How TikTok 2.0 Became a Weapon for ICE

[Nevilledog]

https://newrepublic.com/article/205956/americanized-tiktok-backdoor-ice-surveillance

No paywall link
https://archive.li/jwrp3

In a viral video captured during the ICE surge in Portland, Maine, an agent pointed his phone at a constitutional observer, snapped a photo, and offered a chilling, off-the-cuff warning: She was being added to a “database” of “domestic terrorists.” The brief exchange offered a glimpse into the petty and vindictive mindset of ICE agents. It also offered us a window into the mechanics of a hyperefficient, privatized surveillance state, one that bypasses the pesky barriers of the Fourth Amendment by putting our user data on the government’s credit card.

Last month’s Americanization of TikTok is perhaps the zenith of this strategy. While liberal hawks cheered the platform’s transition to the jumble of jargon now known officially as TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC as a win for national security, they ignored the details written in the fine print. TikTok’s Terms of Service now explicitly include tracking of location and citizenship status (among other identity markers, such as sex).

By housing TikTok’s data on Oracle’s cloud infrastructure—a firm whose multibillion-dollar existence is owed in part to U.S. intelligence and law enforcement contracts, and whose co-founder Larry Ellison recently bragged about AI ushering in an era where “citizens are on their best behavior”—the government has finally achieved its aim of securing the app by integrating it into its domestic surveillance dragnet. Considering the drive to secure TikTok was driven by fears of what the notoriously repressive nation of China might do with our private data, this outcome is, at the very least, highly ironic.

The technical wizardry of this surveillance relies on your Mobile Advertising ID, or MAID, a unique string of alphanumeric characters assigned to every smartphone. Every time an app, be it TikTok or a simple weather tracker, makes a bid to show you an advertisement, it broadcasts both your MAID and your precise GPS coordinates to thousands of private bidders in milliseconds.

*snip*

[highplainsdem]

1. K&R! Was just about to post this. Here's SF writer John Scalzi's comment:

I didn't have TikTok on my phone when it was Chinese spyware, I'm not going to have it on my phone when it is US spyware

— John Scalzi (@scalzi.com) 2026-02-09T14:36:35.499Z