by Karl Bode at techdirt
During the great TikTok moral panic of 2022-2025 we noted repeatedly how it was very weird for the public, press, and lawmakers to singularly hyperventilate about the privacy and propaganda impacts of one specific Chinese-owned app while just completely refusing to do anything about the much broader problems that TikTok (and a thousand other companies) exploit every day.
The U.S. is awash in propaganda we do absolutely nothing about. And our corrupt refusal to pass a basic internet-era privacy law (or regulate data brokers) has resulted in a vast, largely unregulated, hyper-surveillance market for your every thought, browsing habit, or movement. Data that’s then routinely sold to any number of random nitwits, including right wing extremists and foreign intelligence services.
We were told repeatedly for years that TikTok posed some kind of very unique threat, even though that threat was not at all unique, and created by the government’s corrupt failure to protect consumer privacy.
The latest case in point: Pokémon Go owner Niantic is selling the game (and all of its collected data) to a company created by the Saudi Arabian government. According to the fine folks at 404 Media, the companies have made numerous blog posts about the acquisition, without any of them talking about what happens to the reams of sensitive location data the company has collected for years:…
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