There is no doubt Cambridge Analytica was a huge scandal. The courts should've leveraged much stiffer penalties in that case.
But a hostile nation harvesting data on US citizens is much worse.
One of the things I've often said and something that I prefer to say in Latin:
- Si non est timor legis, non est lex. (without fear of the law, there is no law)
I think when organizations abuse the law or they think they can just 'pay the fine' if it goes south, it doesn't act as much of a deterrent.
Today, two developments occurred.
1) China made its first overture to say that ByteDance could sell TikTok. My suspicious nature tells me that they've gotten what they've wanted to this point - and if they don't make some sort of play, TikTok will just die on the vine. Interestingly, President Trump made the point about how China makes lots of products, but we're zero'ed in on TikTok.
While I can see this point, there's also that idea of Trusted Foundation and the like that steer me away from HikVision/Dahua/Lorex security products as well as never even going anywhere near Huawei.
I probably need to line the
inside of my fedora with aluminum foil.
2) President Trump made the point that the US should be a 50% investor with ByteDance for TikTok, or no deal and TikTok basically loses all value. This is an interesting proposition, but it doesn't answer the big fat hairy question of what happens to all that phat data that ByteDance collected on behalf of the CCP, already.
I'm quite sure they're not going to just delete everything in a GDPR kinda way. In fact, it's my opinion that ByteDance isn't even really following GDPR - after all, who's going to check and actually say for sure?
/r