Appearing Thursday on Fox Business Network to discuss the dual danger of China’s data harvesting operation through TikTok and what the Twitter files expose the United States government as doing, Rep. Warren Davidson of Ohio, a Republican, said:
“We have a huge data privacy void. We need a uniform data privacy law. Our bill is called the it’s your data act and it would recognize that Americans truly have a property right in their data. And so, if anybody wants to use it, whether it’s TikTok, Facebook, Twitter, Google, you name it, the U.S. government, once you share that data, you’ve got a property right in it and then you can give or revoke permissions on it.
“And that lets people move across all kinds of apps and platforms. And right now, all this is kind of a backdoor, almost a black market for data. Everyone’s monetizing it. And frankly, what TikTok’s doing isn’t entirely different than what the Twitter files are saying was going on with the United States government. Now, it’s our own government that’s doing it. So, we should be less concerned about it than the Chinese Communist Party doing it, but fundamentally, we have a huge void in privacy here.”
Rep. Davidson is far from the only one to warn of the dangers of TikTok’s data harvesting operation. Even some Democrats are doing so as well, such as Rep. Himes. He, appearing on NBC to discuss the matter, said:
“TikTok, like Huawei, like any number of other Chinese-owned assets or companies, is a threat in the sense that the Chinese government can go to a Chinese company and say, give us all of this information. … So, whether or not Americans who are not in sensitive government roles should use TikTok is, I think, an open question, something that can be debated. You can make your own prudential judgments on that, but the notion that it should not be on government phones, that, to me, doesn’t strike me as that controversial.”
Continuing, Rep. Himes added “Well, it’s a national security threat, and I want to use the language carefully, it’s not a national security threat in the sense that the people who use it are going to be at a personal risk, but it is a threat in the sense that the Chinese Communist Party can go to any company that is Chinese-owned and any company that is in China and say, give us all of this personal information on your user base. That happens every single day in China.”
The alarm bells apparently are, for these politicians, finally ringing. After years of insouciance on the data privacy issue, with the exception of Trump’s aborted attempt to ban TikTok and its data harvesting operation, the political class might be finally waking up and ready to take on the gordian knot of online data privacy.
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