from the yeah-you’re-not-actually-helping dept
For many years, U.S. policymakers have completely refused to assist any significant privateness protections for shoppers. They opposed any new Web privateness legal guidelines, nevertheless simple. They opposed privacy rules for broadband ISPs. Additionally they fought tooth and nail to make sure the nation’s high privateness enforcement company, the FTC, lacked the authority, staff, funds, or assets to truly do its job.
This greed-centric apathy created a wild west knowledge monetization trade throughout telecom, app makers, {hardware} distributors, and data brokers that sees little actual accountability, in flip leading to simply an limitless parade of scams, hacks, breaches, and different privateness and safety violations. You possibly can’t go every week with out a main firm falling flat on its face on this entrance.
The identical policymakers that created this setting at the moment are freaking out as a result of one app and one app solely, TikTok, has taken full benefit of the lax privateness and safety setting these policymakers straight created.
Hyperventilating about TikTok has turn into one of many GOP’s insurance policies du jour, gifting a rotating crop of performative GOP politicians (like the FCC’s Brendan Carr) repeated TV appearances. Final month, Texas Governor Greg Abbott sent out a missive to state leaders urging state organizations to ban the app, claiming the dastardly Chinese language would possibly use it to spy on or flip your children into communists.
The College Of Texas At Austin has shortly fallen into compliance with Abbott’s performative request, asserting that students will no longer be able to access the TikTok domain while using the college network:
So for one, college students will merely have to show off Wi-Fi and use mobile to entry TikTok. There are in all probability additionally going to be different technical workarounds to get across the ban, relying on how sloppily it’s applied. There’s additionally little proof to recommend TikTok poses an distinctive menace to UT Austin’s community past that of quite a few, allowed worldwide apps and providers, making this all form of dumb and annoying.
Once more, TikTok’s potential privateness dangers are just one symptom of a a lot greater downside: our failure to implement any significant privateness requirements or oversight of the a number of, worldwide, data-hoovering industries that over-collect delicate person knowledge then monetize the hell out of it. And we don’t do something about this as a result of for many years our high precedence has been to earn cash. At any price.
So sure, you’ve banned TikTok on the office or campus, congratulations. The issue: your college students’ and workers’ telephones are nonetheless stuffed with quite a few apps, lots of them (gasp) of doubtful worldwide origin, which might be hoovering up and monetizing huge troves of delicate monetary, shopping, location, and different datasets, then doing a comically horrible job securing that knowledge or making it actually nameless.
That knowledge is touring over the networks of telecom operators who’ve been repeatedly proven to have little serious interest in protecting user security, an issue that’s particularly pronounced for women post-Roe.
So once more, on the danger of being redundant, fixating completely on TikTok is silly and myopic. Banning TikTok, however doing completely nothing to deal with the underlying downside that created TikTok’s potential abuse of person knowledge, is a dumb efficiency. And it’s typically been a dumb efficiency by policymakers (like Abbott) with a protracted observe document of not really caring about client privateness and safety.
The fashionable GOP (and a sizeable chunk of the DNC) doesn’t need privateness legal guidelines, even competently crafted ones. They don’t need oversight of corporations that site visitors in delicate person knowledge. They don’t need accountability for executives whose corporations routinely fail to safe that knowledge. And so they don’t need competent, totally staffed and funded privateness regulators with the authority to do something about any of this.
What do they need? Cash and energy, foolish. They need to agitate a xenophobic base and faux they’re doing one thing significant about China. However extra probably, they need to power Bytedance to in the end offload TikTok to GOP-friendly U.S. enterprise mates (say Oracle, Walmart or Fb). And so they need to do it whereas the press un-skeptically portrays them as critical privateness reformers.
Filed Underneath: apps, austin, bans, china, college, ftc, privacy, privacy law, social media, surveillance
Firms: tiktok, ut austin
