TikTok: A social media platform you’ve probably heard of but aren’t entirely familiar with. Don’t worry, if you’re over the age of 25, you’re not alone. TikTok has done a lot of the leg work in helping your kids, grandkids, and “age is just a number” adult friends get through this quarantine with a steady stream of entertainment.
We won’t bog you down with a detailed explanation of what TikTok actually is. We, having grown up on MySpace and Facebook, don’t quite understand it ourselves (so it’s just videos? Like YouTube? Oh, nothing like YouTube? At all?). A quick trip through the first couple pages of search results courtesy of Google shows us TikTok is wildly popular, addicting, and, as of late, increasingly problematic.
One of the most popular social media platforms in 2020, TikTok is facing scrutiny at the highest levels of office in the United States, with both President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo recently stating the US was “looking at” preventing the Chinese-owned app from being used on American soil. Both the US Army and Navy banned TikTok from government phones in December, citing potential security risks.
A country-wide US ban would follow a similar move made by TikTok’s largest market, India, which decided to ban the social media platform along with several other Chinese-owned applications that posed cybersecurity concerns. Australian policymakers are also on board with putting a halt to popular app.
Amazon, the reason you’re not actually saving any money during Quarantine 2020, made headlines Friday after the company briefly asked its employees to delete TikTok from any mobile devices that also had access to company email accounts, according to internal emails obtained by the New York Times. Amazon JK’d its way out of the TikTok ban just hours later, claiming the email was sent to workers by mistake.
You may be asking yourself why the world’s superpowers are forming like the Avengers and concerning themselves with a social media platform that was largely built off the backs of Gen Z and their short attention spans. Quickly ascending to the stratosphere as a major social media platform after being launched in the US just a few years ago, TikTok joined the likes of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Google+ (lol jk) as a mobile device must-have. The Gen Z attention grabber, which consists mainly of short-form videos under 15 seconds, boasts nearly a billion active users. It sits at No. 3 among all free applications on the Apple App Store, as well as No. 1 when filtering that list through “Entertainment.”
In other words, TikTok is huge.
But that’s part of the problem, at least in the eyes of US officials with a penchant for national security (aka most of them).
TikTok is owned by ByteDance, a Chinese multinational internet tech company with headquarters in Beijing. While TikTok itself is based in Los Angeles and only acts as an independent subsidiary of China, some US policymakers argue that ByteDance could be forced to provide China with TikTok’s user data under the country’s controversial national security laws.
“There is no legal mechanism for Chinese companies to appeal if they disagree with a request,” US senators wrote in a letter to the acting US Director of National Intelligence last October (via CNN).
TikTok argues that because it stores American user data on US-based servers, American user data won’t be beholden to Chinese laws. But because of its direct relationship to a Chinese-based company, policymakers aren’t so convinced that allowing the social media platform to flourish in the US is in the best interest of the country’s national security.
You may now be asking yourself another question: How is this any different from what other popular social media platforms are doing?
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Well, for starters, no other single platform reportedly does as much to siphon user data than TikTok, according to a Reddit user who claims to have reverse-engineered the app earlier this year.
“They don’t collect anywhere near the same amount of data that TikTok does … It’s like comparing a cup of water to the ocean,” the user wrote while describing TikTok as a “data collection service that is thinly veiled as a social network.”
That includes the way companies spy on you via your clipboard. It’s become somewhat of a common practice for app developers to access the items from your clipboard (e.g. media that you’ve “Copied” on your device) to personalize your experience when possible. But thanks to an upcoming overhaul to the iPhone operating system due out this fall, users will soon receive a notification each and every time an application takes information stored on your clipboard.
That, for the most part, happens each time you launch an app, as discovered by some users who downloaded the iOS 14 beta. But in TikTok’s case? Every couple of keystrokes, resulting in a nonstop flurry of notifications while using the app.
Okay so TikTok is grabbing the contents of my clipboard every 1-3 keystrokes. iOS 14 is snitching on it with the new paste notification pic.twitter.com/OSXP43t5SZ
— Jeremy Burge (@jeremyburge) June 24, 2020
Users publicly shamed TikTok, along with a handful of other apps that egregiously read user clipboards, which resulted in the company vowing to change its practices.
And, again, it’s not just that TikTok is harvesting user data at a breakneck pace — it’s that it may be required to pass along that data to the Chinese government at any moment. Because of the way China has built its national security infrastructure around citizen surveillance, it’s easy to understand why non-Chinese governments would be opposed to allowing its own citizens to use technology that could potentially feed user data to foreign powers.
You may still be asking yourself the same question: How is this any different from what other platforms social media platforms are doing?
The elephant in the room that is Facebook, Inc., after all, owns Facebook, Instagram, and Whatsapp — a trio of massive platforms that could collectively paint a pretty accurate picture of any user who frequents all three applications. Beyond that, federal requests for Facebook user data are not all that uncommon, with the US submitting 50,741 requests in 2019. Facebook says it responded to 88% of those, many of which fall under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
The difference? Here’s what Facebook has to say:
“Government officials sometimes make requests for data about people who use Facebook as part of official investigations. The vast majority of these requests relate to criminal cases, such as robberies or kidnappings. In many of these cases, these government requests seek basic subscriber information, such as name, registration date and length of service. Other requests may also seek IP address logs or account content.”
Facebook also has the ability to refuse formal requests for user data. ByteDance, if requested by the Chinese government, does not have the same luxury. It’s also unclear what sort of TikTok user data China could ask for, or for what purpose.
So, what do you think? Should the US government do anything about TikTok? Feel free to comment below.