Is TikTok Stealing Data for China or Our Time? – 4/2/2023 – David Wiswell

If you had asked me in the 1990s whether annoying choreographed dancing and bad voice acting would become a national security problem for the United States, I would have thought Saddam Hussein was singing with the Spice Girls.

According to a congressional hearing that increased pressure on the US to ban the video-sharing app, the national security problem is TikTok. Shou Zi Chew, the CEO of Chinese-owned TikTok, was summoned and spent five hours being bullied by lawmakers from both parties.

At a time when tensions between the US and China are growing by the day, my questions about a TikTok ban are: Is TikTok really a threat to national security? And can Congress talk about it knowingly without ever having danced “The Laffy Taffy”?

The main charge was TikTok’s connection to the Chinese regime through its parent company —ByteDance —many of its top executives are accused of having ties to the Chinese Communist Party. In addition, Chew is the former chief financial officer of ByteDance and still has regular consulting meetings with the company.

The basis of this concern was the idea of ​​TikTok sharing data on Americans with China. Chinese laws were cited that require companies to share information with the regime. Congressional committee chair Cathy McMorris Rodgers went so far as to say, “TikTok is a weapon of the Chinese Communist Party to spy on you, manipulate what you watch, and exploit you for future generations.” The feeling of those who attended the hearing was that they were going to meet their in-laws who are armed with a shotgun and want to ask you what your intentions are regarding their data.

Chew said that even though TikTok is a subsidiary of ByteDance, it is an autonomous entity, with 60% of its shares distributed globally, and that Beijing has never asked for data from TikTok and never will. He also outlined plans for TikTok’s so-called “Project Texas,” an initiative whereby US subscriber data would be stored by US-owned Oracle. To the typical Trump voter, that probably sounds better than if they had dubbed the initiative the “Wuhan Project”, for example.

There were also a multitude of criticisms that could be leveled at almost any tech company, such as their ability to share misinformation, facial recognition, and effects on the mental health of teens and young adults. My own mental health took a hit when, while doing research for this column on TikTok, I ended up getting sucked into a brain numbing hole while watching two hours of Laffy Taffy. By the time it was over, I was having suicidal thoughts, but boy, did I know how to dance.

An interesting part of the data concern is that 47 of our 50 US states have poor or non-existent privacy protection laws. Among them, the states of almost all parliamentarians who criticized TikTok at the hearing.

Meta, TikTok’s dwindling American competitor and owner of Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram, shelled out $20 million to lobby TikTok in Congress and pay for op-eds and editorials lambasting TikTok for many of the aforementioned practices. .. which Meta also commits.

Like selling our data to any global entity willing to buy it. In fact, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Gmail and Snapchat all have agreements with Chinese ad tech companies, which exposes our data to the same risk. All of this is befitting a conversation about TikTok, as it can make some of the verbal dancing here seem a little… choreographed. Possibly even repeated literally by lobbyists.

I don’t want to downplay the importance of company warning signs or security concerns regarding a country we’re at odds with — and one whose spy balloons we’ve had to shoot down recently. Maybe a ban is the right thing to do.

But if personal and national security are the issues at stake, and they are not the only risk present in the market, would not the market be the appropriate place to start tightening regulations, transparency laws and mandatory independent audits for any platform that operates in the country? Otherwise, how can we ensure that governments around the world do not have access to sensitive American data? Like the accuracy of my Laffy Taffy.

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