Former Meta global affairs chief Nick Clegg said Friday that tech companies should keep a distance from politics and people should feel “uneasy” about those firms intervening in the public space.
“I generally don’t think that politics and tech innovation mixes very well,” Clegg told CNBC’s “Squawk Box.” “I think it’s quite good when they kind of keep each other at a certain, respectful distance.”
President Donald Trump’s deal with China this week to keep TikTok alive in the U.S. includes heavy doses of both elements, and the balance between the technology and political interests will be closely watched.
Clegg said two details should be especially looked at with TikTok: The safety of American data and the ownership of the algorithm, which he said would be “quite difficult” to share.
Clegg, who stepped down from his role at Meta earlier this year, questioned if U.S. data would be “kept safe here and not subject to surveillance,” but was also critical of other government efforts to silo data.
Clegg noted a recent legislative effort by India to impose “hard data localization” that would keep all data about citizens in India.
“The moment countries start doing that, the dominoes will start to fall,” he said. “If everybody says, ‘No, we want our slice of the … data cake.’ Then, of course, the open data flows that drives the internet will start eroding.”
Trump’s executive order for the new TikTok structure establishes a joint-venture company to oversee TikTok’s U.S. data and algorithm, with Oracle controlling cloud services and running the app’s security operations, CNBC’s David Faber reported.
Neither China nor TikTok parent company ByteDance has commented on Trump’s Thursday executive order.
Clegg said the biggest risk to the internet is possibly the relationship between the U.S. and China, noting the potential of any fallout to push other countries into different policies.
He said the image of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi standing next to Chinese President Xi Jinping during a recent visit was “striking.”
“If India starts emulating China and starts trying to sort of cut off India, much like China has done from the rest of the internet. … I think that would be terrible for the kind of global open principles that the internet was based on,” Clegg said.