China is making territorial claims against every single one of its neighbors, not just Taiwan. It's also, just like Russia, a threat in other ways, e.g. through hacking, misinformation, espionage, market manipulation, etc.
For both reasons. The national security concerns are real. Try taking the app apart with some standard tools and you'll quickly discover that it shares more in common with malware than with any other social media applications.
Then there's the rampant misinformation from the Chinese state, the fact that non-Chinese employees of Bytedance do not have any access to any of TikTok's underlying tech (they'll fly in technicians from China instead of letting any outsider look at anything), the enormous and very telling difference between TikTok for the world and the Chinese alternative, etc. pp.
Very interesting. Lots of news websites are operating on a very similar principle, with the user having to either accept all cookies or pay for an expensive subscription that allows them to opt out of tracking cookies. I've always thought that this couldn't possibly be legal.
You can make the camera blind with a sticker or one of those slidey cover things, although it's much more annoying since that fad of cut outs for cameras has started.
Also, like I said in the other comment, my phone isn't attached to my chest like a body cam and constantly in a position to film everything in the room. If the NSA wants to see my feet, the ceiling or my face, they are free to do so.
My mid-range 2014 laptop has this little. This was considered the minimum for a productivity-oriented device a decade ago.
Much to my annoyance, it's also one of the first (edit: modern) laptops with non-upgradeable RAM, which I didn't know beforehand. It's still usable, but I'm using Firefox instead of Chrome (so 50 tabs are no issue) and it's never been my primary device.