Forget A TikTok Ban, We Need To Regulate Data Brokers And Pass A Real Privacy Law

We've noted for a while now how the great TikTok moral panic of 2023 is largely a distraction. It's a distraction from the fact we've refused to meaningfully regulate dodgy data brokers, who traffic in everything from your daily movement habits to your mental health diagnosis. And it's a distraction from our corrupt failure to pass even a baseline privacy law for the internet era.

Most of the folks crying the loudest about TikTok were the same people that created the policy environment that lets TikTok (and anybody else) play fast and loose with consumer data in the first place.

And they don't want to actually fix the mess they created. U.S. corporations don't want to make slightly less money under a policy framework that empowers consumers, and the U.S. government doesn't want to have to get a warrant for all of that data it buys from brokers.

So you get what we have here: a big dumb performance in which we pretend that banning a single app actually does anything of use. After all, the Chinese, Russian, and U.S. governments can all just buy data from the poorly regulated data broker market. They don't need TikTok for surveillance and propaganda; they have plenty of data brokers and U.S. tech giants for that.

For a while it was actually kind of hard to see this viewpoint reflected in press coverage of the TikTok fracas, which initially leaned heavily toward patriotic fervor. Fortunately that's slowly starting to shift as calls for a ban begin to grow in earnest. Case in point: this New York Times piece by Julia Angwin that once again makes it clear that a TikTok ban isn't thinking broadly enough:

The even deeper problem is that putting TikTok under state control, banning it or selling it to a U.S. company wouldn't solve the threats that the app is said to pose. If China wants to obtain data about U.S. residents, it can still buy it from one of the many unregulated data brokers that sell granular information about all of us. If China wants to influence the American population with disinformation, it can spread lies across the Big Tech platforms just as easily as other nations can.

Angwin also points out something else I've found annoying about the myopic fixation on TikTok: we've never seen anything close to the same level of concern about the poorly-secured Chinese-made routers and internet of things devices Americans happily attach to their home networks with reckless abandon:

Not to mention that our national lack of focus on cybersecurity defenses means that it would be much more effective for China to just hack every home's Wi-Fi router - most of which are manufactured in China and are notoriously insecure - and obtain far more sensitive data than it can get from knowing which videos we swipe on TikTok.

None of this is to say that TikTok is some innocent daisy and doesn't pose a privacy risk.

Just that myopically fixating on the ban of one app - but doing nothing about the shitty policy environment that created the problem - is more political performance than meaningful solution. A performance that will annoy young voters, make it tougher on researchers and educators, uproot established community, face numerous First Amendment challenges, and not actually fix the core issues.

I still maintain that the most vocal supporters of a TikTok ban understand this perfectly well, and couldn't actually care less about consumer privacy or national security. They're eager to deflect blame for decades of failures on consumer protection, to pretend they're being tough on China," to agitate a xenophobic base, and if they're really lucky, to offload TikTok's ballooning billions in ad revenues to U.S.-based cronies (as Trump indicated was his intention from the start).