Top GOP Rep. Says Congress Should Pass A TikTok Ban And A Federal Data Privacy Law

Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers( R – WA ), director of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, stated on Sunday that Congress may enact a federal data privacy regulations and restrictions on TikTok.

The relationship between TikTok and the Chinese company ByteDance is a threat to the privacy and safety of American members, according to McMorris Rodgers, who appeared on CNN’s” State of the Union” on Sunday. However, he also stated that the United States needs to pass national data protection laws to prevent other tech giants from stealing Americans’ information.

According to McMorris Rodgers,” What we are seeing is that TikTok and Mr. Chew have frequently been caught in this exist that there is no connection to ByteDance and eventually the Chinese Communist Party.” Therefore, they cannot be relied upon to safeguard our information. They cannot be relied upon to guarantee that the mental health of our kids is a top concern.

She continued,” We also need a federal data privacy regular.” And that’s what Ranking Member ] Frank ] Pallone( D-NJ ) and I have been working on, and we’re going to introduce this Congress because we need to take action to limit the amount of data that data brokers are initially gathering, whether it be TikTok, big tech, or other companies.

” We must make sure that people have the right to be informed if their information, including their personal information, is being accessed or transferred to another country, such as China, or to understand what their status may be. We must safeguard children, and the protection plan that we have been working on to safeguard anyone under the age of 17 contains the strongest safeguards for children. And we must stop listening to people’s products.

According to McMorris Rodgers, TikTok may be prohibited first.

” I think we need to ban TikTok right away because there is an immediate threat from the Chinese Communist Party via it ,” I would say.

On Saturday, New York Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez called for a nationwide data privacy regulations while also defending TikTok from an effort by both parties to outlaw the Chinese-owned app.

Banting TikTok, according to AOC,” doesn’t actually address the core of the issue, which is the fact that major social media companies are permitted to collect troves of strongly specific data about you that you are unaware of, without really any substantial regulation either.”

She claimed that the United States is one of the primary developed countries in the world without any significant data or privacy protection laws in place. The solution is to” really protect Americans from this kind of severe information harvesting that businesses can do without your substantial ability to say no ,” she added, rather than openly banning TikTok, which has 150 million users.