I can’t believe that half of my feed is TikTok… again.
Why do we keep having this conversation about somehow separating TikTok from China when that doesn’t do anything. The problem is international data flow and the data flow problem will persist regardless of who owns the app.


I could go on a long rant about why all data ends up in China anyway (if China wants it). But in short: it’s because we have an entire shadow economy of user-data-as-currency that is worldwide and China—like everyone else—can just buy your user data off the open market.

We could talk about how these systems are already filled with sketchy arbitrage and outright, already illegal, fraud. If we had actual law enforcement against internet scams these platforms would not be a problem. If we had actual data privacy laws in place, it would not be a problem. Until that comes around, nothing TikTok is doing that helps the Chinese government can’t be accomplished by connecting an ad to any other app.


This TikTok BS is all very dumb, and possibly racist.
It’s also an incredible excuse to avoid doing the work of passing a federal privacy law that, if properly put together, would absolutly solve this problem on TikTok—and everywhere else.
Shoshana Wodinsky already wrote the best possible article on this situation back the last time we talked about TikTok ownership and national security.
So you should just go and read that. Really that’s the be all and end all of this discussion.
But just in case you need further proof:
I don’t want to have these conversations anymore. They’re bad conversations. They are not, in any way, progress. I don’t care about what individual apps are doing unless dealing with it is going to set a legal precedent that applies to all apps and this definitely doesn’t do that. It might even be bad all on its own. I dunno. I have to reiterate: this is the wrong conversation to have.