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If they sold it, isn't that like what... literally almost every single company does nowadays unless you pay up?

I don't think so. You can't buy user data from Google or Facebook or Apple or Microsoft and they probably have more of it than anybody else.

You and I can't buy it because they don't want their competitors getting it. But they'll happily use it to target ads at you, and the US government has access to it and can use it to decide who they want to send their CIA kidnap-torture squads after.

No, but they let you leverage it.

Which is in this case a pretty important distinction. Letting another company leverage user data within the bounding zone which you've defined is not the same thing as is being alleged here, which is actually sharing data.

It's quite literally the difference between exposing a public API and actually handing over the contents of the database.

Facebook buys (well at least used to) buy data from other brokers. So you can think Bytedance = Facebook, Deepseek = data broker in this scenario.

> Letting another company leverage user data within the bounding zone which you've defined is not the same thing as is being alleged here, which is actually sharing data.

Both are real violations of users.

I didn't say they weren't, but it's an important distinction nonetheless.

*even if you pay up.

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