If you didn’t know about this, ToTok is another messaging and IP call app. However, it was recently published that they were suspected of being a spy operation. By none other than the New York Times. Famously factual newspaper, and sourcing from American Officials familiar with the intelligence.
My oh my. I am rushing to remove this from my phone, because what would I do if this temple of privacy, this cradle of my personality, this bastion of my deepest secrets, was ever exposed.
Look, for the purposes of this discussion, I am going to assume that sure, ToTok is a spying tool. And in the meantime, we are going to acknowledge there is a thing called the Patriot Act. Signed by the mediocre megalomaniac painter that used to be the “guy you’d have a beer with”. Dubya Bush.
Gmail, an email solution used by a huge amount of people, through which plenty of companies solve their email issues at a corporate level, and with a freemium business model, routinely routes YOUR communications in and out of US servers. Heirloom Bush determined that the NSA could monitor any and all email comms in and out of US borders. Thus, thanks to this former alcoholic, almost everyone’s email can be read by US intelligence.
No wonder the service is banned in Russia and China, did you ever wonder why?
Let’s go on. Alexa routinely records your conversations, Android could (we assume they don’t) just start listening to you, end of the day, they NEED to improve their Google Assistant to… serve you better. Any qualms about what Siri does?
And that is without looking at Skype, from Microsoft Corporation, Whatsapp, from Facebook, Telegram… Endless.
Well, don’t you worry, because you can use Apple and Android to trace where you have been, where you are going or where you lost your phone. Mark Rober made a truly nice video with this very function at the forefront. I wonder if, when Apple gives you this information, do they have it themselves?
Facebook knows what you say, Instagram (Facebook) knows what you like to see, Whatsapp (Facebook) what you talk to friends about…
But who’s the bad guy? Huawei. Because they could use their phones to listen to you. And Huawei is Chinese! LG and Samsung can do the same with their smart TVs but they are Korean, the good guys. Telegram is Russian! Bad, bad, bad.
And now, ToTok! The Arabs! “They hate us for our freedoms!” As the father of the drone program, Gaffy Bush said.
Lots of noise, lots of fireworks, lots of drama. Obama changed nothing, he even expanded some of these programs, and the latest guy is too worried about his fame to read anything longer than a fortune cookie. Which begs the question of why KFC and McD don’t start doing that?
End of the day, it is free calls, if you want to listen, there is nothing I can do whether I wanted to or not. For telephone companies do have the same capability nowadays…
Piss off, NYTimes, go back to pushing your lobby-based, access-prone, PR publishing propaganda. Do you know that thing that excretes poop? That’s where your article belongs, but failing that, we will use it to clean ours.