There are two schools of thought on the viability of American efforts to protect our personal and banking information from China.

The first says the entire ship has sailed — that because there have been so many breaches and instances in which Americans voluntarily gave their information to various Chinese entities, including banks, lending institutions, and social media platforms, there’s no point in trying to take back the privacy we’ve lost.

The argument is that much data that has already traversed the transom but is not worth preserving. Americans’ banking and financial accounts, for example, remain safe.

Some in the Senate seem to be satisfied with the first take. They see no reason to protect Americans from even the most direct threats to cyber and banking security and are now even willing to let a Chinese state-owned company process credit card transactions in the United States.

The company, UnionPay, has operated in the United States since 2005, executing ATM and debit card transactions under a provision of the Dodd-Frank Act known as the Durbin Amendment.

Dodd-Frank was Congress’s ill-fated attempt to try to shore up the U.S. banking system after the 2008 financial collapse. The Durbin Amendment, added at the last minute, gave the Federal Reserve the right to determine who can sell processing services in the U.S. and for how much.

Now UnionPay, founded in 2002 as part of China’s efforts to create a national payment system, seeks to become an American credit card processor as well. The regular suspects, such as Amazon and other multinational corporations with deep ties to China, support legislation known as the Credit Card Competition Act, which would allow UnionPay to process credit cards. So do Democratic senators, such as Sens. Dick Durbin (D-IL), Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), and Republican Sen. Roger Marshall of Kansas.

If the Chinese have learned nothing else about our country, it’s that any number of politicians, political actors, and affiliated groups are for sale. In fact, it’s fair to argue that China’s donations to charities and nonprofit groups, including colleges, have been key to the increasingly leftist direction these institutions have taken.

That’s why the coalition in support of the legislation that would give UnionPay access to Americans’ financial data includes a variety of left-wing organizations that consistently oppose tough measures on China’s attempts to gain unfair advantages over U.S. merchants in competitive markets, such as the National Retail Federation and the Retail Industry Leaders Association.

Another such group, the Merchants Payment Coalition, has even argued that allowing a Chinese company to process all U.S. credit card transactions – along with debit card transactions — would benefit U.S. national security .

It’s difficult to determine how much data the Chinese possess and how effective they could be in using that knowledge against us. But even those who are resigned to the fact that most Americans’ information is hopelessly compromised can agree that providing the Chinese one more way to look at Americans’ personal finances would be a horrible mistake.

Paul Boardman is chairman of the Decouple China PAC.