![]() And generally, where buyers go, marketers follow: While recent numbers are hard to come by, a 2017 report found that 50 adtech orgs based in mainland China were cutting deals based around targeting consumers in the States. If you’ve ever experienced the utter absurdity of sites like, then you’re probably familiar with the ways some Chinese corporations have made a name for themselves in targeting consumers overseas with cheap crap that they don’t really need but will almost definitely buy. When an app beams your data from your phone into TikTok’s (or some advertiser’s) line of sight, there’s a nearly infinite array of detours that it’s taking to get there at all - and those partnerships get even more tangled if your data happens to cross international borders somewhere along the way. But that’s a scheme that only works if the wacky world of data makes any goddamn sense. Replacing a Beijing-based parent company with one based in Seattle would pacify any paranoia about servers based in China. Looking at that alone, I can see why the Microsoft buyout makes sense. user data is being stored in mainland China, pundits have been pointing to the company’s China-based parent company, Bytedance, as reason enough to be concerned. base on servers based locally and in Singapore, and despite the complete lack of available evidence that any U.S. In December, Chinese authorities officially enacted a piece of legislation that would give them a certain degree of unfettered access to data stored on servers based in the country or being transmitted through China-based networks.ĭespite TikTok’s repeated insistence that it stores the data of its U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo) have shown us, the issue isn’t as much with the data that’s being hoarded as it is with where that data is being stored. But thanks in part to the absurd sprawl of the ad ecosystem, a legal system that’s proved to be less than adequate at wrangling that sprawl and a general don’t-give-a-fuck attitude a lot of adtech players have, we’ve seen a lot of this data repurposed for federal surveillance.īut as multiple lawsuits (and U.S. Generally, when we talk about the unchecked data-mining done by a given social network, we’re talking about data-mining that’s done in the name of targeted ads. companies to servers in China constantly, regardless of who owns TikTok. Or, to put it more bluntly: If Trump’s real concern is keeping the data of our squeaky clean American phones out of the clutches of that dirty, no-good communist adversary China, then Microsoft buying TikTok won’t do shit - our data is making its way from U.S. Our current digital economy, to a certain degree, depends on global ties that are built to run far deeper than any ban or buyout could ever hope to touch. Over time, what’s become very, very clear is that while, say, Google and Facebook and TikTok are ultimately at the whims of local regulators, the same can’t be said about the digital Rube Goldberg machine of platforms, subsidiaries and shady third-parties these companies use to churn our data into massive profits. While I’m a bit rusty on the nitty-gritty of geopolitics, I have been spending a little more than a year closely watching TikTok’s evolving plans to track and target teens abroad. That last one’s been gnawing at me for a while now. Treasury to get a cut of what’s promising to be a multibillion-dollar deal (even though that’s not how any of that works)? Would a buyout even solve any of the alleged privacy concerns surrounding TikTok, or would it just spew out a litany of new ones? Why would a company as corporate as Microsoft be throwing its hat into the tweenage market? Did President Donald Trump seriously just ask for the U.S. When Microsoft officially emerged as the frontrunner for a potential acquisition of the teen-fave-turned-national-security-concern TikTok earlier this week, tech critics ‘round the globe found themselves with an endless set of questions that seemingly nobody could answer. ![]()
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