KTracy.com has been warning about the danger of TikTok and the massive Chinese surveillance project it serves for a some time now. The problem is that Americans are so accustomed to their government and private companies spying on them that the idea of a foreign government spying on them doesn't cause anyone to even blink.

There's an old saying that if you put a frog in boiling water, it will jump right out. However, if you put a frog in cool water and slowly boil the water, the frog will boil to death. It's a metaphor for the apparent unwillingness of people to react to sinister or evil threats that slowly arise. One must wonder if that's not what's happening here. The surveillance state has become so pervasive in western culture that the "free world" no longer cares that it is being spied on by a malicious communist government in China. However, I have to wonder if the threat has not reached too hot a level as TikTok is now requiring iOS users to provide their passwords in order to view content.

Do not, under any circumstances, give your personal passwords - let alone passwords to your phone and cloud data - to anyone or anything, especially not fronts for the Chinese Communist Party! If you did give your password away, change it immediately. If you use the same password for multiple accounts, I STRONGLY recommend taking time this New Years weekend to download a password manager like Enpass, run a password audit, and begin the process of changing all of your old passwords.

There is some hope. It turns out the boiling frog metaphor is not true. The frog WILL actually jump out of a pot of water before it gets too hot (25C to be specific).

The frog has an ounce of common sense, after all.

Do Americans on TikTok have the same amount of common sense? We'll soon find out.