TikTok Goes to Court

The latest TikTok trend? Taking the US government to court.

Last week, the massively popular short-form video app owned by Chinese company ByteDance kicked off its legal fight challenging the US government's divest-or-ban law passed in April, calling it unconstitutional. Coincidentally, the massive case headed to trial just as US regulators launched major cannon fire in the broader fight against Big Tech.

Tik'd Off

ByteDance's legal defense can be summarized in two words: free speech. By shutting down the app, TikTok argues the government is essentially violating the First Amendment rights of its 170 million US users. A concurrent case being argued by a group of American TikTok creators uses similar reasoning. The US government, represented by the Department of Justice, is saying that national security concerns should take priority due to the risk that, one day, the Chinese government might tap the massive amount of data on US users vacuumed up by ByteDance.

But TikTok is no longer the only company in the government's crosshairs over data collection practices. On Thursday, the Federal Trade Commission released a scathing report of the data collection practices of nine major tech companies, including Meta and Amazon. The agency alleges the platforms engaged in "vast surveillance" of users and non-users alike, which in turn led to "broad data sharing" with third parties with very little oversight. The report also noted the practice increases the "systemic risk from data breaches." In other words: nothing you probably didn't know already. It's why many activists and critics have argued the TikTok ban is a mere half-measure for an industrywide illness that only comprehensive consumer data privacy reform can counter. Experts in cybersecurity tend to agree, and some say Big Tech isn't even the biggest culprit of data-privacy malpractice:

• The TikTok conundrum is "more of a geopolitical problem than a data problem," Yashin Manraj, CEO of cybersecurity firm Pvotal Technologies, told The Daily Upside. "If you look at the volume of data breaches, you see [it's] not only on social media, but every business and even the government."
• Manraj added that smaller companies are too often overlooked for invasive data collection or storage malpractice compared to major social media firms — highlighting the need for widespread reform. He added that he's not defending the bigger platforms either: "I don't use any social media myself." 

After two months of an unprecedented post-election stalemate that left the world's seventh-largest economy in political paralysis while its public finances deteriorated, French President Emmanuel Macron appointed a government Saturday.

The country's new finance minister is Antoine Armand, a 33-year-old civil servant-turned-political neophyte who was elected to the National Assembly for Macron's Renaissance party just two years ago. His new job: Fix a ballooning budget deficit that could reach 6% of GDP this year. Sacré bleu!

Lord Have Bercy on Me

There are a whole bunch of factors weighing on France's economy, but the big ones are glacial growth that depresses revenue (the economy grew a paltry 0.87% last year, compared to 2.5% in 2022) and increases in government costs (spending went up 3.7% last year, and 4% the year before).

In 2023, that unvirtuous cycle left the government deficit at €154 billion ($172 billion), accounting for 5.5% of GDP, way off the mark from a 4.9% target. Bercy — the French finance ministry's nickname, taken from the Paris neighborhood where its headquarters are located — now thinks it could hit 6% this year, according to new estimates obtained by business newspaper Les Echos. That's way above its 5.1% target. If that alone isn't enough to make Armand's first day at the office tough, there are other reasons he might soon be asking himself, "Tu es sérieux?":

• Under French law, the government has to submit a budget to the country's parliament by Oct. 1, a.k.a. in huit jours. It's also against EU rules to run a deficit above 3% and, as part of a bloc procedure to rein in overspending, France has to submit a plan to trim its deficits to Brussels by Oct. 15.
• The new government will likely have to take highly unpopular measures, whether steep cuts or tax hikes or both — Les Echos estimates €40 to €50 billion worth just to get to a 5% deficit in 2025 (meanwhile, the president of France's Court of Auditors doesn't think 3% is possible until 2028 or 2029). Expect lots of street protests.

Scraping users' data without their say-so? How awfully 2018 of you.

Last week, reports surfaced that LinkedIn — the job-finding platform-turned-social network where people bare their souls and tenuously link their personal lives to B2B sales — has been quietly opting its users in to data scraping so it can train its large language models. It's part of LinkedIn's big drive to find a bigger role for itself than "fancy classifieds board."

Open to Data Scraping

LinkedIn has been looking for ways to make its platform more sticky — more of a place you go to pootle around rather than look for job listings, then leave. It's already taken on some of the characteristics of the old Facebook-slash-Instagram wall, including introducing posts it thinks you'll engage with rather than just presenting posts from people you know. More recently it also introduced games, and it's trying to build AI chatbots that dole out career advice to keep users coming back. "It's about building this daily habit," editor-in-chief Daniel Roth told the Financial Times in July.

It looks like, to build those AI products, LinkedIn has been quietly harvesting user data, as reported by tech publication 404 Media last week:

• Users outside of the EU, the UK, the EEA, and Switzerland can go into their settings and find a toggle for opting out of data scraping for its AI models, but it's pretty tucked away. If a LinkedIn user in one of those regions tries to find the page, they're met with a message: "This setting is not available where you are located because we do not currently use your data to train generative AI models for content creation."
• This is to shield LinkedIn from getting whacked over the head by Europe's privacy laws. Grok, Twitter's answer to Chat-GPT, has been hit with nine European privacy complaints over how it processes user data.