Banning TikTok or coercing its sale would only address a tiny portion of the problem.
Olivier Douliery/Getty Images, a collaboration between Future Tense and the Tech, Law, & Security Program at American University Washington College of Law that examines the ways technology is influencing how we think about speech.
TikTok, the latest social media giant serving up distraction for the masses, has lately become a political tool for mass distraction. The White House has threatened to ban the Chinese-owned app in the United States or at least broker a possible acquisition by Microsoft . Behind that drama, however, lie a series of crucial technology policy challenges the political class is largely ignoring.
U.S. government scrutiny of TikTok is based in the assumption that being owned by the Beijing-based social media company ByteDance makes it a likely avenue for Chinese government malfeasance targeting the United States. From this point of view, the fact that the app reportedly has 100 million U.S. users leads to three main kinds of risks: user data falling into Chinese government or other hostile hands, Chinese propaganda and censorship efforts penetrating U.S.
Each of these risks is real, but each is in fact larger than anything specific to TikTok. A focus on TikTok alone will do little to solve the broader problems of which these risks are only the most prominent example, and no one should feel their tech security work is done if a single Chinese-owned app is all that gets addressed.
Take the risk of the Chinese government or other bad actors gaining access to user data. The possibility captures the imagination, because mobile apps like TikTokso much data about their users. Not only do they record a person’s posts, but they track what posts a user looks at and for how long. They track location data, system configuration information, and other details that can make users identifiable across different services.
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