from the big-dumb-performance dept
Pretending that you’re actually fixing the world’s privacy and national security issues by banning TikTok is just so very hot right now. Numerous states have passed new rules banning TikTok on government employee devices. And Marco Rubio has proposed a federal law that would ban TikTok unless ByteDance is willing to sell the popular app to an American company (presumably GOP-aligned Oracle).
Joining the festivities is University of Oklahoma, which this week announced its own ban of TikTok on any and all campus devices and networks. The university vaguely waves in the direction of “ongoing national and cybersecurity concerns with the TikTok application,” but doesn’t actually explain what the ban is supposed to accomplish:
In compliance with the Governor’s Executive Order 2022-33, effective immediately, no University employee or student shall access the TikTok application or website on University-owned or operated devices, including OU wired and wireless networks. As a result of the Executive Order, access to the TikTok platform will be blocked and cannot be accessed from the campus network. University-administered TikTok accounts must be deleted and alternate social media platforms utilized in their place.
As with the other bans, this is mostly a dumb performance by people who don’t actually care about user privacy. The app will continue to be used on employee and student personal phones, meaning nothing actually changes outside of the fact that students and employees won’t be able to access the site when connected to campus Wi-Fi. The net gain of such a ban is fairly negligible.
Yes, there have been concerns about TikTok and ByteDance sharing user data with the Chinese government. But singularly focusing on TikTok as the root of all evil in a reality where most peoples’ phones are jam-packed with services and apps from around the world that are every bit as privacy intrusive as TikTok.
The last five years have shown there’s simply no limit of app-makers, telecoms, hardware companies, services, and data brokers that hoover up every last bit of data from your phone, from how many milliseconds you spent on a website, to the exact route you take to work each morning.
Those companies then routinely do a terrible job securing that data, often hiding under the false claim that “anonymizing” it (a meaningless term) magically protects your identity from any shenanigans. As such, it’s pretty easy for the Chinese government (or any other government) to buy access to vast troves of data to build detailed profiles on American consumers, even if you ban TikTok.
Which is why singularly focusing on TikTok alone is so stupid. Most of the Republicans suffering embolisms about TikTok have opposed absolutely any guardrails on consumer data collection and monetization. They’ve opposed even a basic new privacy law for the Internet era. They oppose staffing and funding FTC privacy regulators. They oppose accountability of any kind for most executives.
These policymakers literally created the zero accountability environment that allows TikTok (and everybody else) to violate consumer trust. Banning only TikTok doesn’t fix it. Forcing TikTok to partner with Oracle (a company with its own dodgy history of privacy abuses) doesn’t fix it. Forcing students to browse TikTok on private cellular networks (where consumer tracking is also rampant) doesn’t fix it.
I’d go so far as to argue these bans aren’t even about protecting consumers from TikTok privacy abuses. It’s mostly about pretending to a xenophobic GOP base that the GOP is being “tough on China.” While simultaneously laying the groundwork to force ByteDance to sell TikTok to some GOP-allied company, likely Facebook, Oracle, or Walmart (recall this was Trump’s cronyistic plan all along).
Even the Biden administration’s plan also apparently involves having Oracle do a lot of the heavy lifting, and putting a former s
Because let’s be honest: most of these folks are perfectly fine with rampant privacy abuses as long as it’s U.S. companies profiting off of it and the US government doing the surveillance. Actual consumer privacy doesn’t really enter into it.
Yet when I read mainstream media coverage of these TikTok bans, absolutely none of this context is even mentioned. At no point are readers informed that this is just a bad faith performance. If U.S. policymakers actually cared about privacy, we’d properly fund the FTC. We’d pass a privacy law. We’d embrace real penalties for companies and executives that fail to secure user data.
We’re not doing any of that. Instead, GOP policymakers (like FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr) are putting on a zero-calorie performance for cable news, declaring mission accomplished with a dumb, constipated look on their face.
Filed Under: chinese government, consumers, data brokers, privacy, security, surveillance, tiktok ban, wireless
Companies: tiktok, university of oklahoma
Source link
