ByteDance agreed to pay $400 million to the US DOJ today. They collected personal info from kids under 13 without parental consent and broke COPPA. They pay $300 million now and another $100 million once an old 2019 decree is cleared out.
People are cheering this on other tech subs. I don't get it. Let's look at the actual mechanics here. $400 million is massive for a standard company. For TikTok, it is a basic operating expense. They just paid a retroactive licensing fee to keep running an ad-tech engine disguised as a video app.
The fundamental issue is that legislation like COPPA tries to solve an architectural problem with legal paperwork. Age gating is a technical joke. A kid just taps a button saying they are 18. Suddenly the app gets total legal cover to scrape device IDs and network telemetry. The system is functioning exactly as designed.
Fines do not change the code. As long as the platform architecture requires aggressive data extraction to monetise users, the surveillance will continue. Regulators are basically just taking a cut of the profits.
We need to stop waiting for governments to fix this with penalties. What are you all actually deploying at the OS level to kill this app's telemetry on mobile networks? NextDNS works well enough on home networks but maintaining the blocklists for mobile clients is an absolute chore. Anyone got a cleaner setup?
Source: The Daily Record, link in comment
Source: r/PrivacyToolbox · by /u/EnthusiasmRoutine