Trudeau government bans TikTok from operating in Canada

Instead of the laser focus on TikTok as a threat, it would be better for the US and Canada to have real data protection laws that would apply equally to TikTok, Meta, Google, Apple, and X. What the EU has done is far from perfect but it bans the worst practices. The Chinese can buy all of the information they want on Americans and Canadians from ad brokers, who will happily sell them everything they need to track individuals' locations.

Perhaps the way to get anti-regulation politicians on board with this is for someone to do what was done to Robert Bork and legally disclose lots of personal info on members of Congress/Parliament, obtained from data brokers and de-anonymized.

It is not about the data. It’s about a foreign government controlling the algorithm that decides what millions of people see, and their ability to shape public opinion through that.

Like imagine if China owned CNN and the New York Times and decided what stories they could publish.

What’s crazy is few people even talk about who currently owns major US news networks and what their motives might be. People don’t like Musk owning Twitter/X, that’s a start - but start reading about who owns the rest (especially traditional media).

To be fair, as it relates to this topic there isn't really a need to discuss because foreign entities have been banned from owning controlling stakes in TV and radio networks without approval. A Chinese organization would never be allowed to control a news network in the way they control TikTok.

But the news networks are on the way out, and tiktoks are in. Do you remember the joyous declarations from 1990s that meatspace state borders do not apply to cyberspace? That was not entirely wishful thinking. The same properties that allow information from "free world" to make way into the "world of oppression" work for different definitions of "free" (democratic, communist, fundamentalist, etc) and "oppressed" (communist brainwashed, capitalist exploitative, sinful and godless, etc). A very similar situation enmeshes cryptography.