We’ve noted a few times how the political push to ban TikTok is a dumb performance largely designed to distract people from our failure to pass even a basic internet privacy law or regulate data brokers. We’ve also noted how college bans of TikTok are a dumb extension of that dumb performance, and don’t accomplish anything of meaningful significance.
When the college bans first emerged we noted they’d be trivial to bypass, given the bans only apply to the actual college network. They obviously don’t apply to personal student use over cellular networks. And, not surprisingly, students are finding it extremely easy to bypass the bans, either by simply turning off Wi-Fi when they want to access the social network, or using a VPN:
“The student body, quietly, in unison, added Wi-Fi toggling to their daily routine. “Everyone was so nonchalant about it,” Pablo says. “They really just did not care.”
“There wasn’t a whole lot of pushback, aside from a lot of grumbling and groans,” says Ana Renfroe, a sophomore at Texas A&M. Some of her professors are still showing TikToks in class. They’ll just ask students to download the videos at home she explains, or will upload them to another platform like Instagram Reels.”
The folks who spent several years hyperventilating about how TikTok was some unique threat to the public (on an internet where countless international companies, ISPs, app makers, and data brokers over-collect and fail to secure consumer data) are, of course, nowhere to be found.
Im pretty sure the point was to never ban it outright, it was to remove tiktok from the managed networks, which it has done extremely well.
I don’t think the IT teams were ever brought into that discussion, nor was security genuinely a concern. I think this was purely performance art.
There is genuine security concerns, notably from most major cybersecurity experts. It was an overreaction, but it definitely was founded in reality.
Was it? Which specific security concerns would this have addressed?
https://www.cisecurity.org/insights/blog/why-tiktok-is-the-latest-security-threat
https://dot.la/what-data-does-tiktok-collect-2657689460.html
It’s not too hard to find that they collect a ridiculous amount of data, even over the network.
Neither of those are about network security, but are about the ability to collect data on individuals or to influence campaigns.
THe bans on university networks do not stop any of that, as this article points out.
Additionally, the app can still collect data on the university networks. It just has to wait to send it until they connect to a different network (eg. cellular)
If this was such a security concern, top-tier universities would be blocking it. Not 3rd and 4th tier universities with nothing to steal. If the Chinese government wanted data from a US university, they’d send someone over as a student to join the research labs it cared about.
Additionally, from the same article you linked about why your response and the bans themselves don’t make sense:
You sure like to “think” a lot about things for which you have no data.
You are incorrect.