Tik Tok has become a global giant – America is worried and threatens to limit it – China is the… “spy”

For much of the tech industry, this summer has been a time of economic uncertainty, a time that has seen the price of bitcoin plummet, hundreds of layoffs.

For the video platform Tik Tok, it was also this summer that US regulators decided to introduce stricter rules. Since BuzzFeed reported in June that employees of Tik Tok’s Chinese parent ByteDance had accessed US consumer data, Tik Tok has been at the center of rare cross-party calls for regulation and investigations.

Those investigations came under further pressure when in July FBI Director Christopher Wray called Chinese espionage “the greatest long-term threat to our nation’s … economic growth.”

“If you’re an American adult, there’s a higher chance that China stole your personal data,” Ray said. “Now we’re at the point where the FBI opens a new China-related counterintelligence case every 10 hours.”

Tik Tok is a relatively new player on global social media platforms, but it has already caught the eye of regulators in Europe. New laws about child safety and internet safety in general in the UK and EU. forced the company to become more transparent about how it operates and how content is distributed on its platform.

The issue that US lawmakers have focused on most publicly is the app’s connection to China. Tik Tok has always said its US users’ data is stored in data centers in Virginia and backed up in Singapore. In June, the company announced that all US user data would be routed through US IT giant Oracle’s servers.

But Tik Tok executive records leaked to BuzzFeed News show that China-based ByteDance employees accessed US user data multiple times between September 2021 and January 2022. “Everything is visible in China,” he reportedly said. a Tik Tok employee in a meeting.

After that report, members of Congress took action. On June 23, a bipartisan group of five senators proposed a new bill that would ban companies from sending US user data to “high-risk foreign countries.”

And in July, Senators Mark Warner and Marco Rubio called on the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to launch an investigation into Tik Tok.

“Tik Tok, its parent company ByteDance and other Chinese technology companies are required by Chinese law to share their information with the Communist Party,” Warner said. “Allowing access to US data, to biometrics such as faceprint and voiceprint, poses a great risk not only to privacy, but also to national security.”

Tik Tok said US lawmakers have high national security concerns and that the platform does not share user data with the Chinese government. “Nor, if asked, would we,” said company spokeswoman Maureen Shanahan.

The company also said it has strict controls on who has access to US user data, and that employees outside the US, including China, can access it as needed.

Experts the Guardian spoke to did not dispute the cyber security threat China poses to the US. Although some have expressed concern that regulators’ hyper-focus on the Tik Tok company’s connection to China could distract from other pressing concerns, including TikTok’s algorithms and how much user data the company collects, stores and other US users.

Little is known about the amount of user data that Tik Tok collects and shares with US operators.

Meanwhile, states are taking matters into their own hands. California passed a landmark kids-only safety bill that would require platforms like Tik Tok and Instagram to implement privacy protections for young users by default before releasing any products designed for children.

And while experts and lawmakers agree that more scrutiny is needed, there is considerable disagreement about how much Tik Tok has historically been scrutinized, especially relative to players like Facebook, Twitter and Google. In the next period, it is certain that there will be developments on this issue…

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