cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/12876226
The measure that sailed unanimously through the House Energy and Commerce Committee would prohibit TikTok from US app stores unless the social media platform — used by roughly 170 million Americans — is quickly spun off from its China-linked parent company, ByteDance.
US officials have cited the widespread commercial availability of US citizens’ data as another source of national security risk. The US government and other domestic law enforcement agencies are also known to have purchased US citizens’ data from commercial data brokers.
Not to mention this does nothing. ByteDance could easily just stand up a shell company with a puppet in another country and have it become the owner. Our lawmakers and regulators are fucking morons.
They aren’t. They’re just well paid. Meta and Alphabet don’t want competition.