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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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].
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.
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.
> > 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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].
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.
[+] [-] saltedonion|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] ianleeclark|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] star-trek-fleet|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] learnstats2|5 years ago|reply
All platforms recommendation and ranking algos are ultimately a black box. Why is TikTok special here?
[+] [-] sniperjzp|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kanox|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] est|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] akshaybhalotia|5 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] zkid18|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] zacharytelschow|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] KKKKkkkk1|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gdubs|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jkingsbery|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 29athrowaway|5 years ago|reply
https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/fxgi06/not_new_news...
See the top comment as the video has now been removed from YouTube.
[+] [-] ekianjo|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mcs_|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] coliveira|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] billfruit|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] kalesh|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Razengan|5 years ago|reply
As opposed to Skype, Facebook, WhatsApp, Snapchat and all the others?
[+] [-] gbraad|5 years ago|reply
Can we do the same for YouTube ?!
[+] [-] coopsmgoops|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mathnmusic|5 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] krn|5 years ago|reply
> 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
[+] [-] sethammons|5 years ago|reply
> “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...
[+] [-] shihab|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] kanox|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] echelon|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] ccktlmazeltov|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] reactchain|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stevens32|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] cmonnow|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] LockAndLol|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] kumarvvr|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] amrrs|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] riverlong|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] solutron|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pvelagal|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] raghava|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] OkGoDoIt|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sanmon3186|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] kalesh|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] x87678r|5 years ago|reply
Xiaomi 30%
Vivo 17%
Samsung 16%
Realme 14%
Oppo 12%
Others 11%
https://www.counterpointresearch.com/india-smartphone-share/
[+] [-] koopuluri|5 years ago|reply
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).
[+] [-] sloshnmosh|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] sameerds|5 years ago|reply
"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.
[+] [-] tech_dreamer|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] privacywiki|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sbmthakur|5 years ago|reply
1. https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/satellite-images-s...
2. https://www.lawfareblog.com/beijings-new-national-intelligen...
[+] [-] dang|5 years ago|reply
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.