U.S. Judge Halts TikTok Ban
This whole situation is insane and hypocritical.<p>Rather than having some law that can be used to force TikTok and other companies to respect user privacy and store data safety. The US has basic no laws (with teeth) and doesn't care at all when a company like Equifax or Facebook leaks tons of data which includes foreign governments. But when one company is under the thumb of the CCP, the US freaks out. Meanwhile, the activities of the NSA and FBI in using telecoms and US tech companies to spy are no different, in an abstract sense, than what China does.<p>Essentially, If I'm a user <i>not</i> in the US or China, I don't want either the US or the CCP to be able to abuse/spy on me. But it's insane for US to claim the moral high ground when the legal barrier to the government using private data is literally just they have to pay a private company to do it [1]. That's not much different than the government directly owning shares in a company. Either way money flows from the government to the company in exchange for user data.<p>Sure the CCP is worse in that it prevents/breaks encryption, inspects packets but the US doesn't enforce the use of good security practices and really doesn't care when companies get hacked. We freak out that the TikTok app might be tracking us but we don't even notice that 20 other <i>American</i> apps on our phone collect & sell data.<p>The only real path forward is decentralizing the platforms such that E2E encryption is mandatory.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/federal-agencies-use-cellphone-location-data-for-immigration-enforcement-11581078600" rel="nofollow">https://www.wsj.com/articles/federal-agencies-use-cellphone-...</a>