to throttle and restrict them in the domestic Indian market, provided there are domestic alternatives that can built up would be a good move 10-20 years down the road. Or even better, use the opportunity to shake down and force more technology transfer from the Chinese firms in return for market access. India like China has a sufficiently large population and thereby potential domestic market to pursue this strategy.

robofanatic• 6 years ago

It would be interesting to see Tiktok's usage chart today

pmarreck• 6 years ago

Good.

Free societies should be completely isolated from societies without remotely the same liberties, human rights or sense of ethics.

If you make money off a country because it permits its workers to be enslaved and paid a pittance, you both support the ongoing enslavement AND reward the leaders of that country. This is a devils' tradeoff.

zachguo• 6 years ago

Surprisingly HNers are embracing the concept of cyber sovereignty that China and Russia are pushing.

sergiotapia• 6 years ago

money makes it easy for them.

wogong• 6 years ago

Finally Chinese companies know the feeling of being banned in another country.

electro_blah• 6 years ago

Yeah, I'm sure this has nothing to do with them killing Indian soldiers. it's sad how this is more bigger news than that.

nitrobeast• 6 years ago

Slightly off topic. After the Covid-19 masks are not useful / we must wear masks fiasco, if you are willing to think it through, it is painful how most media are not independent at all. At best they are beholden to group thinks, parroting government officials. At worst they are just instruments of propaganda. I believe it is time for each person to control the information they receive, just like diet. AdBlockers are a good first step.

notsag-hn• 6 years ago

I am really amazed to read so many people talking of chinese companies as the greatest threat for our privacy as opposed to american tech companies, do you guys even read the news or just Trump's Twitter account? This is not about the US or China, they are part of this game but (illegally) harvesting data is a global trend that most likely includes you and the company you're working for. Do you want to change the world? Challenge your boss on the information you collect on your users and the practices you use to facilitate them being tracked instead of fighting China 24/7 on the internet, be smarter than a 20-lines-of-code bot, please.

kabacha• 6 years ago

None of these apps are essential or especially unique so they'll be replaced by some local clone few weeks later. Funnily enough that's exactly how it works in China itself — they ban stuff and then replace with local clones which sometimes end up being even better than original except for the spyware bloat.

Learn2win• 6 years ago

mega censorship!

ipiz0618• 6 years ago

Considering the recent crisis that's brewing between the two, it's a rational move for India to not let China get more intelligence data so easily.

From a humanitarian point of view, everyone in the world should uninstall these apps as they help collecting data for censorship in China [1].

Also, apart from being a spyware, TikTok is simply a dangerous app which brings much harm to society [2].

[1] https://citizenlab.ca/2020/05/we-chat-they-watch/

[2] https://nypost.com/2020/02/13/the-dumb-dangerous-challenges-....

tivonn• 6 years ago

god bless

hnal9434• 6 years ago

People seem to be missing the point that Chinese Apps are literally spying on their users. iOS just released a patch to keep TikTok from scraping users' clipboards.

tomohawk• 6 years ago

The Chinese government moved in martial artists and elite alpine troops to the area. Shortly there after, a number of unarmed Indian soldiers end up dead in the same area.

https://www.straitstimes.com/asia/east-asia/china-sent-marti...

This is small potatoes compared to the concentration camps and genocide and ethic cleansing being forced on Tibet and East Turkistan (what CCP calls Xinjiang). Or to the forced harvesting of organs from living political dissidents.

https://chinatribunal.com/

What will it take?

stevens3213• 6 years ago

I read through the tribunal report expecting some sort of evidence, instead it uses guestimates to arrive at numbers for transplant volume then says there's no possible way the organs could've come from volunteers due to that volume. China has 4 times the population of the US, and right about 4 times the amount of transplants claimed in the report.

rammy1234• 6 years ago

This is going to empower startups in India. To create things in India. Every country needs to go product route. Create more than consumption. we will get variety as well as fosters creativity. One thing for sure empowering startup culture is a game changer for india IMO

sameerds• 6 years ago

What surprises me is that the discussion here is taking the original article at face value. Sure, the Indian govt is citing national security as the reason for the ban. But take a slightly cynical view, and focus your attention on this sentence:

"Jayanth Kolla, an analyst at research firm Convergence Catalyst, told TechCrunch the move was surprising and will have huge impact on Chinese firms, many of which count India as their biggest market."

That's the real reason. This is just posturing between two neighbouring countries who are currently involved in a border dispute. There is already a lot of military posturing, a lot of diplomatic posturing and now a lot of market posturing, which includes the Internet.

rsanek• 6 years ago

It's probable that the border issue made them more willing to take actions that they might normally avoid in fears of unnecessarily angering China. I think of it less as pure posturing and more as, if we're already in a border dispute we might as well take the opportunity to do some things we planned to but put off.

4BxHkLgUVBG• 6 years ago

Yup, this border issue may well be a good thing for India. New Delhi can now officially treat China as an adversary nation and take steps towards securing its national interest without any moral dilemma and without any care as to how CCP will perceive such steps. CCP is now considered hostile so there’s nothing to lose for India.

nobrains• 6 years ago

I don't see how Chinese apps are somehow bad, while the equivalent American apps are not bad. That's being naive.

jb775• 6 years ago

There's an active border dispute currently going on between India and China. Probably equivalent to early movement of a pawn in a game of chess.

blunderkid• 6 years ago

You'd imagine the Chinese communists would be smarter having been in business for 50 years now. But when pushed into a corner on taking the responsibility for the deadly virus, all they can think of is grabbing land and starting wars with their unfortunate neighbors. But better sooner than later. Now you know that when the dragon becomes a super power, it will be nasty, petty, manipulative, bloody, totalitarian & downright ugly. American capitalism propped up CCP. But CCP covets land and power more than money. And they'd rather go to war with their neighbors than accept that they were responsible for the breakout and the spread. The only fault of TikTok, just like that of Huawei and every other Chinese company is that their ultimate masters is the CCP. And yes that's enough reason to ban them.

abrbhat• 6 years ago

An aspect that most people seem to be missing is that this gives the Indians an opportunity to create their own apps and social networks. This has two benefits, it is a safeguard against information propaganda, and it gives protection to the Indian software industry to grow.

qserasera• 6 years ago

The US should at least consider banning TikTok for its predatory practices as well as other apps on its level posthaste.

HariPavan• 6 years ago

does banning these apps do any good for the Indian Government? It just like taking revenge on Chinese companies rather than china gov.

affb-4d68-a853• 6 years ago

I am from India, and I don't understand this. Why are people comparing TikTok to Facebook and Google? Facebook and Google do horrible user tracking, but there is a big difference.

There is such a thing as real dissent in the country where Facebook and Google are headquartered. It actually matters to people who use these services.

Do you doubt it? A Twitter account like this cannot be run from inside of China:

https://twitter.com/Project_Veritas

If you disagree, please comment with a Twitter profile (preferably written in English, but I can also use Google Translate if it is written in Chinese) and change my mind.

What about all the naysayers about a LOT of America's policies who still have a public platform? Here is an example:

https://www.lewrockwell.com/

By the way, just because I am linking to it doesn't mean I agree with everything on that website, which is sort of the whole point isn't it? I am still able to read and then think about dissenting voices.

Can someone show me the Chinese equivalent of that website?

ekianjo2• 6 years ago

That's pretty fair seeing that China bans a lot of content/apps/sites that is not produced in China.

leozhi2• 6 years ago

I run a hard tech product team, our product is moving from prototype to the alpha stage in the next three months. Lots of components come in from China, because they cost twice as much in this country. WeChat is how we (or anyone) talk to Chinese vendors. No Canton Fair, no China travel, communication cut off at its knees, and issues with customs' clearances - this is going to be a brutal time for strained budgets and timelines.

known• 6 years ago

Evidence suggests Modi regime was receiving Chinese donations for many years;

Recently TikTok donated 30 crore rupees to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PM_CARES_Fund

Will Modi regime return these funds ?

vgchh• 6 years ago

With the recent killing of 20 Indian soldiers, conventionally India would’ve responded militarily. Though the reality is India can’t afford a military conflict with the much more powerful China. Thus banning the apps is a good response. You kill our 20 people and alter boundaries, we cut off your businesses from our markets at the very least.

john45324522• 6 years ago

Did the ban go through court process or its imposed by ruling party decision ?

Nginx4874• 6 years ago

Absolutely right decision. There are no private companies in China, all of the corporate entities directly or indirectly depend on CCP, which uses every opportunity to damage national security of enemies.

korginator• 6 years ago

It's funny looking at the responses bashing India's decision here. With the current geo-political climate, and China pretty much swallowing up and controlling all of India's neighbours - Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Nepal, I'd say this decision is long overdue.

In more recent months, China's military has become increasingly aggressive against India and in the South China Sea, and they've just recently passed a draconian 'national security' law in Hong Kong which pretty much allows them unlimited control over the territory.

With this in mind, China is starting to look like a grave threat to the peace and stability of Asia and beyond (apropos their recently influencing the elections in Kiribati and having a puppet leader installed).

India welcoming Chinese made software is like the US deploying Iranian or North Korean origin software. Tell me how that works out.

entha_saava3• 6 years ago

I am an Indian and here is my perspective.

A significant portion of Indian smartphone users are not technically literate. Lot of shady adware developed in China is ubiquitous in India, due to inertia and network effects, as well as lack of awareness about security / permissions given to apps etc..

For example, that file sharing application called ShareIt. That's a piece of shit. But people used it and if you wanted to share some movie / song / something like that with other people, you would've needed that crap. I have refused to use such adware since an year and it worked for me because content I consume was different, there was cheap Jio internet and I didn't need to share much files with others. The technically educated of us used Google Files or Xender which were better than ShareIt. And most people don't own PC/Laptop thus Pendrives are out of question.

Similarly people used browsers like UC browser without concerns, because they didn't know better.

Now there is friction between China and India, the ubiquity of Chinese apps is a threat, and Govt. has taken right step. But more stuff needs to be banned, and the danger needs to be clearly communicated instead of a blanket ban, which leads people to think it is just an act of patriotism.

happppy2• 6 years ago

yeah, block apps when you can't win a war.

bobbydreamer• 6 years ago

Tiktok is a happy app. It make you smile, laugh and relax. Ofcourse India will ban it.

Next will be zoom why there is JioMeet. Can anyone find 5 differences between JioMeet and Zoom app.

India bans TikTok, WeChat, and dozens of other Chinese apps

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