Tech Press Slowly Figuring Out That Banning TikTok Doesn’t Fix The Actual Problem

The great TikTok moral panic of 2023 is largely a distraction. It’s a distraction from the fact we’ve refused to meaningfully regulate dodgy data brokers, who traffic in everything from your daily movement habits to your mental health diagnosis. And it’s a distraction from our corrupt failure to pass even a baseline privacy law for the internet era.

Until the last few weeks, that’s been an oddly under-represented point in press coverage: namely that banning TikTok doesn’t actually fix the problem you’re claiming to fix if you’re not willing to regulate the data broker space more generally. In large part because Chinese and Russian intelligence (or U.S. governments seeking to avoid warrants) can simply pay data brokers for sensitive information anyway.

When the press covers TikTok, this kind of important context either doesn’t exist or is weirdly downplayed. Case in point: the Wall Street Journal last week published a review of more than 3,500 companies, organizations, and government entities that found that tracking pixels from TikTok’s parent company ByteDance were present in 30 U.S. state-sponsored government websites across 27 states.

Several of those states have taken strides to ban TikTok on government owned devices (a good call), yet were kind of oblivious that this additional layer of tracking was even taking place:

The presence of that code means that U.S. state governments around the country are inadvertently participating in a data-collection effort for a foreign-owned company, one that senior Biden administration officials and lawmakers of both parties have said could be harmful to U.S. national security and the privacy of Americans.

So yes, this is not great. At the same time, this is not remotely unique to TikTok. With no privacy law for the internet era, and a general refusal to regulate the data broker space (lest U.S. companies make slightly less money and the U.S. government be forced to obtain warrants), we’ve created an information exchange ecosystem that sees little meaningful oversight or accountability.

Every app on your phone, every website you visit, every telecom network you use all track everything about you in granular detail. That data is then hoovered up by an intentionally confusing data broker market where any idiot with a nickel can buy access to it. Claims that this data has been “anonymized” (and therefore completely safe) are monumental bullshit.

Far down the page, the WSJ acknowledges that this problem goes well beyond TikTok:

U.S. adversaries such as China and Russia routinely use shell companies and proxies to extract marketing and consumer information from the advertising exchanges that deliver the display ads, according to people familiar with the matter. Such advertising exchanges have code running on nearly every cellphone on earth and can collect information about many of those devices. 

But again, notice how the fact that banning TikTok fixes absolutely none of this is kind of just a weird afterthought. And this is one of the better stories on the subject. Most mainstream stories on TikTok are tinged with all kinds of weird patriotic biases that generally miss the forest for the trees, keen on parroting the claim that banning a single app actually solves what are much deeper problems.

Only in the last few months have I seen this dynamic start to shift as the TikTok hearing gets close, but it’s been rough sledding.

I still tend to think the U.S. press has been generally played by politicians whose motivations have little to actually do with consumer privacy and national security. I think there’s plenty of xenophobic folks who simply believe that the money being made by ByteDance belongs in the back pocket of American companies, who’ll then get a free pass to do all the things we’re accusing China of.

The fact that a TikTok ban does little to fix the actual problem (a corrupt refusal to regulate data brokers) never even enters into it because most of the folks making the most noise about TikTok are not interested in fixing the actual problem. They don’t want empowered consumers opting out of lucrative data over-collection by U.S. companies, nor do they want the U.S. government forced to obtain warrants.

Even if our refusal to meaningfully regulate data brokers means that foreign governments have wider access to U.S. consumer data. So instead we get whatever this weird moral panic is; basically a lot of sound and fury, signifying nothing. A grand fit of hyperventilation designed to generally distract you from our well-documented, corruption-fueled failures on consumer protection and privacy law.