They can already buy it. They are already getting it! Look at ALL of the latest televisions on the market - they require you to accept user agreements to basically suck the life out of you. They listen, report what you watch, how long you watch it, when you change channels, it is really unbelievable. And cars are doing it too! How fast you drive, what you are saying. All of the Google and Apple Home Pods, Amazon’s Alexa products. It is a joke. Except it is not! I think it is a competition for information between big companies backed by big governments.

I thought Snowden already made it pretty obvious that US companies don’t. Basically the only thing you can do as a US company is try to obfuscate your data with encryption so not even you can read it. That’s why some VPN companies advertise about not keeping laws, so they have nothing to turn over when the feds come a-knocking.

The other problem is that you don’t even need official government power to get data from US companies. A lot of these companies will sell their data on you to make a quick buck, anyway.

Unless they get subpoenad by a district court and the C suite is willing to go to jail for not disclosing it.

Also the US govt already has asked for built-in backdoors to iPhones and the like. They even have highly complex de-anonymization algorithms for data that almost every American with a credit card is giving to their “private” bank so we can have FICO credit scores and venmo.

The private ownership isn’t doing shit for our data protections.

Imagine how much easier it will be to influence the next generation of US politicians who have no privacy whatsoever, and whose thought patterns are well documented.

We’re already dealing with the aftermath of this with US Corps evidenced by the destruction of unions and workers rights if you replace “privacy” with “education.” Why is privacy important

One of the biggest lies I see is this foreign adversary being a bigger threat than the endless local adversaries (capitalists) that are actually destroying this country. The Chinese didn’t destroy the healthcare industry, nor rail, energy, telecommunications, airline, financial industries. They have not suppressed the regulating of the internet, religion in politics, nor have they aided to the degrading of education, social security, disability support, or our laws against bribing politicians.

US companies have seen similar criticism, antitrust suits, and billions in fines.

Nah, they haven’t, otherwise we’d have laws (regulations) around them that would prevent them from, say, in the tech industry, distributing our data.

…there is a big difference between selling bits of redacted data to ad companies, and providing raw database access to a foreign adversary with malicious intent.

We know of techniques to pull out excess data from claimed “anonymized” datasets. Can you prove this data is redacted more effectively than that? Can you prove that they are only selling to ad companies? Can you prove it’s more malicious intent?

The answer is no, because we already avoided regulating this industry due to internal malicious actors.

Facebook, YouTube and other social media platforms are used for exactly the same purpose, all you need to do as an adversary is place an ad buy and you’re plopped right into user feeds.

You’ve got the right idea that adtech is a national security risk and should be treated as such but the solution can’t stop at just “tiktok and the CCP bad” - the solution needs to be a whole lot bigger.

TikTok is not even available in China

I think that’s the biggest thing here that defenders of TikTok need to understand. The Chinese think it’s worth the West having but not worth them having it. What should that tell people about their purposes?