Responding to a lawsuit from video-sharing platform TikTok, the US Justice Department argued that China could order the company to manipulate TikTok’s algorithm and expand Beijing’s “malign influence.”
The US Justice Department defended a law that aims to either ban TikTok or force it to divest its assets in the US after the social media company filed a lawsuit against the legislation.
Under the law, the social media platform will have to find a non-Chinese buyer or face a ban in the US by January 19, 2025.
The Chinese-based TikTok is challenging the law before a US appeals court.
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You don’t give an authoritarian government with a freedom index of 9 access to international user data.
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And we can reject it. Fuck the CCP (1st), but also fuck Google, Amazon, Apple next.
You’re talking past the other guys point. We all agree that the CCP sucks, but just going after tiktok doesn’t solve the problem when they can just buy user data from a broker. You need to go after all surveillance adtech if you want to keep entities like the CCP from buying that data anyway.
Tiktok isn’t special here, just about every online advertiser will run whatever campaign you want as long as you pay their prices so you have to go after all of them to resolve the issue. Tiktok has CPC ties, yes, but they’re just the tip of the iceberg if you’re serious about the national security risk of adtech.
Edit: if you really want to go after manipulation of public sentiment you’ll also need to mandate disclosure and auditing of social media feed and advertising algorithms to a regulatory agency with extremely heavy fines (say X million $/day) for violators. That’s about the only way you can actually stop the sort of behavior the CCP is engaging in on tiktok.
Adtech itself is an entirely bigger ball of wax, if you want to reduce adtech’s social influence you’re going to have to take ownership of private user data out of the hands of advertisers and give it back to people themselves.
I agree. But first thing first
You really think people are going to come back and talk about the privacy problem of US companies without this stuff in the news? People need to push for this now, otherwise they’re going to fall back into the rut of the status quo. This should raise eyebrows that they’re finally doing something about one company when it’s US companies that brought us a shit stain like Trump into the presidency.
A chinese owned company, by chinese law, is the CCP’s bitch. An american owned company, by contrast, at least has the chance to refuse government requests, not that they always do.
I thought Snowden already made it pretty obvious that US companies don’t. Basically the only thing you can do as a US company is try to obfuscate your data with encryption so not even you can read it. That’s why some VPN companies advertise about not keeping laws, so they have nothing to turn over when the feds come a-knocking.
The other problem is that you don’t even need official government power to get data from US companies. A lot of these companies will sell their data on you to make a quick buck, anyway.
Unless they get subpoenad by a district court and the C suite is willing to go to jail for not disclosing it.
Also the US govt already has asked for built-in backdoors to iPhones and the like. They even have highly complex de-anonymization algorithms for data that almost every American with a credit card is giving to their “private” bank so we can have FICO credit scores and venmo.
The private ownership isn’t doing shit for our data protections.