Despite Tik Tok is one of the most popular social networks these days, many people, especially in USA – geopolitical rival of the Asian giant – fear that the Chinese application leaks the data of its users to the communist party who commands that country. In fact, in December, the United States Senate banned the use of Tik Tok on official devices, and now several congressmen from the northern country are directly proposing to completely ban the application. But how true is the fear of probable espionage?
TikTok is owned by the company bytedancewhich is based in Beijing. In China, the government censors and controls Internet companies, and uses online surveillance to control people. However, the American part of TikTok has been caught spying on a journalist (which it admitted) suppressing black content creators (it claimed it was a “mistake”) and allowing China-based employees access to non-public information about Americans.
From the Democratic Senator Michael F. Bennett even the republican joseph hawley, the bipartisan push to ban Tik Tok is growing. But this extreme solution clashes with the taste of many users, especially those of Generation Z: TikTok is a very important place for self-expression and exploration, and banning it could trigger an intergenerational war. Faced with this, are there reasons for the United States to ban Tik Tok?
One of the two biggest concerns in this controversy is the possible traffic of data from Tik Tok to the Chinese government. Josh Hawley says that “if you have TikTok on your phone, it’s reading your emails, it’s looking at your photos, it’s accessing your contact list, and it’s making that information available to the Chinese Communist Party, period.” And it is true that Tik Tok collects a lot of data, but no less than another social network of American origin, Facebookthat in 2020 the amount of data it collects increased, and it is much greater than that of the Chinese network: it even collects location data, profile information, and the web pages that users visit outside of Facebook.
The same happens with Google, which tries to record a history of where you go and all the pages you visit in your Chrome web browser. But on the subject of private emails, there is no evidence that Tik Tok reads them. In addition, the application’s representatives state that they have not shared US user data with the Chinese government, nor would they do so if asked, in addition to ensuring that they have sent all US data to cloud services managed by Oracle, one of the largest companies in Silicon Valley.
Despite this, ByteDance is still required to comply with requests for user data under Chinese law, and it’s unclear how the company could resist, despite claims that it doesn’t tamper with that data.
On the other hand, and while it may not be consoling, China has been amassing data on Americans long before TikTok came along. It has been implicated in major personal data breaches, including attacks on the US Office of Personnel Management and that of the credit reporting agency, equifax, which affected nearly half of all Americans. What’s more, China could also buy data on anyone in the data broker industry that tracks and sells users’ personal information to companies around the world. (Which, on the other hand, any government or company could do).
The other big concern is how the Chinese government can decide what you see on Tik Tok, or how it can use the social network to spread its own propaganda. the democrat Michael F. Bennett wrote a letter to Apple already Google regarding this, alleging that the Chinese Communist Party “could force TikTok, through ByteDance, to use its influence to further the interests of the Chinese government, for example, by adjusting its algorithm to feature American content to undermine American democratic institutions or silence criticism of the Chinese Communist Party’s policy.”
However, what makes TikTok so popular – the “For You” algorithm that customizes a different collection of videos for each user according to their preferences – makes it hard to spot how its algorithms might be tipping the stage. Additionally, TikTok said that its search functionality works with data from other popular searches and hashtags. And to allay some concerns, the app may make its content recommendation and moderation systems subject to review by an additional independent third-party inspector.
Although the world of applications and their links with the powers of the world continues to be a dark subject, it is convenient that the decisions to be made regarding them are based on information and evidence, and not out of simple fear. Meanwhile, in the face of what is not known, it is convenient that if you have any doubts, Tik Tok is used without opening an account -it is still possible-, be careful with the handling of personal information and pay attention to the privacy settings in this and any application.
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