And what is the evidence for it being a Chinese spying platform? Is it owned by a Chinese company? Is there any hard evidence? Why is it so controversial?
And what is the evidence for it being a Chinese spying platform? Is it owned by a Chinese company? Is there any hard evidence? Why is it so controversial?
Two reasons, both related to being owned by a Chinese company.
It’s mining data for the Chinese company.
The Chinese company can make their algorithm present whatever they want. So they can play up criticism of the US and downplay criticism of China.
The degree of separation between the communist government and private companies is uncertain, so yeah.
Finally, someone who seems to be providing an answer based on objective fact rather than their own political perspective.
I’m getting the sense that the issue is simply that ByteDance is a Chinese company and their data farming is suspected of being accessible to the CCP, which may effectively be a means of spying on American citizens and as misinformation tactics. Not really any different the other way around, of course, but at least that makes sense as a rationale for banning it in the U.S.
There are problems with the law as well. The main one is that Tik Tok buys a whole lot of data about Americans and their browser history etc from data brokers. So they don’t necessarily need the app to gather information. Comparisons of the Tik Tok app vs it’s counterpart in China exist and they paint a pretty significant picture of the differences and similarities that explain how it could be used to push a narrative or propaganda. Barring that though two things can be true. It can be true that Tik Tok is a danger to national security, and also be lobbied against by American Tech companies.
What we’re seeing is that this law was the result of several things and doesn’t just have one singular aim. Anyone who says it’s just about one singular thing just doesn’t want to admit the validity of the other arguments because it ruins how they feel about the federal government, Tik Tok, China, Trump, Biden etc.
Moreover while there’s no proof it HAS been done, inserting some new bit of code in a Chinese owned app could perform security breaches inside the user’s phones. I’m not even sure they’d be interested in MY info, but they sure would like to have access to my company’s network complete with VPN.