What to know about RedNote, the Chinese app that American TikTokkers are flooding

[Bernardo de La Paz]

72. The "she" was not Autumn, but the person Autumn wrote about. The valuable data is not hacked data

I'm sorry, I was much too brief in that reply.

Further, the data is not simply passwords, names, email and phone numbers, which is the basic kind of information that gets hacked.

The data that gets sold is a lot more, a distillation by AIs of all her posts to indicate who she is connected to as family, friends, enemies, employers. It indicates likes and dislikes and interests, a personal profile. It includes photos of those people, their houses, their cars, their toys, where they go on vacation, the food they eat. A very complete profile.

Plus internal direct messages between users who expect those messages to be private and not read by the companies.

Data breaches are a bother, but pale in comparison to the detailed profiles bad actors glean from posts, likes, what posts they read, and what posts they read more than once.

Not just the users, but even people and companies and government operations not on the app get compromised by the volumes of cross-correlated data.