The US government pushed to ban TikTok citing national security concerns about Chinese data collection. Critics point out that US companies like Meta and Google collect identical or more extensive data on American users, share it with advertisers, and have been caught providing it to law enforcement without warrants. The RESTRICT Act proposed to address TikTok would grant sweeping surveillance powers far beyond the app. Former NSA Director Keith Alexander sits on the board of Amazon, which collects vast amounts of user data. The real concern appears to be a foreign government having data access that the US government wants to control.
“Google tracks your location 24/7 and sells it. Meta reads your messages. But TikTok is the national security threat? This isn't about safety — it's about who controls the data.”
From “crazy” to confirmed
The Claim Is Made
This is the moment they called it crazy.
When the Biden administration moved to ban TikTok in 2023, the stated rationale was straightforward: the Chinese government could access data on 150 million American users, posing an unacceptable national security threat. Few questioned the logic. After all, protecting citizen data from foreign surveillance sounds like basic government responsibility.
But critics noticed something curious about this argument. The companies operating in America—Meta, Google, Amazon—collect nearly identical datasets on Americans. They track location, browsing habits, social connections, and purchasing behavior. They sell this information to thousands of advertisers and have repeatedly shared it with law enforcement agencies without warrants, according to court documents and congressional testimony.
The official response from lawmakers was dismissive. Supporters of the ban argued that the difference was fundamental: American companies answer to American regulators, while TikTok answers to Beijing. The implication was clear: foreign control made the data collection categorically different, regardless of scale or scope.
Yet the evidence complicates this clean distinction. The Electronic Frontier Foundation's analysis of the TikTok debate found that US tech companies had faced minimal consequences for similar practices. Meta paid a $5 billion fine in 2019 for privacy violations but continued collecting data at the same scale. Google settled with 40 state attorneys general over location tracking practices, yet location data collection remained the company's core business model.
More troubling was what came next. The proposed RESTRICT Act, designed to address the TikTok problem, would have granted the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States broad authority to regulate data flows from any company with foreign connections. The Brookings Institution noted that the powers outlined in the legislation extended far beyond TikTok—potentially affecting any technology company with non-American ownership or investors.
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This is where the pattern becomes visible. Keith Alexander, former director of the National Security Agency, joined Amazon's board in 2020. Amazon Web Services stores vast amounts of American data. The same government worried about Chinese access to TikTok's user data had approved an NSA executive moving to a company handling sensitive information at scale.
The claim that TikTok represented a unique threat while American companies posed none appears increasingly selective. The data collection is comparable. The scale is comparable. The vulnerabilities are comparable. What differs is which government might theoretically access it.
This matters because it suggests the TikTok debate was less about protecting American data and more about controlling who can access it. A foreign government accessing American data represents a threat to national security. But an American government accessing the same data through American companies, or potentially through the broad powers outlined in the RESTRICT Act, represents something else entirely: the concentration of surveillance authority among domestic powers.
Public trust in government depends partly on consistency. When officials cite privacy concerns to restrict a foreign company while tolerating identical practices from domestic ones, citizens have reason to question the stated motive. The actual concern appears to be data sovereignty—ensuring American intelligence agencies maintain exclusive access to American data—rather than data protection itself.
That distinction changes what kind of problem we're actually trying to solve.
Beat the odds
This had a 0.2% chance of leaking — someone talked anyway.
Conspirators
~150Network
Secret kept
3.2 years
Time to 95% exposure
500+ years
