Growing Tik Tok Security Concerns (Data Leakage to Beijing)

  

 Jennifer lopez, Selena Gomez, Mariah Carey and the cast of High School Musical are  some of the Famous celebrities that are having a blast on the video sharing app Tik Tok.  But are all these fun dances challenges and pranks as harmless as they sound? There are serious things that we need to consider about tik tok.

             Tik toks parent company ‘byte dance’ is based in China and it's just one of the many thriving tech companies in the country, very innovative but the Chinese government knows this and in recent years they have taken many steps to make sure that they have ultimate control over these tech companies and the way they do that is by ensuring that these tech companies have Chinese Communist Party committees running inside the companies and they have oversight over what the company is doing. 

         Facebook, twitter platforms along with others like YouTube and Google are banned in China. So why should tik tok be any different?  They want the platform to be light entertaining and funny and they have made several statements about how they don't really want it to be a political space. Many believes that censored content includes videos of the pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong or anything related to the LGBTQ community.

              It may be an uncontroversial thing in China for these companies to say hey we don't want politics on our platforms we just want it to be entertainment. That just doesn't work outside of China. These companies as they expand out into the world they can't just accept that consumers and citizens around the world are going to accept those same censorship. 

            As far as privacy concerns Goes lets just take a look at tik tok’s Terms & Conditions. Tik-tok requires the user to accept a huge number of permissions, a lot of those permissions on your phone make sense it's a video sharing app so of course it wants access to your camera but there are other permissions that it requires that are a little more puzzling for example permission to access your location data on your phone the GPS coordinates of where you are and when you look at how the app works that doesn't seem to make a huge amount of sense because there's nothing in the app that indicates where you're located makes any difference over how you use the app or how the app responds to you.

          So a lot of that data is being vacuumed up by tik-tok and the concern is that that data is being sent back to Beijing, China. Now tik-tok has said that the data is being stored in Singapore and the United States and is not stored in Beijing but that does not mean that beijing-based engineers are not accessing that data in order to make app better.

             Now the reason why that is a worry is because in China there is a whole suite of national security laws that say if you are an individual or a company you have to cooperate with the authorities on intelligence gathering work so there is no firewall between these companies and the data they hold and the Chinese authorities but that means that this data all of this data that this app is collecting could be used by Chinese intelligence services and you know the data that these apps collect.

       It really paints a very  vivid picture of everyday people's lives what you do every day what time you wake up where you go who you talk to this is very  valuable information for foreign intelligence services.

    

    It doesn't just stop there it really is an AI company, it puts a lot of emphasis on the data collection it does and how it crunches that data so it's not just looking at what hashtags you use it's looking at your face it is analyzing your your face and feeding that into a facial recognition algorithm they may even at some stage know what your going to look like you know if you applied these filters to your face it can they can figure out what you're going to look like when you're an older person.

 

           So if the authorities in Beijing have access to this data, they can do what product ads do and really get better at understanding the vast amount of information about the people they care about.

 

            Now why would this matter to an average American teenager filming a dance to dojo cats say so?  Maybe right now they're teenagers and they're just putting up funny content on tick-tock but that data if it is being stored and accessed by foreign governments then that can be easily accessed once this person does go on to have any internship at the White House or go and work at Congress if they work in the government if they work for the military if they work in sensitive parts of the economy it's something tik tok users may want to keep in mind the next time they record themselves doing the renegade.

 

            If we're worried about the kind of data and the capabilities that these companies have now just use your imagination to think where is this technology going in the next two years in the next five years what is this technology going to be capable of doing we have to think ahead.

 

            It can be concluded that the tik tok app being used to sweep data from users by the Chinese government is obviously troubling. But let’s not forget that tech companies using data gathered from their users is standard in the west. The difference only being that in the west, the corporate sector is the one using and selling this data, that is then used to improve their product and increase their capital. Two sides of the same coin.