Mar 11, 2023
Hey everybody, I’m Joe Miller and here’s what’s going on in the world of tech law & policy this week.
Alfred Ng over at Politico reports that the police can obtain Ring camera footage without your permission. All they need is a warrant. But don’t worry – they will be nice. They will call you instead of knocking on your door. If you don’t give them the footage, Ring will also contact you. If you still don’t give them the footage, well, I don’t know about you but I wouldn’t want to find out what happens after that!
And getting a warrant is the least intrusive way to gain access. San Francisco recently passed an ordinance allowing police access to live Ring camera footage.
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Should the U.S. ban TikTok in the U.S.? The younger you are, the more likely you are to say, “No.” But lawmakers across the aisle want the app banned, citing security and propaganda concerns about the fact that its parent company, ByteDance, is based in China, and China has way more control over its corporations than the U.S.
But in yet another deadlock in Washington, the Biden administration hasn’t acted, the Commerce Department hasn’t acted, and neither has Congress. The Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S. (CFIUS) has engaged nine agencies in an investigation, but it has taken years to get that completed.
Neither Democrats nor Republicans want to be the ones to anger GenZ and suburban moms. And a ton of TikTok accounts are run by politicians.
There’s been discussion about Oracle handling all U.S. TikTok data in the U.S. But engineers in Beijing will still have access.
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House Republicans are lining up in support of Elon Musk, as Cat Zakrzewski reports in the Washington Post.
House Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan released an 18-page report attacking the Federal Trade Commission’s investigation of the platform, calling it a “harassment campaign” against Elon Musk.. The FTC began re-investigating Twitter last year, before Musk acquired Twitter, about a possible breach of its 2011 consent decree to improve privacy practices.
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