Ajit Karn
More and more people from both parties want to ban TikTok in the United States. Representatives Mike Gallagher (R-WI) and Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-IL) and Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) all put forward bills to ban the app. Even though security is a concern, ByteDance, the Chinese company that owns TikTok, insists that US user data is stored outside of China. Even so, US lawmakers worry that the CCP could force the company to give up information about US users. So, now that you know all that, will the US ban TikTok?
With support from both parties, will the US ban TikTok?
In December, TikTok admitted in public that employees had “illegally accessed” the personal user data of two journalists, and those employees were fired. A few days earlier, Senator Marco Rubio had introduced the ANTI-SOCIAL CCP ACT. For security reasons, the TSA and the U.S. military also banned the app from all government-owned devices.
But the bipartisan bill is getting criticism from people who say it’s more about politics than privacy. Ryan Calo, a law and information science professor at the University of Washington, told NPR that TikTok isn’t as much of a security risk as people think. “If the sophisticated Chinese intelligence sector wanted information, it probably wouldn’t have to go through TikTok,” he said.
Does TikTok really watch what you do?
As was already said, the company admitted in public that four employees looked at the private information of two reporters. Forbes says that when you use the in-app browser, the app injects a Java script that records every button you press. But Facebook and Instagram do the same thing, so it seems like this is a common way for social media sites to work. The General Data Protection Commission of the European Union fined Facebook’s parent company, Meta, $410 million for using user data in the wrong way. And on another part of the internet, the Data Protection Commission of Ireland is looking into a huge Twitter data breach.
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The bill wasn’t introduced until the middle of December. If it passes, it won’t happen for a while. And if the government does ban the app, it will get a lot of pushback from younger people.
