For several years we’ve noted how most of the calls to ban TikTok are bad faith bullshit made by a rotating crop of characters that not only couldn’t care less about consumer privacy, but are directly responsible for the privacy oversight vacuum TikTok (and everybody else) exploits.
Rubio’s Bill To Ban TikTok Is A Dumb Performance That Ignores The Real Problem
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For decades, U.S. politicians leaders utterly refused to support most meaningful privacy protections for consumers. They opposed any nationwide privacy law, however straightforward. They opposed privacy rules for broadband ISPs. They also fought tooth and nail to ensure the nation’s top privacy enforcement agency, the FTC, lacked the authority, staff, funds, or resources to actually do its job.
State TikTok Bans Are A Dumb Performance And Don’t Fix The Actual Underlying Problem
South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem put on a bit of a performance this week by announcing that the state would be banning government employees from installing TikTok on their phones. The effort, according to the Governor, is supposed to counter the national security risk of TikTok sharing consumer data with the Chinese government:
South Dakota Bans Government Employees From Using TikTok. The Countless Other Apps And Services That Hoover Up And Sell Sensitive Data Are Fine, Though
Related:
Oracle Cloud Data Center Locations
Oracle’s coziness with [US] government goes back to its founding
TikTok is such a danger, to national security, that US politicians have used it for campaigning, a tool of war propaganda, and former NATO employees work for them! Besides, TikTok stores user data with Oracle! This moral panic, over TikTok, is all about competition!
On November 17, Sheila Bair, the former Chair of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) during the financial crisis of 2008, went on CNBC to lament the lack of controls leading to the collapse of the crypto currency exchange, FTX. During the interview, Bair used the phrase “nobody looking behind the curtain.”
Sheila Bair, Former Chair of the FDIC, Is Now an “Organizer/Director” of a Cayman Islands Crypto Company that Got a U.S. National Bank Charter Last Year
Related (why no one was prosecuted for the financial crisis of 2007–2008 + another comment):
Read More »The fallout from the collapse of the crypto exchange FTX and its missing billions of dollars of customer funds has, finally, galvanized some members of Congress to push back against the swarms of crypto lobbyists whose activities are clearly impacting the safety and soundness of U.S. banks.
Evidence Grows that Crypto and Federally-Insured Banks Are a Combustible Mixture
US legislation that could open members of oil producing group OPEC+ to antitrust lawsuits has emerged as a possible tool to tackle high fuel prices, after the body said it would slash production despite lobbying by the Biden administration.
What is NOPEC, the US bill to pressure OPEC+?
White House rules out ban on natural gas exports this winter
“Americans for years enjoyed low price natural gas,” said Mark Wolfe, head of NEAD. “I am afraid that era is now over.”
Techbro Influencer Scott Galloway Heads To The Fainting Couch Over TikTok
This week, Galloway spent his time pushing the hot DC claim du jour: that TikTok is a profound menace to the planet and should be banned. He made the point at the Vox Code conference, then hopped over to Bill Maher’s HBO show to make a similar pronouncement:
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Actual evidence of TikTok being uniquely dangerous (especially any indication China has used or could use TikTok to bedazzle U.S. children) has been sorely lacking, but that doesn’t stop folks from heading to the fainting couches. This face fanning has been especially popular among a certain set of xenophobic DC politicians, and companies that don’t want to have to directly compete with China.
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The problem: the U.S. is a corrupt, xenophobic, superficial dumpster fire, so most of the “solutions” to this potential problem have been stupid and performative.
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Here’s the thing: you could ban TikTok immediately, and China could hoover up location, browsing, and behavior data from an ocean of completely unaccountable and hugely shady data brokers and middlemen. And they can do that because U.S. privacy and security standards are hot garbage. And in some instances, they’re hot garbage because of the same people now complaining about TikTok.
Both Carr and Cruz have extensive histories of undermining regulatory oversight and privacy rules at absolutely every opportunity, yet both are lauded by Galloway in a blog post for being heroic leaders in the “ban TikTok” crusades. Galloway’s a top pundit, yet somehow can’t see that Carr and Cruz are engaged in a zero-calorie xenophobic theatrics, and couldn’t care less about actual consumer privacy.
For literally thirty straight years, at absolutely every single turn, we prioritized making money over transparency or consumer privacy. As a result, consumer privacy protections are garbage, regulators are toothless, governments exploit the attention economy to avoid having to get warrants, and any idiot with a nickel can easily build gigantic, hugely detailed profiles about your everyday life without your consent.
“Banning TikTok” does nothing meaningful if you’re genuinely interested in meaningful surveillance and privacy reform. There will always be another TikTok. There’s an ocean of companies engaging in the same or worse behavior as TikTok because we’ve sanctioned this kind of guardrail-optional hyper-collection and monetization of consumer behavioral data at every step of the way.
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Many of the folks beating the “ban TikTok” drum may be well intentioned but just don’t really understand how broken the consumer privacy landscape is. They may not understand that this is a problem that’s exponentially more complicated than just what we do with a single app. Freaking out exclusively about a single app tells me you either don’t really understand the data-hoovering monster we’ve built, or don’t really care if anybody other than China exploits it (waves tiny American flag patriotically).
Many of the other folks calling for a TikTok ban aren’t operating in good faith. Facebook/Meta, for example, spends a lot of time spreading scary stories about TikTok in the press and DC because they want to crush a competitive threat they’ve been incapable of out-innovating. Similar, Politico’s owner is on the Netflix board and simply wants to curtail what he sees as a threat to market and advertising mindshare.
Then there’s just a ton of Silicon Valley folks who believe they inherently own and deserve the advertising market share TikTok occupies. And then of course there’s just a whole bunch of rank bigots who are mad because darker skinned human beings built a popular app, and try to hide this bigotry behind patriotic, pseudo national security concerns.
All of this converges to create a stupid, soupy mess that’s devoid of any actual fixes to any actual problems. Hyper surveillance and propaganda are very real problems that require a dizzying array of complicated fixes, including media and privacy policy reform, antitrust reform, tougher consumer protection standards, education reform, and a meaningful privacy law for the internet era.
Previously:
The NATO to TikTok Pipeline: Why is TikTok Employing So Many National Security Agents?
The White House is briefing TikTok stars about the war in Ukraine
Lions Not Sheep, which sells a series of T-shirts and other apparel with pro-Trump and conservative messages, agreed to pay a $211,335 fine to the Federal Trade Commission after it was busted removing “Made in China” tags and replacing them with ones claiming the items were made in the U.S.
Lions Not Sheep Busted for Faking ‘Made in USA’ Tags
As much as I’m enjoying the January 6th committee’s careful assembly of evidence proving former President Trump is a [douchebag]. I wasn’t seeing much in the way of a criminal offense until this week’s underreported story about how Trump used his “STOP THE STEAL” fundraising appeals to grift his supporters out of $250 million, none of which was, in fact, used to fight election fraud.
Ann Coulter: Trump swindles the deplorables
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But there was also this, from the New York Times account, which bears closer scrutiny:
Investigators went further on Monday, detailing how the Trump campaign and its Republican allies used claims of a rigged election that they knew were false to mislead small donors and raise as much as $250 million for an entity they called the Official Election Defense Fund, which top campaign aides testified never existed.
“Not only was there the big lie,” said Representative Zoe Lofgren, a California Democrat who played a key role in the hearing, “there was the big rip-off.”
Money ostensibly raised to “stop the steal” instead went to Mr. Trump and his allies, including, the investigation found, $1 million for a charitable foundation run by Mark Meadows, his chief of staff; $1 million to a political group run by several of his former staff members, including Stephen Miller, the architect of Mr. Trump’s immigration agenda; more than $200,000 to Trump hotels; and $5 million to Event Strategies Inc., which ran the Jan. 6 rally that preceded the Capitol riot.
Aides said Kimberly Guilfoyle, the girlfriend of Mr. Trump’s son Donald Trump Jr., was paid $60,000 to speak at that event, a speech that lasted less than three minutes.
“It is clear that he intentionally misled his donors, asked them to donate to a fund that didn’t exist and used the money raised for something other than what he said,” Ms. Lofgren said of Mr. Trump.
Ms. Cat’s Chronicles 
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