Our laws are woefully out of date to account for the technological innovation that has happened in the last, even, decade.
Of course, this is a fact that everyone here is perfectly willing to admit when it comes to topics that are easy to take the "right" side on, like privacy, encryption, and net neutrality. When the topic gets more contentious, like allowing the ability for another country to collect data on the citizens of the US, its not so clear.
But, the core reasoning behind the issues are the same: we don't have the legal precedent to say that they're breaking the law. This is how new laws are made: we get executive or judicial precedent, this leads to a new law, and now they're breaking it. The law is not set in stone, and allowing applications like TikTok to exist simply because they're not breaking any existing laws is not the kind of conversation any decision makers are having right now, for the better.
Privacy incursions have been made by data brokers for 50 years. There's been plenty of time to legislate privacy. The people controlling Congress won't let it happen.
Of course, this is a fact that everyone here is perfectly willing to admit when it comes to topics that are easy to take the "right" side on, like privacy, encryption, and net neutrality. When the topic gets more contentious, like allowing the ability for another country to collect data on the citizens of the US, its not so clear.
But, the core reasoning behind the issues are the same: we don't have the legal precedent to say that they're breaking the law. This is how new laws are made: we get executive or judicial precedent, this leads to a new law, and now they're breaking it. The law is not set in stone, and allowing applications like TikTok to exist simply because they're not breaking any existing laws is not the kind of conversation any decision makers are having right now, for the better.