TikTok Ban Does Nothing to Protect Our Privacy Rights
Grandstanding is great for re-election, but not for passing bi-partisan legislation to protect your privacy.
Regardless of where you stand on the merits the legislation calling for the divesture of TikTok, we need to realize the TikTok bill (Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act) represents another expansion of power in our central government that they will never willingly return. Hypocritically, it makes the operating procedures of our markets look like the authoritarian regimes we criticize. Ultimately, it will monopolize the market of social media into fewer hands when the parent company Meta already owns five out of the top seven brands. It is an extremely fair contrast to make that China has far more onerous requirements for operating within their country, but at the crux of the proponents of the TikTok ban’s argument lies “National Security” concerns which are not addressed by targeting a single company. TikTok may be a foreign state-owned platform where millennials and younger persons go for their news, but banning it does not moderate the foreign state-backed troll farms on every social media platform poisoning our discourse nor does it improve consumer privacy protections against corporations domestic or foreign.
How is manipulating your opinion on how to vote that much different from manipulating your opinion on what to buy? Do you find the omnipotent online advertisements of what you spoke about earlier in the day intrusive or has the apathy towards their total ubiquitousness set in? Most likely the latter, but that is part of the long term strategy of lobbyists. In other parts of the world, legislation was passed to enact consumer privacy protections. The European Union passed the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) which grants individuals various rights, including
the right to access their data,
the right to rectification,
the right to erasure (also known as the "right to be forgotten"),
the right to data portability, and
the right to object to processing.
With steep penalties for non-compliance, including fines of up to €20 million or 4% of global annual turnover (whichever is higher), companies observe a precautionary principle and limit data collection. Simultaneously, whenever visiting a website in the EU, that familiar annoying little opt-out agreement that pop us there allows the user to more easily completely reject any kind of tracking. While in the US, we have the California Consumer Privacy Act (CPPA) that causes all US websites to have the cookies disclaimer, you will notice the insidious option in the US that makes you accept “essential cookies” and you are not able to opt-out entirely without a time consuming explicit request. Simply put, we do not have the right to be forgotten.
With the penalties small enough to be considered costs of doing business rather than legal consequences, companies in the US have little to fear. The CCPA seems toothless when it only allows for enforcement by the California Attorney General for citizens of California and only having penalties for violations of up to $2,500 per unintentional violation and up to $7,500 per intentional violation. Lacking any federal laws in the US, the scope of the CCPA law means much of the US citizenry does not have any privacy protections.
Perhaps it is because our memories are diminished and the news cycles ever shorter, but some legislators seem to not realize the TikTok ban would also essentially be a handout to the company caught up in the Cambridge Analytica scandal.
VIDEO: “The Facebook Protection Act” as referred to jokingly by Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky.
Let’s think carefully before handing more power to the central government and ask our elected officials why they can move so speedily on this single-issue legislation that is only 12 pages long when so many other pressing issues and other bills become 1,000+ pages while languishing for months. The reason TikTok is being banned is because passing actual US privacy protections would stymie unconstitutional and warrantless data collection on Americans.