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We Have Met the Enemy, and It Is…TikTok
A few months ago I wrote about TikTok: marvelling at its rapid spread, noting how it was China’s first big tech success internationally, even speculating on what it could mean for U.S. healthcare. Now TikTok is back in the news, because — and I’m not making this up — experts fear it could be a threat to national security.
The Treasury Department’s Committee on Foreign Investment is investigating TikTok’s parent ByteDance. A Senate Judiciary Committee panel is holding hearings today (at which TikTok declined to appear). Concerns were initially raised about apparent censorship of Hong Kong protests, but now are broader. Some sources claim TikTok is sending user data back to China, possibly to the Chinese government.
Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR) worries that “…the company is beholden to the Chinese Communist Party and will not secure the rights and privacy of its American users,” while Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) expressed concern “…that apps like TikTok — that store massive amounts of personal data accessible to foreign governments — may pose serious risks to millions of Americans.”
And you thought it was just a platform for goofy videos.
One former ByteDance manager told The Washington Post: “They want to be a global company, and numbers-wise, they’ve had that success. But the purse is still in China: The money always comes from there, and the decisions all come from there.” A security expert added: “The leverage the government has over the people who have access to that data, that’s what’s relevant.”
TikTok denies that it censors political content, claims that U.S. data is stored “locally,” and maintains that it does not send any user data to China, but we’re grappling to deal with a tech company having such a U.S. footprint while overseen by another country. Mark Zuckerberg, whose own company has faced plenty of criticism about its values, said in a speech at Georgetown University:
Until recently, the internet in almost every country outside China has been defined by…
