The Peter Zeihan Podcast Series - They're Watching You: The Ban on TikTok || Peter Zeihan

Episode Date: April 12, 2023

The CCP is always watching...and no, I'm not talking about spy balloons today. Under the law in China, any company must cooperate with the government. So if you've got TikTok on your phone, you may want to watch your back. Full Newsletter: https://mailchi.mp/zeihan/theyre-watching-you-the-tiktok-ban

Hi, Peter Zine here coming to you from Crown Point Overlooked in New Zealand just outside of Queenstown. The news that I've been following of late has to do with TikTok and everyone talking about how it is a government spy program and it needs to be banned. For those of you and want me for a while, you know, I'm a relatively laissez-faire kind of guy for most things. But there are exceptions. This is absolutely one. Underlaw in China, any company, not an information company, not an internet company, not a social media company, any company has to cooperate with. their intelligence services for any reason at any time in whatever way the Chinese government requires. So technically, every Chinese company is a security risk, much less one that you put on your phone.

And with the technology as it currently exists with TikTok, even if you have the app closed, it's recording everything you do, bank account information, your cell phone calls, everything. And what happens is the Chinese government, if they have an interest in you, they will go into TikTok and say, I want information up with this person, in this area, these keywords, that sort of thing. They have to make a very specific request to go into the data and pull it, and TikTok is legally required to cooperate and hand over all the information.

So from a security point of view, absolutely TikTok is a threat. But there is a company out there that is at least an order of magnitude worse than TikTok, and it is called Facebook, because they collect data in exactly the same way, it just as invasive, but unlike TikTok, where the Chinese government has to then come and choose to go after you. Facebook does the work for them, and they take all of their data from their billion plus users, and they break them up into chunks of 10,000 based on what sort of fraud they think, Facebook thinks, you will fall for.

A religious scam, an anti-vaxxer scam, a give money to the elderly scam, a save-the-children scam, whatever it happens to be, and then they take these packets of 10,000, and they go to a place in Germany, they go to a place in Vegas every year, where the scammers get together for literal conventions and they market your data. They market your data to these entities. And of course the Chinese government shows up for that. So does the Russian government. So the only way to be safe from these two apps is not simply to delete it off of your phone,

but then to go through and do a full system reboot and purge. Because even if you have signed out of TikTok or Facebook, it is still collecting the data. You actually have to delete the entire thing after signing out. It's the only gonna get it right. So the restrictions on TikTok, I think they're a great idea, and I think they're only the beginning of what we need to do to get our social media space back. All right.

That's, holy crap, weather just turned. We gotta go. You guys take care.