FBI Has A Warning For Tiktok Users: Here’s Why
We all know that TikTok has always been problematic, not just for parents of teenagers but almost for everyone. Nowadays, parents are worried about the latest dangerous trends Tiktok users are following. The biggest issue is that the app is owned by ByteDance, a Chinese company. The Director of the FBI, Christopher Wray, has recently reminded lawmakers:
“Chinese companies are required to essentially… do whatever the Chinese government wants them to do in terms of sharing information or serving as a tool of the Chinese government.”
“the possibility that the Chinese government could use it to control data collection on millions of users. Or control the recommendation algorithm, which could be used to influence operations if they so chose. Or to control software on millions of devices, which gives it an opportunity to potentially technically compromise personal devices. That’s plenty of reason by itself to be extremely concerned,”
The bigger concerns are that China can actually use data about users from within the app to gather and store information about American citizens. Furthermore, China can put pressure on the company to modify its algorithm in order to display content with the purpose of influencing users.
The Trump administration also tried to block TikTok completely, together with another Chinese app, WeChat. It led to a very strange series of events that included the possibility of Microsoft buying TikTok. However, that didn’t happen, and Oracle was chosen instead to sort of safeguard the data of American users.
According to the privacy nutrition label in the iOS App Store, the data collected by tiktok includes contact information like your email address and phone number, as well as browsing history, your app usage data, the videos you interact with, and your location. All of the information would be valuable if you wanted to target specific individuals.
TikTok says that engineers in China can only access data that is public, like the videos posted on the platform or comments. Private user data is said to be walled off. The point that matters is that the company doesn’t have a choice. If China orders TikTok to hand over user data, then it will have to hand over whatever data it has.
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