Privacy and Security risks associated with TikTok

Media Screamed Bloody Murder Over Twitter Suspensions … Where’s Their Rage Against THIS?

Looks like Trump was right yet again. This time it’s about his warnings to steer clear of TikTok.

It’s a story told in three parts.
Part I: Conflicting Executive Orders

In August of 2020, Trump issued an Executive order that you may or may not remember. Here’s the meat of that order:

I, DONALD J. TRUMP, President of the United States of America, find that additional steps must be taken to deal with the national emergency with respect to the information and communications technology and services supply chain declared in Executive Order 13873 of May 15, 2019…Specifically, the spread in the United States of mobile applications developed and owned by companies in the People’s Republic of China (China) continues to threaten the national security, foreign policy, and economy of the United States. At this time, action must be taken to address the threat posed by one mobile application in particular, TikTok.

TikTok, a video-sharing mobile application owned by the Chinese company ByteDance Ltd., has reportedly been downloaded over 175 million times in the United States and over one billion times globally. TikTok automatically captures vast swaths of information from its users, including Internet and other network activity information such as location data and browsing and search histories. This data collection threatens to allow the Chinese Communist Party access to Americans’ personal and proprietary information — potentially allowing China to track the locations of Federal employees and contractors, build dossiers of personal information for blackmail, and conduct corporate espionage.

Less than a year later, in June of 2021, Joe Biden made the news by rescinding that same order.

Read Parts II and III