The problem with tiktok is not speculative at all. It doesn't matter what you can prove they did, it only matters that you can prove they can.
It is not speculation at all to say that tiktok can both collect data and manipulate populations. Whether they actually do doesn't even matter. The problem is you can't prove that they have not, are not, or will not.
The only problem is 50 other apps all pose essentially the same risks, and tiktok is hardly special.
The contrast is any of the various open source activity pub apps. Any given server could be doing anything, but there is no single black box server that everyone has to live on. There are 1000 different servers and a bunch of open source code that all serve as verification checks on each other. No aberrant server can hide its skewed behavior for long when there are other servers that didn't F with the code and so their behavior matches the public code, and so the aberrant ones can be exposed by their behavior and stats deviating from the norm, even if you can't trust that a given server is really running clean code.
It is not speculation at all to say that tiktok can both collect data and manipulate populations. Whether they actually do doesn't even matter. The problem is you can't prove that they have not, are not, or will not.
The only problem is 50 other apps all pose essentially the same risks, and tiktok is hardly special.
The contrast is any of the various open source activity pub apps. Any given server could be doing anything, but there is no single black box server that everyone has to live on. There are 1000 different servers and a bunch of open source code that all serve as verification checks on each other. No aberrant server can hide its skewed behavior for long when there are other servers that didn't F with the code and so their behavior matches the public code, and so the aberrant ones can be exposed by their behavior and stats deviating from the norm, even if you can't trust that a given server is really running clean code.