Going even beyond that, hosting a video sharing website is a ridiculously inefficient way for a state actor to get people's data. The ENTIRE bloated US intelligence apparatus has an operating budget of 74 billion dollars. Satellites to cyber war to black sites, $74b. ByteDance is reportedly spending $7b just on GPUs this year. Hackers are a hell of a lot cheaper than that.
Going even beyond that, hosting a video sharing website is a ridiculously inefficient way for a state actor to get people's data. The ENTIRE bloated US intelligence apparatus has an operating budget of 74 billion dollars. Satellites to cyber war to black sites, $74b. ByteDance is reportedly spending $7b just on GPUs this year. Hackers are a hell of a lot cheaper than that.
Granted, TikTok is actually making money.