The Absence of Data Privacy Law Is a National Security Threat

I am curious to know the degree to which US political parties' self-interest, in data collection and aggregation, is responsible for the lack of creating data privacy laws. That kind of incentive leeches away my hope that the US will improve the legal landscape for data privacy.

In Canada, federal political parties conveniently scoped their data operations outside of federal privacy legislation when it was written. Then, when provincial legislation threatened those parties' data collection operations, the federal parties subtly changed federal law in order to claim that federal political parties' data collection was exclusively under federal jurisdiction:

> The amended petition from the Liberal Party argues that the passage of C-47 “expressly confirmed Parliament's intent” that the collection and use of personal information by the federal parties “be governed exclusively by federal law.”

https://www.hilltimes.com/story/2023/09/08/federal-parties-a...

The question of whether that kind of jurisdictional excision can be performed is now before our courts.

California is attempting to pass the DELETE act which provides new rights to control your personal information with respect to data brokers. (https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/08/californias-delete-act...)

People should also look for end-to-end encryption tools as they can provide some protections immediately.

If the US Government is worried enough about the data that TikTok vacuums up from its users that it wants to ban that specific app, that screams loudly that the behaviour of TikTok, who have merely followed the path laid down by the likes of Google and Facebook, is a threat to national security.

But since this behaviour has been going on so long, and the US economy is already in such a dire state, laws protecting user privacy (laws that are actually worth a damn) could have a disastrous enough effect on the US economy that implementing these privacy laws could also be a national security risk.

Which is why they tried to ban TikTok rather than actually do the right, difficult thing of implementing worthwhile privacy laws.

Data privacy is a component of it, but there would still be a security threat even if a privacy law existed.

Social media is the real security threat. It's never been cheaper and more accessible to spread disinformation and propaganda, and influence public opinion in any country in the world. Instead of investing in traditional military and physical warfare, governments and companies can invest in troll farms, social media influencers and advertising to spread their agenda. This is a long process, but eventually it causes internal sociopolitical conflicts, weakens the enemy, corrupts their democratic processes, all the while leaving them in a state of confusion as to how they got there, and without leaving a trace that could point to who or what was responsible for it. I.e. information warfare.

The US is not the only victim in this war, and they are also a perpetrator.

There's also no way to realistically stop this, unless these platforms are segmented, and each country runs and controls their own, blocking external access. This will likely happen in the next few years, as the internet itself becomes more fragmented.