TikTok – Page 2 – Lone Candle

Maybe Trump was right about TikTok

Posted on December 9, 2022 by Lone Candle

“TikTok is owned by ByteDance, which is based in China. It isn’t an arm of the Chinese Communist Party, but Chinese laws say it can be forced to assist the Chinese government. That could mean handing all the data its app has collected about American citizens to China. And TikTok collects a lot of data about its users.
“The Chinese government has established clear pathways to empower itself to surveil individuals, to gather data from corporations, and through the 2017 [National Intelligence] law, to aggregate that data on government servers,” said Aynne Kokas, director of the University of Virginia’s East Asia Center and author of the recently released book Trafficking Data: How China Is Winning the Battle for Digital Sovereignty. “To the degree to which any of this is happening is difficult to know.”

TikTok has repeatedly said it isn’t happening and that it never will. It’s also tried to distance itself from its Chinese parent company. But those claims have been undermined by recent reports that say ByteDance has a great deal of control over TikTok and its direction, that China does have access to US data, and that ByteDance has tried to get location data from a few Americans through their TikTok accounts. (To these reports, TikTok has said that the app doesn’t collect precise location data and therefore couldn’t surveil US users this way, and that leaked conversations about Chinese employees having access to US data were in regards to figuring out to turn that access off.)”

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” They also fear that TikTok, directed by the Chinese government, will push propaganda or disinformation, which wouldn’t be hard to do considering how TikTok feeds its users so much content with its “For You” algorithm. It’s also not out of the realm of possibility that it would do this. A 2019 report showed that ByteDance had a list of banned content on TikTok, which included Tiananmen Square, Tibet, and Taiwan. And China has been caught using social media to spread disinformation or propaganda before (as have many other countries, including the United States). But that was through someone else’s platform. With TikTok, China could directly control what’s on the platform and how it’s distributed. It can’t do that with Facebook or Instagram.”

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“there’s the fear that China will be able to use TikTok’s data to power its AI innovations. That’s an advantage the US won’t have because its social media apps are banned in China and because there aren’t laws that would compel social media companies to hand over data just because the government wants it.”

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“While some have come around to thinking Trump was right to want to ban TikTok, they don’t necessarily agree with how he tried to do it. Courts didn’t agree either, and blocked his August 2020 executive order that would have forced ByteDance to sell TikTok or be banned. But it never made it to an actual trial, as Biden took office and revoked the executive order.
Republican leaders have criticized President Biden for not being as tough as Trump on TikTok and appearing to support the platform by reaching out to some of its biggest influencers. But the Biden administration isn’t going easy on TikTok, either. Biden recently issued an executive order expanding the definition of national security for the purposes of CFIUS reviews to include data and technologies necessary to “protect United States technical leadership.” It doesn’t directly address TikTok, but it certainly includes it.

CFIUS, by the way, has been reviewing ByteDance’s acquisition of Musical.ly for several years now. CFIUS doesn’t comment on ongoing investigations, but TikTok said in a statement to Recode that “we will not comment on the specifics of confidential discussions with the US government, but we are confident that we are on a path to fully satisfy all reasonable US national security concerns.”

To that end, TikTok is currently trying to wall US data off from China to satisfy CFIUS’s concerns in an effort it’s dubbed “Project Texas.” That would keep what’s considered “protected” data on US users on US-based servers run by Oracle, with controls over who has access to it.”

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“A deal between CFIUS and TikTok has reportedly been imminent for weeks now, but it hasn’t happened yet. There are doubts that anything short of forcing ByteDance to sell off TikTok would guarantee that China can’t access user data or do anything about concerns over pushing propaganda and disinformation.”

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“These problems could be solved very quickly if ByteDance were to sell off TikTok, but that doesn’t seem to be an option. The Chinese government would have to approve such a move, and experts say that’s very unlikely.

“The Chinese government loves TikTok,” Lewis said, pointing out that it’s the only social media app from China that’s been successful outside of the country. “The Chinese government will protect it.””

Do you really need to worry about your security on TikTok? Here’s what we know.

Posted on August 18, 2020 by Lone Candle

“TikTok has repeatedly denied that it has or ever would give up user data to the Chinese government. The company says it stores American user data on servers in the US and Singapore, which ostensibly would make it harder for the Chinese government to tap into. The company has also taken measures to separate its US business overall from its Chinese parent company. For example, TikTok doesn’t operate in China (the Chinese version of it, Douyin, does).

The CIA reportedly investigated TikTok’s security threat and found no proof that Chinese intelligence authorities have been snooping on Americans through TikTok, according to the New York Times. The agency’s assessment still found that Chinese authorities could potentially tap into Americans’ data through the app, according to the Times’s summary of the classified report. That’s why last December, the Department of Defense cautioned military personnel to delete TikTok from their smartphones over security concerns. And the Senate voted unanimously to ban federal employees from using TikTok on government devices last week.

“There’s no publicly available evidence that TikTok has ever done anything wrong,” said Segal, “but the concern is that because the Chinese National Intelligence Law of 2017 says any Chinese company can be drafted into espionage, a company could be forced to hand over the data.””

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“A second area of concern is that apps like TikTok and WeChat censor content that the Chinese Communist Party disapproves of. On this front, there are more documented concerns, especially about WeChat.

WeChat has been found to intercept and censor political messages sent by Chinese users to US users. A report in May by Canadian researchers CitizenLab found that the app was blocking certain messages, including a political cartoon depicting the late Nobel laureate Liu Xiaobo, who was critical of the Chinese government. The report also found that WeChat was analyzing messages sent by international users, including those in the US, to scan for and block politically sensitive content before it could circulate among Chinese users.

With TikTok, there have been accusations — without definitive proof — of censorship at the behest of the Chinese government. Last year, internal company documents showed TikTok was instructing its staff to moderate content in line with the Chinese government’s censorship of topics like the Tiananmen Square massacre and Free Tibet, according to leaked guidelines published by the Guardian. But these guidelines were part of broad rules against controversial discussions on international politics across countries, so there’s no explicit proof that this was a directive from the Chinese government to TikTok. Another oft-cited concern about potential political censorship on TikTok is that during last year’s Hong Kong independence protests, there weren’t a lot of results for popular hashtags of the protest movement. But there’s no proof that the company was actively censoring content or whether people just weren’t posting about it.”

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“It’s important to put all of this in context. TikTok and WeChat’s political troubles in the US don’t exist in a vacuum, but rather inside a larger web of complex China-US politics. Since 2018, Trump has waged a trade war with China over free trade policies that he feels disadvantage US manufacturing. And increasingly, tech has become tangled up in this war, involving Chinese-owned dating apps, drone companies, and telecom hardware makers.”

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“Chesney stressed, the US isn’t making the first move here. American companies have long been banned in China, where companies that started off by building copycats of major US tech apps — Baidu is China’s answer to Google, Didi its Uber, Weibo its Twitter — have grown into tech powerhouses. US social media companies have tried, unsuccessfully, to enter the Chinese market.”

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“Several analysts told Recode that some of the concern about TikTok and other Chinese technology companies is valid. But the way the TikTok order in particular has been executed — with Trump going back and forth on whether he’d approve a TikTok-Microsoft sale, and at one point demanding a cut of the deal — has been haphazard and has given the global business community a sense of distrust toward the US government.”