TikTok
Yesterday the US Supreme Court unanimously upheld a law that bans TikTok in the United States (unless its parent, ByteDance, sells the platform by tomorrow).
📰 News coverage:
Supreme Court Backs Law Requiring TikTok to Be Sold or Banned (New York Times, gift link)
Supreme Court Upholds TikTok Shutdown (WSJ, gift link)
How did we get here? The AP has a helpful recap.
In 2020, the president issued an executive order, which noted:
Specifically, the spread in the United States of mobile applications developed and owned by companies in the People’s Republic of China (China) continues to threaten the national security, foreign policy, and economy of the United States. At this time, action must be taken to address the threat posed by one mobile application in particular, TikTok.
TikTok, a video-sharing mobile application owned by the Chinese company ByteDance Ltd., has reportedly been downloaded over 175 million times in the United States and over one billion times globally. TikTok automatically captures vast swaths of information from its users, including Internet and other network activity information such as location data and browsing and search histories. This data collection threatens to allow the Chinese Communist Party access to Americans’ personal and proprietary information — potentially allowing China to track the locations of Federal employees and contractors, build dossiers of personal information for blackmail, and conduct corporate espionage.
TikTok also reportedly censors content that the Chinese Communist Party deems politically sensitive, such as content concerning protests in Hong Kong and China’s treatment of Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities. This mobile application may also be used for disinformation campaigns that benefit the Chinese Communist Party, such as when TikTok videos spread debunked conspiracy theories about the origins of the 2019 Novel Coronavirus.
These risks are real. The Department of Homeland Security, Transportation Security Administration, and the United States Armed Forces have already banned the use of TikTok on Federal Government phones. The Government of India recently banned the use of TikTok and other Chinese mobile applications throughout the country; in a statement, India’s Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology asserted that they were “stealing and surreptitiously transmitting users’ data in an unauthorized manner to servers which have locations outside India.” American companies and organizations have begun banning TikTok on their devices. The United States must take aggressive action against the owners of TikTok to protect our national security.
…
DONALD J. TRUMP
THE WHITE HOUSE,
August 6, 2020.
In the ensuing years, there has been a lot of back and forth. I haven’t followed every bit of the storyline. Microsoft explored purchasing TikTok (never did), Oracle was going to manage TikTok’s user data in the US, TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew got grilled on Capitol Hill, and Congress passed a bill to ban TikTok citing national security concerns.
Now, it would seem, the saga is wrapping up as people post their farewells to TikTok.
📰 News coverage:
TikTok says it will ‘go dark’ unless it gets clarity from Biden following Supreme Court ruling (AP)
TikTok says it will 'go dark' on Sunday without US government action (BBC)
TikTok to ‘Go Dark’ on Sunday for Its 170 Million American Users (New York Times)
But there’s also this:
📰 News coverage:
TikTok to sponsor Trump inauguration party (Politico)
TikTok CEO to attend Trump inauguration as app’s ban looms (Axios)
Politics isn’t my beat so I’ll let someone else read those tea leaves.
Privacy
While national security is important, what continues to strike me is the lack of meaningful discussion around protecting personal privacy in the United States.
I recall a WSJ article from 2023:
One issue is data collection. Another is access. The WSJ article noted:
Former TikTok employees who have worked elsewhere in the tech industry say the dashboard that provided access to view the data was accessible to more workers than is common at other tech platforms. Employees in China also had access to the data, and at times controlled the permissions for who could view the information, according to the former employees.
The issue is this:
No comprehensive U.S. privacy law regulates the practice of collecting sensitive data. Seven states have passed privacy laws, including some that require companies to protect certain categories of sensitive data, including gender and sexual identity. [emphasis added]
Instead, the self-described “leading self–regulatory association” has a policy:
The Network Advertising Initiative, an industry trade group that represents many players in the digital advertising technology industry, has since 2015 forbidden members from targeting people based on inferred LGBT identity. The trade group feared that targeted advertising had the power to inadvertently out a young person to their parents or peers on shared computers.
Leigh Freund, chief executive officer of the group, said members “have been willing to forego revenue opportunities for tailored ads to LGBTQ audiences” to avoid potentially outing people.
It’s great that an industry trade group is concerned about potentially outing a young person to their parents. At a larger level, I would argue it would be even better if the US finally created a meaningful privacy framework like Europe has done with its General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).1 The Electronic Frontier Foundation highlights what comprehensive data privacy legislation would look like.
From the TokTok privacy policy:
By posting User Content to or through the Services, you waive any rights to prior inspection or approval of any marketing or promotional materials related to such User Content. You also waive any and all rights of privacy, publicity, or any other rights of a similar nature in connection with your User Content, or any portion thereof. [emphasis added]
It’s not just TikTok, of course. As
wrote this week in :There is of course a certain irony in discussing the threat of interference in American society via the acquisition and manipulation of private data as if it were a fresh and foreign concept. It was a little less than seven years ago, after all, that the general public learned (over two years after Facebook discovered it and kept it to themselves) that the firm Cambridge Analytica had obtained the private data of millions of Facebook users and — waste not want not — with that data created voter profiles to aid the efforts of the Republican presidential campaign (beginning not with Donald Trump but with eventual — and perennial — loser Ted Cruz). (source)
Oh, and then there’s also this from last month:
📋Here are recommendations from the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA).
TikTok one last time
Finally, if you’d like to look back or forward, here are a few more curated links:
📰 News & Commentary:
A Big, Bold TikTok Ban (New York Times, gift link)
Love, Hate or Fear It, TikTok Has Changed America (New York Times, gift link)
What if No One Misses TikTok? (New York Times)
Is the TikTok Ban a Chance to Rethink the Whole Internet? (The New Yorker)
How are you thinking about this moment?
Wherever you are, I hope you have a wonderful weekend. May our best days be in front of us.
Be well,
-Bryce