Comment on Senate passes TikTok ban bill, sending it to Biden, who has already committed to signing it
AmbiguousProps@lemmy.today 5 months agoI mean, you are correct that a complete ban is unpopular. But I don’t think that’s the exclusive reason the forced sale was provided as an option. TikTok (and the data on it) is super valuable. Someone will most likely buy it, and the data collection and foreign sale (or theft) will continue.
China is a threat, and so are the data brokers. This benefits US-based data brokers, but does it really benefit the individual citizen? I personally don’t think so, at least not from a data collection and personal privacy perspective.
WhatsThePoint@lemmy.world 5 months ago
No doubt the sale would monetarily benefit someone, but since Byte Dance didn’t comply with the original work around, I don’t see a much better solution to remove the CCP’s influence on Byte Dance and the app. It’s definitely not as black and white as much of the discourse I’ve seen. I appreciate discussing it with you and I see many of your points. Data brokers are indeed out of control. I hope the language in the bill banning data brokers from selling to foreign adversaries is somehow helpful in getting the ball rolling on deeper limits to data mining. Precedents being set to limit them could be a good first step.