Even Former NSA Lawyers Don’t Think A TikTok Ban Fixes The Actual Problem
We've mentioned more than a few times how the great moral panic over TikTok is a hollow performance by unserious people who have little actual interest in consumer privacy. Folks like the FCC's Brendan Carr, who've spent years opposing funding privacy regulators or passing a meaningful Internet privacy law, yet now suffer repeated, performative embolisms when TikTok exploits a reality they helped create.
Much of the U.S. press coverage of the TikTok issue has been hollow, nationalistic, and painfully lacking this context. That interestingly started to change a little bit last week, with an opinion piece in the New York Times by Glenn S. Gerstell, former general counsel at the NSA (of all people), who reiterates a point I've found has been repeatedly lost in most press coverage. Namely:
[a TikTok ban] would sidestep a broader problem - our nation's overall failure to address concerns over the huge amount of personal data collected in our digital lives, especially when that data could be used by foreign adversaries....if it wanted to collect information on Americans, China could sidestep a ban and legally, though with a little more effort, purchase almost limitless amounts of information from data brokers who stockpile information about our online activities.
The policymakers currently the most vocal about TikTok created this environment they're pretending to be upset about.
They opposed giving privacy regulators at the FTC the funds, staff, or authority to adequately police companies that play fast and loose with sensitive consumer data. They repeatedly fought against absolutely any privacy law for the Internet era that would in absolutely any way inconvenience U.S. telecoms, app makers, and data brokers.
The end result: a barely regulated data-hoovering market that gobbles up and monetizes everything from your daily movement habits to a granular snapshot of your every online decision down to the millisecond. Foreign intelligence agencies can easily cobble together vast profiles on U.S. consumers for very little money, making a TikTok ban kind of like shooting a single bull in a stampede.
(An aside: the GOP folks hyperventilating about TikTok's potential for propaganda and influence also couldn't care less about our own domestic propaganda system built over decades by the GOP across AM radio, local broadcast news, cable TV news, and the Internet. That disinformation bullhorn is directly radicalizing Americans, fomenting violence, chipping away at the cornerstones of democracy, and undermining public health advice in a way that's far more concrete than TikTok, yet we've seen little real media reform.)
The TikTok moral panic is, in reality, a distraction from our profound failures on consumer protection and privacy legislation. The real path forward is meaningful privacy legislation and actual, meaningful penalties for companies that routinely play fast and loose with consumer data, both foreign and domestic:
The optimal way forward would be for Congress to pass a law governing the collection and misuse of online personal and commercial data that would apply not only to current apps such as TikTok but also to future digital apps (foreign owned or not) posing security or privacy concerns.
U.S. corporations very much don't want a reality where consumers are empowered and there are meaningful, well-considered penalties for corporations (and executives) that repeatedly violate consumer privacy, because it will cost them billions. Corruption has, quite effectively, prevented this reality from materializing despite several decades of efforts, and advice from activists and experts alike.
If we're going to have an adult conversation about TikTok, we need to discuss how corruption first stifled meaningful privacy reform and consumer protection, as well as how that corruption is easily exploitable by both foreign governments and our own. Simply hyperventilating about TikTok, and pretending that banning a single popular app fixes any of this, is grade school bullshit dressed up as adult conversation.