Responding to a lawsuit from video-sharing platform TikTok, the US Justice Department argued that China could order the company to manipulate TikTok’s algorithm and expand Beijing’s “malign influence.”
The US Justice Department defended a law that aims to either ban TikTok or force it to divest its assets in the US after the social media company filed a lawsuit against the legislation.
Under the law, the social media platform will have to find a non-Chinese buyer or face a ban in the US by January 19, 2025.
The Chinese-based TikTok is challenging the law before a US appeals court.
A chinese owned company, by chinese law, is the CCP’s bitch. An american owned company, by contrast, at least has the chance to refuse government requests, not that they always do.
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.