When TikTok left the United States for all of 14 hours, users–Tiktok “Refugees,” as they would call themselves–immediately downloaded the Chinese social media app RedNote.
XiaoHongShu, directly translating into “small red book,” or “RedNote” for English users, is a Chinese social media app that was created as “China’s answer to Instagram” after it and a slew of other social media services were banned in the early 2010s. It was never meant to be used outside of China.
So, when former TikTok users turned to RedNote, they were shocked that the Terms of Service were in Mandarin. No, I can’t believe it either–it’s astounding that a Chinese app wrote its terms of service in Chinese. However, unlike TikTok, which hosts data on servers in the U.S, RedNote’s data is hosted on Chinese servers. These two facts, coupled with general fear about Chinese data mining (in the CCP’s eyes: “it’s not your data, it’s OUR data”), were quick to raise concerns about data privacy.
The irony is not lost. TikTok was banned by the American government because of concerns that the Chinese government would use data collected from the app and could subtly influence users. But when services went down, TikTok users chose to download the one app that was even more Chinese: RedNote.
I remember talking to my mom about social media once.
“Why do you use TikTok and Instagram? What if they steal your information and use it?” she asked.
“What’s the point? Everyone has all my information anyway. Why should I care? Also, you literally use Facebook,” I responded.
This conversation that may or may not have happened demonstrates the difference in thinking between generations. Older people who didn’t grow up with the internet–information about everything, everywhere, all at once–aren’t as comfortable with this idea that companies have your data and can do whatever they want with it. But younger generations who have grown up always using social media, always scrolling through TikTok and interacting with videos that they relate to in order to make their For You Page more unique to them, are normalized and numb to the fact that we are not alone in this massive, secular online world; there’s always the elephant in the room–the company that owns our favorite social media sites.
The idea isn’t unique to social media. At-home DNA testing has gone from a multi-billion dollar industry to those same companies at risk for filing for bankruptcy in just a few years. Concerns about privacy have been raised since it first became popular, but now, they are higher than ever–what will happen to my genetic data if 23andMe gets bought by a malicious company?
Why does it matter if someone uses my DNA from a DNA test that I’ve hypothetically taken to make a clone? (They probably wouldn’t; I’m short and that would be kind of a letdown for the world’s first ever human clones.) Why should I care if they use the information to catch criminals? I’ve never committed a felony–but maybe my opinion will change if I do.
But we shed DNA every day. If someone wants to take my genetic information, all they have to do is follow me around until a hair falls off my head.
The problem isn’t that we’re concerned about our privacy, because the truth is, we’re not. The problem is that older generations don’t understand how much of our data is already out there and that there’s not much we can do about that. Pretty much the only thing that you can do to prevent your data being stolen is to pull a Ron Swanson and hide out in the woods.
