If the Chinese state wants to procure data on Americans, it need not convince us to install Tiktok. Which makes the RESTRICT Act an especially foolish project.

The surveillance public-private partnership is a vicious cycle: corporations let cops and spies plunder our data then the cops and spies lobby against privacy laws that would prevent these corporations from spying on us: Hell, a cynic might even say that commercial surveillance companies are betting on this. The same goes for commercial surveillance: once you collect massive, nonconsensual dossiers on every technology user alive, you don't get to act surprised when cops and spies show up and order your company to serve as deputies for a massive, off-the-books warrantless surveillance project. Once you put that gun on the mantelpiece in Act I, you damn betcha that some strong-man backed by a powerful state is going to come along and shoot it by Act III. That's the completely foreseeable consequence of arrogating the power to decide which software every mobile user on earth is entitled to use – as Google and Apple have done. That's how they do it in China, after all: when China wanted to ban VPNs and other privacy tools, they just ordered Apple to remove them from the App Store, and Apple rolled over: My guess is that they're thinking of ordering the mobile duopoly of Google and Apple to nuke the Tiktok app from their app stores. In practice, banning stuff on the internet is hard, especially if you don't have a national firewall: How will they do this? Congress isn't clear. With the RESTRICT Act, Congress is proposing to continue Trump's war on Tiktok, enacting a US ban on the Chinese-owned service. We should ban TikTok('s surveillance) ( ) Colophon: Recent publications, upcoming/recent appearances, current writing projects, current reading.

Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.

We should ban TikTok('s surveillance): And Google's, Apple's, and Facebook's surveillance, too.

Tor macmillan