People keep saying it’s a “ban,” when it’s really going to end up as a forced sale.

It’s not really clear to me that changing ownership is an effective way to address the issue.

I mean, sure, owning a media outlet gives you leverage over it, but it isn’t the only way to influence the outlet.

And, yes, you can gather data on users with TikTok…but a lot of apps can gather data. And they don’t need to be out of China, either – a typical US company probably isn’t going to directly aim to leverage user data for CCP political goals, but on the other hand, they also may be quite willing to sell data that could wind up in someone else’s hands. Even anonymized data isn’t always effectively anonymized or can be deanonymized when correlated with other databases.

Hell, my understanding is that in Russia, a significant problem is people just paying off employees to hand out databases that their employers have built. Like, with Navalny, the fact that it was the norm that stolen databases of phone call histories floating around in Russia was shocking to me. But even outside of Russia, if you have a major power that really wants to get its hands on some data at a private company enough to commit real resources towards doing so, how secure is it? Instead of owning a company to get at its user databases how much would it cost to buy off an employee to hand that database over? I’d bet less than it costs to buy the company.

How much would it cost to pay someone to open a back door to the company’s network, and how secure is that network internally?