The U.S. House of Representatives passed legislation recently requiring TikTok to either be owned primarily by a U.S. corporation or be blocked in the United States. The legislation will now be taken up by the U.S. Senate, where it faces a decidedly murkier path despite support from President Joe Biden.
To understand why TikTok presents a clear and present danger to national security, it is important to understand TikTok at its most basic and then how it compares with similar companies.
The primary concern surrounding TikTok is that it is a Chinese company, a subsidiary of the Beijing-based Bytedance. As a Chinese company, Bytedance and its subsidiaries are obligated to assist Chinese intelligence-gathering worldwide. Stories have appeared demonstrating that Chinese Communist Party (CCP) officials use TikTok to collect data on everyone, from individual protesters to journalists. Empowering a Chinese company beholden to the CCP to control phones, holders of sensitive data on their users, and others, it seems foolhardy to trust them at their word.
TikTok presents serious problems, but how should we compare it with similar firms individually or against larger concerns?
Google, Facebook, and others collect data on American consumers, but there are significant differences not just in the amount of data each company collects but also in how they use what they collect. For instance, companies such as Google have actually refused to work with the U.S. government on advanced technologies such as artificial intelligence. It seems incomprehensible that a Chinese company such as TikTok with a Communist Party official at the highest level of the company would refuse any request by the Party. There is a vast difference between U.S. firms’ relationship with the state and Chinese companies’ relationship with Party officials throughout Chinese companies.
Furthermore, TikTok collects significantly more data than social media platforms and accesses more secure areas of a phone. This presents a serious problem given that phones, between messages, behavior, and other monitoring, probably know more about us than even those close to us. Given the access to these data in China and its extensive intrusion beyond normal app needs to overall behavior, this presents very worrying implications in the hands of an authoritarian government reaching into the most intimate parts of Americans’ lives.
Chinese companies have been blocked for the very real security risks they pose to the United States. Huawei was blocked because of national security concerns of manufacturing insecure devices either maliciously or by willful ignorance. Huawei and its competitor, ZTE, are directly owned by the Chinese military, with clear proof of the malicious security in their devices. Just the fact that TikTok comes in a glossier consumer-facing format does not change the underlying risk to the United States from the computer code within the platform.
Contrast this with the behavior of tech companies, such as Facebook and Google. These companies face lawsuits for not protecting consumer data or hacks. Even the relationships between U.S. tech social media firms are different. U.S. courts have actually ruled against special government access to user data or control over platform content. The idea of a court ruling against the Chinese government in China or the U.S. government surrendering American citizens to the CCP in the United States is unimaginable.
TikTok presents a grave security threat because of its data gathering on Americans, its relationship with Beijing, and most fundamentally, the security risk of the code used to power its popular app. The fact that TikTok uses cute and catchy videos to hook Americans does not make it any less risky.
