CNN Business
—
Two years after then-President Donald Trump said he would ban TikTok in the United States through an executive order, the short-form video platform is once again under scrutiny in Washington. And the underlying problem remains largely the same: TikTok’s ties to China through its parent company, Bytedance.
A growing number of US lawmakers are calling on the Biden administration to take action against TikTok, citing apparent national security and data privacy concerns. The criticism stems from a Buzzfeed News report in June that said some US user data was accessed multiple times from China. The report cited leaked audio recordings of dozens of internal TikTok meetings, including one where a TikTok employee allegedly said, “Everything is seen in China.”
In a response to the report, TikTok previously said it “has always maintained that our engineers located outside of the United States, including in China, can access US user data as needed under these strict controls.” A TikTok executive testified before a Senate panel last year that he does not share information with the Chinese government and that a US-based security team decides who can access US user data from China.
The renewed pressure on TikTok comes as the platform’s influence continues to grow in the United States. After Trump left, the Biden administration revoked the executive order and largely backed down from official attempts to ban TikTok. Last year, TikTok said it surpassed 1 billion monthly active users globally, and more than 100 million users are believed to be in the United States, according to some market research estimates. Activity on the app continues to shape the news cycle, popular music, food trends and more in the country. Meanwhile, other American social media giants continue to imitate TikTok’s features in a bid to compete.
Some critics have previously called Trump’s crusade against the fast-growing video app political theater rooted in xenophobia, and denounced Trump’s bizarre suggestion that the US should get a ‘cut’ from any deal s they were forcing the sale of the application to an American company. But the latest round of pressure from lawmakers on both sides of the aisle shows just how much the issue of national security continues to plague TikTok in the United States, even under a new administration.
Here’s what you need to know about TikTok and Bytedance’s latest scrutiny along the device.
Several US lawmakers and officials have called in recent months for further investigations into TikTok’s data storage practices or even for the app to be removed from US app stores.
A coalition of GOP senators led by Tom Cotton of Arkansas sent a letter in June to Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen calling for responses on steps the Biden administration is taking to address “national security and privacy risks posed by TikTok.” A separate group of Republican senators led by Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee also sent a letter of questions to TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew. The senators said recent media reports “confirm what lawmakers have long suspected about TikTok and its parent company, ByteDance — they’re using their access to a treasure trove of US consumer data to surveil Americans.”
Meanwhile, a bipartisan group of lawmakers from the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence has urged the Federal Trade Commission to formally investigate TikTok and ByteDance. “In light of TikTok’s repeated misrepresentations regarding its data security, data handling and corporate governance practices, we urge you to act quickly on this matter,” reads the letter signed by Mark Warner of Virginia and Marco Rubio from Florida.
In a letter, a member of the Federal Communications Commission urged Apple and Google to remove TikTok from their app stores. FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr claimed ByteDance was “beholden” to the Chinese government and “required by law to comply” with the Chinese government’s surveillance requirements. The letter was widely reported, despite the fact that the FCC has no role in overseeing app stores.
In a letter responding to Blackburn and others, Chew said: “We have not provided US user data to the [Communist Party of China]nor would we if asked.
Amid the recent uproar, TikTok announced that it had moved its US user data to Oracle’s cloud platform so that “100% of US user traffic” is now hosted by the cloud provider, responding potentially to national security concerns.
In his letter to lawmakers, which mentioned the move to Oracle, Chew said the broader goal of the company’s data security efforts is to build trust and “make substantial progress toward compliance with an agreement with the U.S. government which will fully protect user data and the national security interests of the United States.
Chew did not name any specific group within the US government, but the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) has been investigating TikTok since 2019. The government body, however, did not provide any recent updates on its investigation. . Citing unnamed sources, Reuters recently reported that CFIUS had “extensive discussions with TikTok about security issues.” CFIUS representatives did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
TikTok also recently pledged to offer researchers more transparency about activity on the platform, including access for a select group to its API, or application programming interface.
“We know that just saying ‘trust us’ isn’t enough,” Vanessa Pappas, TikTok’s chief operating officer, said in a blog post announcing the planned update. “That’s why we made a strong commitment to transparency a long time ago, particularly around how we moderate and recommend content.”
While TikTok has long dismissed national security concerns as “baseless”, concerns persist.
“The fact that the Chinese government, if they really want to, can force any company at their borders to comply with data access requests, I think that’s really the root of a lot of these concerns about TikTok,” said nonresident Justin Sherman. member of the Atlantic Council’s Cyber Statecraft Initiative.
“There are real national security issues that arise,” Sherman added, but there are also issues with galvanizing much of the conversation around anti-China rhetoric.
Focusing too narrowly on the national origin of an app owner, or just a single company, looks at only one way to access data, Sherman said. As a result, it loses all other means by which data travels through advertisers, brokers and more.
“It’s nice to have that kind of focus” on privacy and data security issues, Sherman said. “But if all you’re doing is writing letters about specific companies and not writing and testing laws and regulations to control risk, in the long run nothing really will change too much.”
cnn en2fr2en
