The U.S TikTok Case – Will A Unified Federal Data Protection Laws and Apt Stewardship from TikTok resolve the issues?

Abstract

By means of literature research and comparative research, this paper seeks to look at governments emphasis on data protection, and the tough laws formulated to protectits citizens and how social media platforms are playing their stewardship rolein ensuring data owners (users) are protected. The paper explores how seriously governments take data protection and the strict laws they have in place to protect their citizens, as well as the guardianship role social media platforms play in ensuring data owners (users) are protected. At the same time, this article also discusses the alternative of TikTok proposed by the United States to deal with concerns about the security of citizens' data. This paper seeks to look at alternatives to the US proposal of the ownership of TikTok due to fear of data security of its citizens. It is a fine case to study personal data protection policies and what social media platform providers are doing to ensure they meet the growing tough data protection laws of governments around the world. B In this article, our data stewards will be the social media platforms and the owners will be users of those platforms and governments of those individuals. It is particularly important to know about these two because of the growing concerns about data security and privacy; and the risk it poses to individuals and organizations; and nations. Countries are coming out with tougher laws and social media platforms have already paid billions in fines because these two items were not professionally managed. Meta, TikTok and X (formerly Twitter) have been fined over $3 billion for General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) violations in 2023 1 .