China=Bad

TikTok does what every other social media app does (which is 100% legal in the US, thanks to corrupt leaders and law makers), but:China, so: Bad.

Yeah!

through deep learning

Belongs after

investigations

And many, many mobile apps out there, except this one is the bad one, because: China.

My point is that meaningful privacy legislation would stop all apps from doing this with our data, but we have legislators who only pretend to care if a bogeyman has access to the data, and forget the part where any adversary could simply buy the data on the open data market.

I’m personally less interested in China having access to my daily movements than I am my own government, which includes states that are trying to criminalize going to certain medical providers.

I’d prefer if nobody had access, but I can see through the charade. These legislators are invested in technology that competes with China, and that collect and sell our data, so they prefer to keep things the way they are and pick winners and losers.

Dumb.

“We are too corrupt to draft meaningful privacy legislation, but watch as we pretend CCP is the real problem.”

Performative BS

I owned four Fitbit devices, and they all broke in some way. The clip broke at the middle joint. Everything else always was at the wristband to body joint, and they refused to make standard wristbands. I’ve had a Vivoactive 3 since 2018-ish, and it still works for me, plus I can have custom activities, and watch faces, and data screens. I like that my partner’s Garmin and mine use the same charging cable, too.

Disclaimer: I don’t use the smart watch features, like texts or calls or notifications of any kind on my tracker, and the battery lasts about five days still, unless I use GPS.

Garmin has so many different trackers for different niches. Scuba, hikers, bikers, runners, pilots…

I switched after getting my third Fitbit replacement under warranty. Affordable and standard watch band parts, though some high-end trackers are a bit pricey for me.

Just no reason to stay with Fitbit with Google’s history of product longevity and support.

On of my banking apps fails to open when I disallow connections to graph.facebook.com. Their support team has indicated that it’s not their app. I have logs from various vpn-like capture apps, and my firewall. Pretty icky.

The eSafety commissioner, Julie Inman Grant, has proposed cloud and messaging service providers should detect and remove known child abuse material and pro-terror material “where technically feasible” – as well as disrupt and deter new material of that nature.

The eSafety regulator has stressed in an associated discussion paper it “does not advocate building in weaknesses or back doors to undermine privacy and security on end-to-end encrypted services”.

I so love these magic wand-waving legislators. “Spy on your users and control what they do on your encrypted platform, but in a way that doesn’t break encryption or violate privacy…”