Banning TikTok Won’t Keep Your Data Safe – DNyuz

The divest-or-be-banned TikTok ultimatum that U.S. President Joe Biden signed into law in April poses a dilemma for the app’s claimed 170 million U.S. users: allegiance to TikTok or the White House and Silicon Valley?

According to the law, Beijing-based ByteDance must divest from its U.S. subsidiary TikTok and sever Chinese control of the app’s U.S. operations by Jan. 19, 2025 (or, with an extension, April 19, 2025). Noncompliance would cost almost $1 trillion in penalties plus the application’s prohibition on domestic web hosts and app stores. U.S. internet service providers could still fetch the foreign-hosted TikTok website but without convenient upgrades, millions of consumers’ preexisting app installations would descend into buggy obsolescence—assuming Apple and Google don’t wipe the app off millions of devices altogether.

In May, TikTok and ByteDance called the drastic measures “unconstitutional” and divestment “not possible.” Emphasizing First Amendment rights, the two companies initiated a lawsuit predicted to reach the U.S. Supreme Court.

Yet there is a more decisive factor in this saga than Washington and Beijing crossing courtroom swords: an internet where a rogues’ gallery of pompous billionaires, authoritarian regimes, and opaque oligarchs own users’ public data—the building blocks of knowledge—and sell access to it.

But people can sell or share a ride to a physical library without hoarding all its books.

A true “knowledge commons” requires an alternative online ecosystem. Unfortunately, instead of a knowledge commons, today’s internet has become a race to expand control over every last piece of data, with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) among the frontrunners.

To spread their messages, factions debating the potential TikTok ban rely on the same internet, a space that could potentially become a true global commons. That promise, however, can’t be actualized with today’s coupling of apps with private databases.

Apps (or websites) provide front-end functionality; proprietary databases on the back end lock up the mounds of content. Just as with X, Facebook, and the rest, when users launch TikTok’s app they surrender saleable personal data; in return, some faraway data center unlocks TikTok’s proprietary database to dispense seconds-long videos ostensibly “For You.” It’s the transactional web: Sign in, do something for the company’s benefit, and you may see portions of their private-property database—user-generated content the company didn’t create but leverages for unjust social control.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Nothing inherently yokes databases to particular apps—databases can accept input from whichever app or none—but the internet has so far failed to forge any decoupled ecosystem. Every silver bullet on offer seems on further consideration to be yet another website commanded by yet another chest-pounding billionaire strutting atop his locked database, limiting access to only those he approves. As a result, mass collaboration drowns in silos controlled by Great Man aspirants skewing information by ideology, personality, and popularity.

Domestic U.S. companies offer no refuge. TikTok’s addictive personalization algorithm and never-ending videos entrance viewers as slot machines do, harming mental health—and so does U.S.-based YouTube. Internal documents instructed TikTok moderators to suppress “ugly” people while “heating” beautiful ones—and internal records from Silicon Valley’s Instagram said surveyed teenagers blamed it for their increased rates of anxiety and depression.

Meanwhile, the ritual of unrepentant tech bosses appearing before Congress continues. TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew dodged lawmakers’ questions about China’s Uyghur genocide, downplaying inquiries about his platform censoring content on that subject, Tiananmen Square, and more. He dismissed a report regarding ByteDance rifling through Indian users’ data long after India banned TikTok. Reminded that, via their TikTok accounts, ByteDance covertly monitored locations of specific U.S. journalists who’d earlier revealed how engineers at the Chinese company had “access to everything,” Chew refused to call the secretive efforts to determine the journalists’ sources spying.

Whether the biased databases come from Chew, Facebook cofounder Mark Zuckerberg, X executive chairman Elon Musk, or beyond social media—from online marketplace kingpins such as Overstock founder Patrick Byrne or academic research database behemoths like Elsevier—they all result in ordinary users having a harder and harder time hearing or seeing a platform’s victims, or even each other.

“This is why I am working on a universal database: to try to democratize this access to a megaphone and bring us information from everyone,” Canadian programmer and philosopher Heather Marsh said at a censored Oxford Union whistleblowing panel.

At free software conferences in Cuba, France, and Spain, Marsh explained her Getgee, or G, project for a knowledge commons. Naturally, it’s unlikely all states will immediately see the advantages of a completely new structure, or that data-hoarding mega-corporations will go quietly into the night. But once a better system has gotten off the ground, its users will fight for it (as they once fought for Silicon Valley), making larger-scale transition inevitable.

Before late mathematician Alan Turing freely shared his idea of “instruction tables” (software) in 1936, irrevocably changing every global commons, he didn’t ask permission from corporations, states, or his neighbors. Disruptive innovation is more than regulating states versus cruel corporations: Intelligent individuals and tiny teams with big hearts still matter.

With G, Marsh proposes decoupling apps and databases with a framework separating information into layers. The foundation would be a universal database where, say, professors could place instructional videos as public data. Apps would offer additional features, such as captioning or translation, without vacuuming up personal data as the price of entry. Personal data would instead be treated as each individual’s sole property.

Apps would become just apps, adding functionality and that’s it, no longer married to any company’s exclusive database. Work on middle layers—via public or private federated servers—would enhance the universal database with meaning and trust networks, and ready it for apps. This middle data, and the apps themselves, could be confidential or deleted. But as long as international consortiums maintained the foundational universal database and framework, akin to international bodies maintaining the web now, the database would persist—a global commons.

Existing global commons are actively disputed. Then-U.S. President Donald Trump established the U.S. Space Force in 2019 and soon after declared that the United States did not view outer space as a global commons; this remains official U.S. policy. The addition of roughly a dump truck’s worth of plastic into the oceans every minute and the surveillance and severing of underwater internet cables similarly testify to the high seas not as idealistic shared commons but as military-industrial battleground.

In such circumstances, small, underfunded teams still save the world. Indeed, just 22 aging ships repair the constantly breaking undersea cables civilization depends on. Underpaid  and unpaid developers, scattered worldwide, patch arcane software bugs threatening the world economy. Far from the popular celebrity spectacles, those with direct experience of the failing mechanics underpinning our various troubled global commons often have innovative ideas.

Biden’s divestment-or-ban law expects TikTok to provide “data and information portability to alternative applications”—that is, upon request by someone within U.S. borders, TikTok must supply all data related to their account, so they can export that data elsewhere. G builds that in: Like picking your own route to the brick-and-mortar library for a book club, everyone could use different apps to view and comment on the same public video, unleashing mass collaboration.

G could accomplish this because its universal database would retain users’ public work forever, and its middle layers would hold their trust networks, making it easy to ditch any antagonizing app and resume the same work with the same contacts on a different app.

Picture a singer uploading her #MeToo song into the universal database. If an app or website, censoring or glitching, won’t load it—as has been the case for Russian dissident band Pussy Riot—anyone could simply use another. Different legal systems might disagree if the hypothetical song is defamatory. The adaptable middle layers would act as participatory debate hotspots, allowing for regional governance experimentation—perhaps one government bleeps lyrics from (copies of) the song until its courts decide. What no state or company could do is censor the song into nonexistence.

“If TikTok users could own their videos independently and not have their followers and creative work erased by unelected corporations from any state, they’d probably be very happy,” Marsh told me. “Fundamental internet reform is urgent. What we have currently is the foundation of an inescapable web of global totalitarianism, and it will be very, very hard to dismantle once complete.”

Before the U.S. House Energy and Commerce Committee last year, Chew insisted that TikTok would “not be manipulated by any government” and ByteDance was not owned or controlled by the Chinese government.

The evidence contradicts him. Former TikTok staff said boundaries between China-based ByteDance and Los Angeles- and Singapore-based TikTok are nonexistent. An ex-ByteDance executive charged in a 2023 court filing that ByteDance wields “supreme access” to data stored in the United States, and the CCP, through its party committee inside ByteDance, has “control over ByteDance and TikTok.” Chinese government media glorifies that same party committee.

ByteDance also celebrates its “strategic cooperation” agreement with the Chinese Ministry of Public Security, implicated in the CCP’s illegal transnational Fox Hunt operations. The operations coerce thousands of Chinese dissidents worldwide—hundreds on U.S. soil—back to the mainland via surveillance, secret police kidnappings, and collective punishment of targets’ families.

None of this, as human rights group Safeguard Defenders recently detailed, deterred the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime as well as authorities in dozens of countries from cooperative agreements with the culpable National Supervision Commission, a private CCP police force. Simultaneously, like their planetwide soft power subversion, the CCP’s control of industry in China is accelerating. Rebellious Chinese business moguls and feminists have gone missing amid forced disappearances, unexplained ambiguities, and reappearances with stage-managed smiles.

Averting eyes from stockpiled TikTok data is surely not front-of-mind for such merciless authoritarians. But the prospect of oligarchs anywhere strangling the internet should encourage an immediate evolution toward a genuine global knowledge commons.

Federal officials’ public explanations for why the U.S. government has given TikTok an ultimatum have been infrequent or dismissive, considering that half the U.S. population uses TikTok, a third of U.S. adults under 30 regularly gets news there, and it was, in recent years, the most downloaded app in the United States and the world.

In February, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI)’s annual threat assessment asserted without detail that “TikTok accounts run by a (Chinese government) propaganda arm reportedly targeted candidates from both political parties during” the U.S. 2022 midterm elections.

The assessment noted China might try “to influence the U.S. elections in 2024” to “sideline critics of China and magnify U.S. societal divisions,” using “online personas” a la “Moscow’s playbook.” Lacking security clearances, everyday members of the public reading ODNI’s bald assertions could understandably walk away unconvinced.

But if the Biden administration won’t stop the near-silent treatment on the topic and there is no online commons for effective bottom-up knowledge-building, many across the country will simply scroll TikTok to take in Chinese-molded, lopsided portrayals of the ban debate—exacerbating the same societal divisions the law is meant to assuage.

G wouldn’t be a panacea. Some problems—authoritarian firewalls, nonconsensual pornography—would still exist. But decoupling apps from databases and stratifying information would simplify addressing those problems.

Marsh’s proposal offers more than just censorship resistance and app portability. It offers a way for local economies and individuality to escape both Silicon Valley and the CCP’s totalizing dictates.

G would rescue international experts, regions considering their advice, and the intermediaries trying to bridge the two, by rendering obsolete the segregated digital silos, choked with AI spam, that increasingly separate them all. Finally, G is more than just a constantly updating global commons for public data; it’s that plus a global commons for worldwide collaboration—via apps and the middle layers. It’s the difference between sharing only the words in a dictionary on the one hand (a webpage repository of files), and also sharing the conversations using those words on the other (the G ecosystem).

Today, corporate-owned data, personal data, and public data are all hopelessly mixed, polarizing people into inflammatory thought bubbles and stripping them of privacy and dignity.

We can do better—and finally create, own, share, discuss, and enjoy the books inside our online global library.

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