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TikTok will not be sold, Chinese parent ByteDance tells US (www.bbc.com)

submitted 7 months ago by NightOwl@lemmy.ca to c/worldnews@lemmy.ml

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[-] DarkGamer@kbin.social 0 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

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[-] queermunist@lemmy.ml 12 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

The CPC can just buy data from a different broker. You think Alphabet or Meta are loyal to American interests?

Also, TikTok won't be banned for months, so it won't change the campus protests at all. In fact it'll probably piss the protesters off even more, it's very obvious government censorship.

Also also, there's zero proof TikTok is promoting pro-Palestine/anti-Israel content. That's just what is naturally popular, the reality is that all the other social media companies are suppressing pro-Palestine/anti-Israel content. That's it.

[-] MossyFeathers@pawb.social -4 points 7 months ago

Facebook absolutely would sell your info to foreign governments, however I'm not convinced Google would.

I know Google harvests a shitton of data and uses it for advertising, but that's ironically why I think they probably wouldn't actually sell it. Because Google owns a massive advertising company, it's in their best interests to keep the data they collect so that other companies can't pop up and use the data themselves.

Also, if I'm not mistaken, the bill isn't specifically about tiktok but instead covers the sale of personal data to foreign countries in general. It's just that it's worded in a way that tiktok is the obvious target. As such, I'm not sure an American company could sell their customer's info to China; at least not without laundering it through other companies first.

However, all of that said, I'm not trying to defend the bill, tiktok, Google or Facebook. I don't like any of those companies and while I think the concept of the bill is good, it's very obviously focused on tiktok and, like you and others have pointed out, does nothing about the data collection that American companies do.

[-] queermunist@lemmy.ml 4 points 7 months ago

The law only prohibits the operations of so-called "foreign adversary controlled applications" i.e. companies with Chinese investors.

I'm pretty sure if TikTok was controlled by American investors and sold data to China it would be fine - although there's also an executive action that bans selling data to foreign adversaries, it also hasn't actually been implemented by regulators and is pretty simple to work around anyway since a third-party can just buy data from American companies and then sell it to China.

I think a bill like this that targeted all companies that collect data would be good.

Targeting "foreign adversary controlled applications" doesn't really help anyone.