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The U.S. House of Representatives voted 352-65 on March 13, 2024, to require TikTok’s parent company, China-based ByteDance, to sell the app or face a nationwide ban on TikTok. President Joe Biden said on March 8 that he would sign the legislation if it reached his desk. The popular video social media app had 149 million users in the U.S. as of January 2024. Many of them contacted Congress to protest the possibility of a ban. The bill’s fate in the Senate is unclear. It’s also unclear whether any resulting legislation would survive a court challenge. On May 17, 2023, Montana Gov. Greg Gianforte signed legislation banning TikTok in the state, the first total ban by a U.S. state government. The law would impose fines of US$10,000 per day on any app store that offers TikTok and on the app-maker itself if it operates in the state. Individual users would not be subject to penalties. The law was scheduled to go into effect Jan. 1, 2024, but a federal judge blocked it pending a trial to determine whether the state overstepped its authority and whether the law violates the First Amendment. The federal government, along with many state and foreign governments and some companies, has already banned TikTok on work-provided phones. This type of ban can be effective for protecting data related to government work. But a full national ban of the app is another matter, which raises a number of questions: What data privacy risk does TikTok pose? What could the Chinese government do with data collected by the app? Is its content recommendation algorithm dangerous? Is it legal for a government to impose a total ban on the app? And is it even possible to ban an app? Vacuuming up data As a cybersecurity researcher, I’ve noted that every few years, a newly popular mobile app raises issues of security, privacy and data access. Apps collect data for several reasons. Sometimes the data is used to improve the app for users. However, most apps collect data that the companies use in part to fund their operations. This revenue typically comes from targeting users with ads based on the data they collect. The questions this use of data raises are: Does the app need all this data? What does it do with the data? And how does it protect the data from others? So what makes TikTok different from the likes of Pokemon-GO, Facebook or even your phone itself? TikTok’s privacy policy, which few people read, is a good place to start. Overall, the company is not particularly transparent about its practices. The document is too long to list here all the data it collects, which should be a warning. There are a few items of interest in TikTok’s privacy policy besides the information you give them when you create an account – name, age, username, password, language, email, phone number, social media account information and profile image – that are concerning. This information includes location data, data from your clipboard, contact information, website tracking, plus all data you post and messages you send through the app. The company claims that current versions of the app do not collect GPS information from U.S. users. If most apps collect data, why are governments worried about TikTok? First, they worry about the Chinese government accessing data from TikTok’s 150 million users in the U.S. There is also a concern about the algorithms used by TikTok to show content. Data in the Chinese government’s hands If the data does end up in the hands of the Chinese government, the question is how could it use the data to its benefit. The government could share it with other companies in China to help them profit, which is no different than U.S. companies sharing marketing data. The Chinese government is known for playing the long game, and data is