Instead of myopically fixating on TikTok, the US should pass a real privacy law to regulate data brokers who sell info on US citizens to anyone, including China
TechdirtKarl Bode
Context & Ripple Effects
This piece ran at the peak of Washington's TikTok moment: days before Shou Zi Chew's congressional testimony, with TikTok touting 150M US monthly users and the White House weighing a draft bipartisan bill to give itself new legal powers over apps it deems risky. Techdirt's argument cuts against that frame: the real exposure isn't one Chinese-owned app but an open market of US data brokers willing to sell Americans' information to anyone, China included.
The argument aged into policy. A year later, the House passed a bill barring data brokers from selling personal data on Americans to China, Russia, and other 'foreign adversaries' — a narrow version of exactly the broker-focused regulation this piece called for, arriving alongside, not instead of, the push to ban or force a sale of TikTok.
First-order effects
If enacted as written, comprehensive privacy regulation would directly hit the data broker industry's business model — cutting off the legal channel through which information on US citizens reaches buyers including China.
For TikTok, a broad data law would reframe its own case: the company's access to American data would be treated as one instance of a systemic problem rather than a unique threat justifying divestiture.
Second-order effects
Adtech and analytics firms built on reselling personal data would face compliance costs and lost foreign-revenue channels, pushing consolidation among brokers able to absorb the regulatory burden.
Legislators who back only the adversary-targeted House bill preserve most of the domestic broker market — meaning the political fight shifts to whether the narrower foreign-adversary framing becomes the ceiling for reform.
Third-order effects
If the pattern holds, US data governance moves from app-by-app bans toward sector-wide rules on who may buy and sell citizen data — with enforcement aimed at the intermediary market rather than individual platforms' ownership.
The unresolved gap between a foreign-adversaries-only bill and full privacy regulation leaves the core question open: whether Congress treats data brokerage as a national-security issue or a consumer-rights issue.
The trend: US policy on data and foreign adversaries is shifting from singling out TikTok toward regulating the data broker market itself — though so far only along geopolitical, not privacy-first, lines.
Ban TikTok? Most of the national security allegations against TikTok could just as easily be levied against the U.S. tech giants. So let's pass laws forcing all tech to serve us better. My latest for @nytopinion: https://www.nytimes.com/...
It would also set a dangerous precedent, which could encourage other nations to ban US tech, force US tech companies to sell assets or further force tech companies to comply with state censorship.
I'm also laughing that U.S. wants to ban TikTok because China and spying but lacks critical thought about the U.S. . . . Like Twitter knows exactly where I am, too. lol https://twitter.com/...
I get a lot of questions that I file under the heading “China whining”. They go “China is doing thing x that we don't like, how do we get them to stop?” The answer is nearly always: get your own house in order first. https://twitter.com/...
FB hired a consulting megafirm to astroturf letters to the editor at 100s of newspapers to hype up a TikTok moral panic. The goal? “Dream would be to get stories with headlines like ‘From dances to danger.’” It's targeted misinformation on a massive scale. https://www.washingtonp…
@runasand ... If the Chinese government is in your threat model, don't install TikTok on your device. Otherwise, your actual problem is surveillance capitalism.
Imagine if, after Russia invaded Ukraine, we said “No, kicking RT off US airwaves is too harsh, we should take a comprehensive look at foreign propaganda instead.” https://www.nytimes.com/...
The comparison is wrong. Exploiting vulnerabilities of platforms that you don't control to disseminate disinformation and deploying the whole machinery that you control to disseminate disinformation are two very different things. https://www.nytimes.com/... https://twitter.com/..…
Lot's of people are citing the (admittedly awful) breach of trust when TikTok staff in Beijing spied on western reporters last year. But US tech firms are also guilty of horrendous data issues that we largely ignore. This article is excellent: https://www.nytimes.com/... https://…
A better solution is to pass laws that set minimum standards for all of our tech companies — starting with a comprehensive data privacy law. As @evan_greer says let's stop “xenophobic showboating” and get serious about tech regulation.
the tiktok moral panic is a distraction from our corrupt failure to regulate the data broker space and pass even a rudimentary privacy law for the internet era: https://twitter.com/...