Banning TikTok Won't Make Us Safe
Hi friends --
You may have noticed that Washington D.C. is in a frenzy about TikTok -- proposing to ban it, force it to sell or submit to state control.
In my latest piece for New York Times Opinion, I argue that all the tech giants that prey on Americans’ data should get the same scrutiny and enforced accountability that is being proposed for TikTok. After all, Congress has failed to pass even the most basic comprehensive privacy legislation to protect our data from being misused by all the tech companies that collect and mine it.
And if you look at the evidence, it is clear that everything TikTok is being accused of is also true of other tech platforms.
Claim 1: TikTok's app gobbles up too much data from users' phones. Verdict: True, but so do most apps in our unregulated app marketplace.
Claim 2: TikTok could use its algorithm to promote Chinese propaganda or suppress dissent. Verdict: True, but the worst such abuses we've seen have been Facebook's platform being uses to spread Russian misinformation, abet a genocide in Myanmar and enable an insurrection in the U.S.
Claim 3: TikTok has insecure systems that could expose U.S. data to Chinese employees. Verdict: True, but internal data risks have dogged all the Big Tech platforms. Google has fired dozens of employees for data misuse. A Twitter engineer was convicted of using his access to spy on Saudi dissidents.
TikTok has proposed a plan to put its US operations under state control, with a subsidiary that would be overseen by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States. Meanwhile, the Biden Administration has reportedly pushed for TikTok to sell to a US company or be banned entirely.
None of these options solve the problems that are being alleged. If China wants data about US residents, it can easily buy it from the unregulated data broker market. If it wants to push propaganda, it can do so across many tech platforms.
A better solution would be for the U.S. to follow the lead of most other nations and -- at the very least -- pass a comprehensive data privacy law to set minimum standards for what is allowable with our data.
Thanks for reading. I'll be sending these out about once a month as my New York Times pieces publish, and I hope to be sending out some updates on my new projects later this year, too.
Best
Julia