We took a look at all sides of the conversation about the Chinese-owned, short-form video app.
Better Informed in just 3.1416 minutes
Get the daily email that makes learning about current tech and coding trends fun. Stay engaged and on top of your industry, for free.
In an early Christmas gift to Youtube Shorts and Instagram Reels, this week the US Senate unanimously passed a bill that would ban TikTok on the government-owned devices of federal employees. Though the legislation faces an uncertain future in the House, several states have already enacted similar bans. And a bipartisan group of legislators wants to go further, proposing a full-on nationwide TikTok prohibition.
Lawmakers have nothing against lip-syncing challenges and 20-second plant care tutorials, but they see the short-form video app as a national security threat and point to a parade of red flags (no Communist Party pun intended) concerning privacy and security that arise from TikTok being owned by a Chinese company: Beijing-based ByteDance.
But TikTok is hoping to salvage the American Dream of virality for its 135 million US-based users. The company has been negotiating with the Biden administration for months, hoping to reach a deal to keep the company running in the US with changes to its data governance policies.
So how exactly could your twelve-year-old cousin’s favorite thing to do before bed be a threat to anything other than her emotional development?
The case against TikTok
FBI Director Chris Wray warned that the Chinese government could weaponize the powerful recommendation algorithm for “influence operations.” Wray also claims China can collect user data for espionage.
This isn’t just TikTok-phobia:
- Leaked audio from the company’s internal meetings obtained by BuzzFeed suggests that engineers in China have accessed US users’ data.
- Forbes learned of a Beijing-based ByteDance team’s plan to surveil the location of at least two Americans using TikTok data.
- Chinese law mandates that businesses share intelligence with the government upon request.
All this has lawmakers like Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO) saying that Americans aren’t safe on TikTok unless ByteDance sells it to a company not based in China. US users themselves, too, appear worried. A recent YouGov poll found that 41% of Americans think TikTok is a national security threat (35% said they’re not sure).
But some experts think these concerns are overblown
If you’re worried that a CCP cadre might cringe at unpublished footage of you munching corn off a rotating drill, or steal your personal info, remember that TikTok isn’t the first app to hoover up user data.
Information researcher Clifford Lampe told Forbes he thinks TikTok “collects as much data as any social media platform.” And researchers from the University of Toronto concluded last year that the app doesn’t appear to collect “contact lists, user files, or geolocation coordinates” without user permission.
China also doesn’t need TikTok to get a hold of personal data: Hacking or buying it off a shady data broker (as it has done on multiple occasions) are options, too. Besides, much of it can already be found in public sources.
As for TikTok itself, it claims US user data can’t be accessed from China without the oversight of a US team and assures it would never share data with authorities in Beijing.—SK
