I think this article makes some really important points, especially on how silly it is for us to fight unfair Chinese business practices with the same tactics. However, I do think it is questionable to leave out the detail about whether we want Americans (or folks from any other country in this world) to have their data passing through and being stored on Chinese servers - likely owned and operated by, but at least, accessible to - Chinese government operatives, who are known to be assembling social credit profiles which can be very repressive. (See: <a href="https://www.wired.com/story/age-of-social-credit/" rel="nofollow">https://www.wired.com/story/age-of-social-credit/</a>)<p>There is an element of this that involves the responsibility of governments to protect their people's data from becoming weaponized against them. I haven't been able to ascertain all the details of the TikTok debacle, but IMHO the key thing government should be doing here is ensuring that data remains within the country from which it originated. These sorts of data and privacy concerns are quite reasonable. Robbing brilliant ideas from other countries is not.