House panel unanimously approves bill that could ban TikTok | CNN Business
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House lawmakers voted to advance a bill that would ban TikTok from US app stores unless the social media platform’s parent, ByteDance, divests the company.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/12876226

The measure that sailed unanimously through the House Energy and Commerce Committee would prohibit TikTok from US app stores unless the social media platform — used by roughly 170 million Americans — is quickly spun off from its China-linked parent company, ByteDance.

US officials have cited the widespread commercial availability of US citizens’ data as another source of national security risk. The US government and other domestic law enforcement agencies are also known to have purchased US citizens’ data from commercial data brokers.

  • CeeBee@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    4 months ago

    Facebook being sued for giving data to Chinese companies with tighter relationships to the CCP than Bytedance is literally headline news right now.

    I looked it up, and you’re right that there’s an issue there. But that’s an issue with an American owned company giving data to an adversarial country (two actually, China and Russia). It’s 100% absurd and shouldn’t be allowed with heavy penalties. But that’s still a different issue than the one we’re talking about.

    The fact is you’re bending over backwards to defend an unconstitutional law with unprecedented powers

    Two things: I’m not American, and it’s not unconstitutional anyways. There’s nothing in the bill that says no one is allowed to use it. And the first and preferred option of the bill is to sell ownership of TikTok to an American firm, essentially to divorce control and influence of China from the largely American userbase. If, and only if, the transfer of ownership is not possible then the app is to be delisted from all app stores.

    That means that it’s still possible for existing users to use the app and it’s still possible to install the app through official means without either thing being illegal.

    https://www.reuters.com/technology/proposed-us-tiktok-ban-not-fair-chinas-foreign-ministry-says-2024-03-14/

    Another interesting thing is that the Chinese Foreign Ministry has said it will protect its rights and national security interests (paraphrased). What on earth does TikTok, an app that’s Chinese owned and banned in the very country that owns it, have to do with Chinese National security?

    That a very telling thing to say.

    Make it illegal on pain of ban to give, or sell American data to a sensitive country; or otherwise cause American data in your company’s control to come into their possession.

    I can agree with this, but the TikTok bill has nothing to do with xenophobia. If China wasn’t an adversarial country actively bullying and threatening other countries with war and annihilation then it wouldn’t be an issue.

    In fact, let’s go a step further and implement sweeping data protection laws so that our data can’t be sold for any reason.

    The question of what’s the difference isn’t some cute gotcha thing.

    No, it’s not a “cute gotcha thing”. It’s pointing out the difference between passive data collection and active control to influence content.

    And you need to look up targeted advertising.

    I know very well what it is. I work in the tech sector (IT/programming) adjacent to cyber security.

    It’s literally creating a custom algorithm on everything from Reddit to Facebook to Google Search. Which is why it was used by the Russians to impact our 2016 elections via Facebook.

    Right, so if you think targeted advertising is bad when company A sells data to company B, who then builds algorithms to target people for political party C, imagine how bad it is when that entire process is vertically integrated and directly controlled by a foreign adversary. And to add to that, we’re not even just dealing with ads anymore, we’re dealing with grassroots-like influencer content with talking points from the CCP.

    You gave me an example of one really bad thing and said it’s the same thing as a different and extremely bad thing.

    Both of them are bad need to be addressed. But with TikTok being run by a CCP-influenced company in a country that laughs at American laws, there’s little recourse to deal with it.