Though it is common for governments to spy abroad, Washington enjoys an advantage not shared by other countries: jurisdiction over the handful of companies that effectively run the modern internet, including Google, Meta, Amazon and Microsoft.
For billions of internet users outside the US, the lack of privacy mirrors the alleged threat that US officials say TikTok, owned by Chinese company ByteDance, poses to Americans.
“So the noise the Americans are making about TikTok must be seen less as a sincere desire to protect citizens from surveillance and influence operations, and more as an attempt to ring-fence and consolidate national control over social media"
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) estimates that the US government has collected more than one billion communications per year since 2011, based on how the number of targets has grown since that year.
“They’re making a big stink about TikTok and the Chinese collecting data when the US is collecting a great deal of data itself,” says Jonathan Hafetz, an expert on US constitutional law and national security at Seton Hall University in New Jersey.
“It is a little bit ironic for the US to sort of trumpet citizens’ privacy concerns or worries about surveillance. It’s OK for them to collect the data, but they don’t want China to collect it.”
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