TikTok is under fire in the United States, following bipartisan support for banning the service unless it's spun off by the parent company ByteDance. ByteDance says that it won't ever sell TikTok, but if that is truly the case, then the app will be illegal to distribute in the United States in the somewhat near future.
The driving forces behind the bill are the security concerns surrounding the application, with allegations that it can be used to spy on or manipulate American citizens. While the Supreme Court is now set to weigh in on the matter ahead of the January 10th deadline, fans of the app are skeptical that the ban will be lifted or even delayed.
However, what evidence is there that TikTok poses a national security risk? While it's true that the Chinese government requires companies to "support, assist and cooperate with the state intelligence work," this isn't so different from the United States. Section 702 is often used as a justification to spy on foreigners outside of the United States, though countries like China have then banned services like Google as a result.
As a result, the TikTok ban can be seen as a retaliation against China banning U.S. services, but to do it under the guise of national security isn't necessarily an accurate portrayal of what's really going on.
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Has TikTok done anything wrong?
And if it has, is a ban the right move?
First and foremost, TikTok has certainly made some incredibly egregious mistakes. In 2022, ByteDance confirmed that workers in the company had spied on multiple journalists following the leaking of confidential information. Those workers were said to have looked at the IP addresses of journalists using the app to see if they were potentially near employees who were suspects of leaking the information. These include former BuzzFeed reporter Emily Baker-White and Financial Times reporter Cristina Criddle, among others.
With that said, even the Electronic Frontier Foundation is against the ban, going so far as to call it "unconstitutional." The EFF argues that the bill does nothing to protect actual user data, and companies will still continue to collect it, analyze it, and sell it, it just won't be TikTok. If your problem is the Chinese government and how it collects your data, should you not be more concerned about how companies closer to home are collecting and analyzing your data? After all, a Chinese company may not be able to use that information to advertise directly to you, but an American company certainly can.
The EFF argues that Congress should work to prevent all companies from mass collection of data, rather than just a select few that the government decides should be restricted. It also points out that the U.S. condemned Nigeria for its ban on Twitter in 2021, highlighting the hypocrisy of what the country is looking to do with TikTok now.
What about security and data collection?
TikTok doesn't seem to be doing anything out of the ordinary
TikTok has been the subject of a lot of investigative work across the board from independent cybersecurity researchers to full teams. For example, TikTok was widely reported to tracking keystrokes from users who clicked links in the app, injecting JavaScript into pages that were clicked. However, that's not quite what happened, and the security researcher who discovered it, Felix Krause, only reported on the technical capability, not that it actually was being tracked.
On top of that, TikTok is not the only application to do that either. Instagram, owned by Meta, does the same thing, and so does Facebook and Amazon. Instagram tracks user interactions on the page for advertising purposes, but the difference is that TikTok was said to be capable of tracking everything. There was no evidence to suggest it was actually collecting that data, but we know that Instagram does, so why is the focus on TikTok?
As for the terms of service including the data that users share with TikTok, what's different when compared to the data you share with American companies like Facebook, Apple, or Google? The California Consumer Privacy Act, the closest U.S. equivalent to GDPR, requires companies to comply if they operate in California, but only if they make more than 50% of their revenue from selling consumer data.
In fact, TikTok states that it collects "approximate" location data, through the use of IP addresses. In some regions, TikTok will request location data, but this is coarse location, not precise location. In contrast, Instagram actually does request precise location to enable features like location tagging. Whether or not that's okay isn't the problem, it's that the data TikTok requests isn't exactly out of the ordinary.
As for "biometric data" that TikTok added to its privacy policies in 2021, the company says those are used for AI filters that use facial recognition. As for why this was added, multiple states in the U.S. have requirements that companies disclose if they are processing biometric data, such as Illinois in a law passed in 2008, known as BIPA. In contrast in the EU, biometric data falls under GDPR, which TikTok complies with on all fronts. Given its addition to the U.S. terms of service only, it's possible that TikTok was shielding itself against scrutiny by disclosing it, especially given that Instagram found itself in hot water under that same Illinois law thanks to allegations that it didn't disclose how it used biometric data.
Instagram denied any wrongdoing but paid a settlement of $68.5 million. Shortly after the start of that lawsuit, TikTok updated its privacy policies to directly reference the collection of biometric data,
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Is a ban justified?
The U.S. has other problems it needs to deal with first
Depending on who you ask, a ban on TikTok, should it not be divested from ByteDance, is either completely justifiable or a constitutional violation. Given that the Supreme Court is said to be hearing an appeal from TikTok, it's likely that we'll find out whether or not they think it's a constitutional violation.
With that said, there's not a lot that TikTok does that other social media platforms don't, with the only difference between that TikTok is owned by a Chinese company. What that Chinese company does with that information should still be a concern, but in the same way, it should be a concern what American companies do with the information of American citizens.
The FISA Amendment Act of 2008 allows for the warrantless surveillance of American citizens for up to a week, alongside the Patriot Act which also enables broad surveillance of American and non-American citizens. Several American companies are participants in the PRISM program as well, which government officials have denied has been used on American citizens, though The Washington Post reported that data was collected and analyzed when the person the data pertained to was deemed to have a 51% chance or higher of being a foreign national.
All of this is to say that I personally agree with the EFF in that the problem doesn't really come from TikTok itself, but rather, the data we allow to be collected by companies in general. While TikTok spied on journalists, the United States Justice Department was caught doing the exact same thing in an effort to gain information on the communications of reporters at CNN, The Washington Post, and The New York Times. This isn't a TikTok problem, this is a broader problem.
Your data is your data, and banning TikTok won't stop companies from collecting it. In fact, it makes it more likely for you to use American services that can actually, tangibly affect your life right now by using that data to try and sell you products or to sell it to advertisers. The United States has a major data privacy problem on its hands, and passing the buck to TikTok merely shifts the blame rather than dealing with the actual problem.