“There is plenty the U.S. government could do to ensure that TikTok acts responsibly without getting rid of it altogether.” This opinion piece really sums up my feelings on the “ban TikTok” movement in the US. I have no particular love for TikTok, but it’s far from the only chinese-controlled tech product, and it’s certainly not the worst of social-media-as-spyware.
Regulating the whole industry for data and privacy protection seems like a much more important long-term improvement.
At least with the whole TikTok issue, people now have a clear idea of how dangerous foreign centralised Internet services are, but unfortunately, they don’t care if those services are domestic.
One would hope it would be easier for people to see that facebook, etc, etc are doing the same thing and that this is a bigger problem then some Chinese-owned social network. Which may or may not just die out like any number of services before it.