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TikTok has faced widespread ban calls from critics, who feared that China could use the platform to access user data around the world. At the end of last
TikTok has faced widespread ban calls from critics, who feared that China could use the platform to access user data around the world. At the end of last year, the criticism towards the social platform intensified and with the start of 2023 relations between the USA and China deteriorated and the social network came under attack again.
24 Channels He talks about why the TikTok ban is spreading to other countries and what can await the service in the near future.
It is an algorithm-based social media platform for sharing short videos that has skyrocketed in popularity over the past few years and reached one billion monthly active users in September 2021. The application is very popular among young people and is used all over the world.
The standoff against Chinese digital services began during Donald Trump’s presidency. It was he who tried to ban TikTok and WeChat in the US because he saw them as a threat to national security.
However, due to a series of lawsuits, the ban never came into effect. Eventually, the current president of the USA, Joe Biden, annulled the decree banning these practices. It was replaced by a new security review that brought up a number of not-so-positive points. But one of the first nails in TikTok’s coffin was the Forbes investigation, which revealed that ByteDance had repeatedly accessed data from American users and planned to use TikTok to track the location of certain American citizens, including journalists.
The company, of course, denied such accusations, but agreed to launch an internal investigation that revealed employees were stalking journalists who covered the company’s activities. Subsequently, the chief internal auditor, who headed the team that organized the monitoring, was dismissed.
Official employees in the US and Canada are prohibited from using TikTok on their work phones. This topic remains relevant and is discussed at various levels.
Last November, FBI Director Christopher Wray said TikTok posed a “threat to national security” at a House Homeland Security Committee hearing in November. Already at the end of 2022, Joe Biden approved the ban of the Chinese social network on the devices of government employees. A wave of bans spread in a number of states where it was supported by the Republicans.
At the same time, many schools and universities in the US have also banned TikTok on school devices and school Wi-Fi. In addition, students were not advised to use the social network on their personal devices.
After all, Massachusetts senator Josh Hawley, who wrote the law banning TikTok on federal devices signed in December, also passed a broader bill on January 25 that would ban TikTok on all devices in the United States.
In response to political and legal pressure, TikTok and ByteDance stepped up their lobbying activities in the US. ByteDance General Counsel Erich Andersen, who previously took an “upside-down” approach to negotiations with the Biden administration, described the company’s approach as “our own disclosure of what we are willing to do and the national security process.” meeting with think tanks and lawmakers and recruiting a number of new communicators. According to The New York Times, ByteDance spent about $5.4 million on lobbying last year and is expected to surpass that figure by 2023.
TikTok CEO Shaw Zi Chu will testify before the US House Energy and Commerce Committee on March 23. He is expected to answer questions about consumer privacy, data security, and “TikTok’s relationship with the Communist Party of China.” TikTok spokesperson Brooke Oberwetter said the company welcomes the opportunity to “flag all the ‘ands’ in Tiktok, ByteDance, and our commitments to addressing US national security issues.”
The IT service of the European Commission has instructed all employees of the European Union executive body to delete the TikTok video application from their work and personal devices. The request, emailed to all employees on Thursday, February 23, comes amid growing concerns about data protection.
The Canadian government has also banned TikTok from all of its phones and other devices due to data protection concerns. He said the program poses “an unacceptable level of privacy and security risk” and that the company’s data collection methods leave it vulnerable to cyberattacks.
Subsequently, a TikTok ban was introduced by the Danish Ministry of Defense, citing the same security concerns. It is worth noting that the country’s parliament announced a similar ban last month. The country’s lawmakers had to remove TikTok from their devices and not use the social network.
While nearly every social network collects and stores user data, the amount of data TikTok collects and how transparently it communicates what it collects has some cybersecurity experts worried – especially given the perception that the Chinese government has access to it.
As soon as the app is downloaded and opened on your smartphone or tablet, it learns a lot about you.
Comprehensive terms of service define what you agree to:
Like other platforms, including Facebook and YouTube, TikTok tracks the content you interact with and for how long. But TikTok also monitors how you use your device and how it works, including “keystroke patterns or rhythms, battery status, sound settings, and connected audio devices.”
It can also identify the objects and landscapes that appear in your videos, the presence and location of facial and body features in the image… and the text of spoken words.
Social media businesses rely on GPS data analytics to sell ads, develop new versions of apps, and tailor content to user habits.
Cybersecurity firm Internet 2.0 says TikTok, with more than 1.5 billion users, is not entirely transparent. TikTok can collect “accurate” data about the location of users using GPS, and this information is far more accurate than the company once admitted.
An interesting feature of TikTok is that it remembers the MAC address of the device – a unique 12-digit identifier. In 2020, the company managed to circumvent the Android operating system’s ban on reading this information, but the company itself later stated that new versions of the application do not read MAC addresses.
The main complaint against the social network is quite clear: Since the product belongs to the Chinese company ByteDance, it is clear that in the future user data may fall into the hands of the Chinese authorities. It is possible that TikTok is or still is a spying tool. And although the company tries to deny the accusations and justify itself, it is constantly caught in an unethical approach to its dealings with the end user, to say the least.
Interviewed with 24 Channels CEO Molfar Artem StarosekTalking about why TikTok can actually be dangerous for users in practice.
Any social network is dangerous, and Tik Tok is no exception. Because of the app’s vulnerabilities, attackers can actually gain access to user accounts, as experts in the field have repeatedly stated. But I think the main problem is Chinese ownership. Device information, email address, date of birth, phone number, your contacts, preferences, in-app activity and location are data that may fall into the hands of the Chinese government.
Artem stresses that the real problem lies in local laws that allow the Chinese government to secretly request data from Chinese companies and citizens for intelligence gathering operations. China may also use TikTok content guidelines to: Disinformation and political influence in the West.
On the other hand, TikTok’s privacy and security issues are no different than Instagram, Facebook or Twitter. All social networks collect data from their users. Restrictions on TikTok use may be due to many factors, including data security, national security, child protection, and competition with local social networks, but the intensification of opposition may be due to the intensification of Chinese influence politically. .
– Adds Artem.
CEO Molfar also points out that the locations of other countries, including Canada, Belgium, Denmark, India, Taiwan, the US and the EU, are a clear line of geopolitical resistance to China’s growing expansion.
The future of TikTok in Ukraine is an open question right now. The social network continues to work without restrictions, despite the fact that it managed to actively promote Russian trends and bloggers in the Ukrainian information space.
How and when will the Ukrainian government respond to the spying threat from TikTok? Will it be banned in comparison with other countries that show active support for Ukraine in the war with Russia? The answers to all these questions may appear in the near future, especially if global opposition to the Chinese social network is actively growing.
Source: 24 Tv
John Wilkes is a seasoned journalist and author at Div Bracket. He specializes in covering trending news across a wide range of topics, from politics to entertainment and everything in between.
