Superb return policy. Brand name products (on most things), and these brands will honour warranties when purchased from Amazon directly. No sales-pressure emails, fake promotions/coupons, or notifications on your phone (my wife uses Temu, and she gets these spam messages constantly throughout the day!).
I buy from Aliexpress, but it depends on the item. Some brands do have Aliexpress official stores, but shipping is often days or weeks or months (or never). Approx. 1 out of 10 orders I place on Aliexpress don’t even arrive, and I won’t be able to claim a refund for months after I’ve paid.
Aliexpress also likes to promote way too many sex toys and sleazy trash thumbnails when my order history has only been RC car and bike parts, and a flashlight. Disgusting how they “market” products.
I hate defending Amazon, because there’s a lot wrong with them, too. But compared to Temu or Ali, they are just so much better in every way.
If I had a nickel for every time I saw one of these posts, I’d have two nickels, Which isn’t a lot, but it’s weird that it happened twice on the same day
The fundamental difference is who is in control, and for what purpose.
American spyware is controlled by corporations, and is all about selling you shit you don’t need.
Chinese (and Russian) spyware is–apparently–controlled rather directly by their respective governments, and is being used to suppress democracy and increase polarization in the US and EU.
I don’t like any spyware. But the latter category–spyware that’s functionally state-sponsored–is clearly more immediately dangerous. The former is more like a slow-growing cancer.
I mean, that’s part of the reason that I’m here, rather than The Place That Shall Not Be Named. That, and because my account was permanently banned because I suggested torching the house of a someone flying a nazi flag.
All of the US corporate social media platforms are part of the US military-industrial-intellegence complex now. Look at their boards of directors and executives. Look at the Twitter Files. Look Hamilton 68.
Id be surprised if all admins of every instance that’s federated with Lemmy are all on the same page, let alone looking for narrative driven bots.
I see “Ukrainian combat footage” with hundreds of upvotes and no comments, there was also an article speaking positively about facebook that had lots of upvotes and no comments (it’s in my history of you look, because I commented lol) - those look like red flags to me
I don’t find the first strange, but I also find combat footage both interesting and not worth commenting on. Plus I think a lot of people just upvote Ukraine stuff and move along because there’s no more conversation to be had in general.
That second one does seem a little weird, but Lemmy’s more than capable of licking corporate boot when you phrase it correctly to them. I’ve always found that strange in general.
Twitter files are mostly a tool for Elon Musks policy. Wiki entry shows enough of why they are problematic. The Hamilton 68 controversy isn’t a big thing like you are pretending. If anything their database was misunderstood. businessinsider.com/what-is-hamilton-68-russian-o…
Glad to see the first comment in this chain being one calling out the usage of the Twitter files as a serious supporting point for anything but a point of deflection by Mr “I don’t use pr firms”.
Immediately emptied out a salt shaker on how I viewed everything else in the original comment :| homie thinks the Twitter files are relevant… ehhh I probably don’t have much interest or respect in any of their other opinions
guess I’m being downvoted by the tinfoil hats in here anyway. Same as the twitter users, it’s often not bots that are the problem but rather dumb people :-(
I’m not defending China here, but since Snowden we now know that American corporate spyware does serve the government. And they are suppressing democracy - this isn’t a democracy yet, and peaceful protests for democracy are met with violent police resistance - Occupy, BLM, etc.
I sincerely hope that Lemmy can grow large enough to serve as a staging ground for democratic protests in America, just because it’s not corporate controlled.
The concern about TikTok acquiring your private information for marketing purposes is a red herring. The concern of our government here is propaganda and narrative control – power.
The USA has a very strong first amendment. Cruise social media and you can find Americans literally calling on fellow Americans to overthrow the government. And these people are largely left alone by the government. Heck, a fair number of folks who were involved in the January 6th insurrection are still walking free.
Advocacy groups, including the American Civil Liberties Union, have called the bill “censorship plain and simple,” arguing that “jeopardizing access to the platform jeopardizes access to free expression.”
At 27 years old, Florida Democratic Rep. Maxwell Frost is the youngest member of Congress, and he opposes the bill.
“I think that it is a violation of people’s First Amendment rights,” he said. “TikTok is a place for people to express ideas. I have many small businesses in my district and content creators in my district, and I think it’s going to drastically impact them too.”
The fact that Republicans started it is enough for me to be at least suspicious of why its even being considered.
EDIT: Also lol at “strong first amendment rights” when redneck states ban any books with queer or black characters. And lmao at “Strong first amendment rights” when people get fired for talking about forming a union, let alone even trying to make one.
I think the comment shouldn’t have been removed, but principally because it is trivial to refute. The US is well aware of the fact that people calling for revolution have no teeth, while the people who actually did substantial law-breaking on Jan 6 (which itself had no teeth, but I digress) were indeed arrested.
Meanwhile, Wikipedia’s list of Chinese"dissidents" includes blatant fraudsters like Miles Guo, who fled China to evade capture for financial crimes before being imprisoned in the US for continuing to commit financial crimes, to say nothing of the “dissidents” involved in actual insurrectionary activity that killed PLA soldiers.
If all you did was drop a wiki link that’s a pretty worthless comment. Do you think China is the only country where dissidents get in trouble with the government? Do you think the U.S. doesn’t harass (or worse) dissidents?
TikTok, regardless of the country of origin, is known to be spyware on a much greater level than everything else on this list. It collects every click, interaction, and even your clipboard, among other things, sometimes while not using the app.
Yes, this kind of data harvesting should be illegal for Google, Facebook, etc. Do something about it, US government. Unfortunately our next best option is to use FOSS where possible.
Yeah I remember when TikTok was first getting popular in the States, and some reverse engineer I followed on Twitter posted his findings about it, and it was honestly pretty terrifying. Like unfettered access to your device, regardless of permissions granted, and remote code execution capabilities kind of terrifying. I don’t think Spotify does that lmao
Ahhh, typical Hexbear, jumping to the conclusion that I am racist because I said TikTok is bad without any citations. See the other reply in the thread for the citations.
TikTok is not the only company that uses its pixels throughout the internet. The report found Google, Meta and Microsoft, among others, use these trackers.
Your first link has a sentence expressly disproving your own thesis, so in addition to concluding you are a racist, I can also now conclude that you didn’t read your own sources.
Goalpost shifting, your original post said that TikTok is known to be spyware on a much greater level than anything else on this list.
Your statement isn’t true even if you prove that Tiktok is the worst offender on the list. You need to prove that Tiktok is worse to a much higher degree than anything else on that list. Your own source straight out says that at least 3 of the other companies on the list engage in similar practices.
TikTok is not the only company that uses its pixels throughout the internet. The report found Google, Meta and Microsoft, among others, use these trackers.
Nothing beats Instagram, Facebook, Google, Microsoft or Twitter in spyware. Have you heard of the Snowden revelations? These companies provide all their data to US spies.
TikTok, regardless of the country of origin, is known to be spyware on a much greater level than everything else on this list. It collects every click, interaction, and even your clipboard, among other things, sometimes while not using the app.
Can you provide concrete proof that this is the case, when compared to other Western social media platforms? You sound like a scientologist.
ABC News does not provide the “cybersecurity report” they “obtained”. Usually this is a sign of Washington ordering news outlets to do their thing. Wired looks the same. And going by the video format of WSJ tabloid, it also has nothing of substance that technically breaks down things.
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