China doesn't need TikTok to get your data. They can just buy it from data brokers, lol.

I have a Xiaomi phone. They already know everything about me.

Can I just brag for a moment? I feel like I am among my people, and there is a little lesson at the end.

to calibrate: White dude in my 40s, nerdy by nature but non-technical in my education/employment

Twitter - signed up in the early 2000s when it first came out, pretty much stopped using by 2011

Facebook - signed up in the early 2000s when it first got big, pretty much stopped using by 2011, deleted my abandoned account last year

Google +, I'm sure I never signed up, but I had an account that I never used. Google being google negated me ever having to contemplate whether or not I would ever use it

Snapchat - never used

TikTok - never used

Instagram - never used

Are there others? I don't know.

Reddit was the only "social media" I ever used for a sustained period of time and the only one where I felt part of any sort of community. I left reddit in June of 2023 when I made this account and I've never been back.

So, in many ways, I am successfully resisting/avoiding "the algorithm" and I am a good example of high media literacy with good resistance to manipulation by social media.

But, just to emphasize why community itself is so valuable and worthy of exploitation by techbros, here are life changes I've made since joining Lemmy, even without any algorithms or dark patterns. Not that Lemmy is strictly causal in all of these, but the relationship is there:

• I am now making my way through TNG, and am generally more Trek-literate

• Linux, natch

• Cancelled all streaming services (honestly most 'subscription services') in favor of a NAS running Plex (for now, will probably move to Jellyfin), Calibre, AudioBookshelf, Immich, Joplin, NextCloud, etc, etc, etc

• Now using Steam Deck as my daily driver for gaming

In other words, though I prize my independent thinking and avoidance of Big Cloud, and though I think all of these are positive changes representing a positive influence, I am clearly impressionable. And so are you.

I already get the same thing from the YouTube app which won't shut the fuck up about Shorts

More like Buys the same data from Meta but okay.

If you even have a phone then Google, the phone's manufacturer, your ISP, the NSA and their respective governments already know everything about you.

Never used TikTok, but I’m not going to pretend that China (and pretty much every other government if it wants it) doesn’t have access to my data, there isn’t much I can do about it at this point.

EDIT: they do* have it, I’m just sleep deprived

Heh, nice. Now do American corporations.

No wörries I still had a Huawei for several years and still use the Huawei health app.

So I'm pretty sure China could — if they had any interest in — know literally my very heartbeat.

China is a perfect communist motherland that doesn't need anyones secrets!

I mean, I have it installed, but I have it installed in a "sandbox" (Co-opting androids work profile feature) I use Insular

But looking now, it seems it hasn't been updated in a year so I might have to look for an alternative soon if it has issues when I upgrade to Android 16 lol

Big brain move, let's make them buy our data from someone else. 🙌

haha yeah that’s stopping them

They still know your name, phone number, relationships, and every piece of info ever supplied to or from you in a text message going back as far as it is recorded on every phone which has ever downloaded the app. Your mother, your brother, your sister, your ex.

It's a cruel and terrible world for those who aren't ignorant.