image source, AFP
China counterattacked a bill passed by the US Congress, and the bill could eventually cause Tiktok to be banned in the United States.
Related bills are also the latest measures to worry about the security issues of Tiktok, an application developed by Chinese companies for many years.
Earlier, many officials and politicians in Western countries have been banned from downloading and installing Tiktok on their working phones.
So what is the most important network security concern caused by Tiktok?How did the company respond?
1.Tiktok collected "overdose" data
Tiktok represents the data collected by the application "in line with industry practice."
Critics often quoted a network security report released by the Australian online company Internet 2.0 in July 2022 as evidence to criticize Tiktok to collect too much data.
The company's researcher studied Tiktok's source code and reported that it "collected excessive data."Analysts said that Tiktok will collect location, specific devices in use, and which other applications are above.
However, a similar test of Citizen Lab believes that "Tiktok will collect data similar to other popular social media platforms to track user behavior."
Similarly, a report from Georgia Institute of Technology last year stated: "The key fact is that most other social media and mobile phone software are doing the same thing (referring to collecting user data)."
2.Tiktok may be used by China to monitor users
Tiktok said that the company is completely independent and "has never provided user data to the Chinese government.
Even though privacy experts are dissatisfied with this, most people accept it and provide a large amount of privacy data. It is an agreement reached between us and social media.
As a free -service exchange condition, they collect our information and use this information to sell advertisements on their platforms, or sell our data to companies trying to push us advertising to us on other network platforms.
The problem between critics and TIKTOK is that Tiktok is the most unique in the mainstream software in the United States because it is belted by the headquarters in Beijing's technology giants.Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and YouTube are collecting similar user data, but they are all controlled by American local companies.
Byte beating has Tiktok and its sisters applied vibrato.
Over the years, the United States legislators, like most countries in the world, have always believed that the data collected by these platforms will not be used to be used for negative uses that may endanger national security.
Trump's administrative order issued in 2020 said that Tiktok's data collection may allow China to "track the position of federal employees and contractors, establish personal information files for extortion, and conduct business spy activities."
So far, there is evidence that this is just a theoretical risk -but a ambiguous law adopted in China in 2017 has exacerbated people's concerns.
Article 7 of the China National Intelligence Law shows that any organization or citizen shall "support, assist and cooperate" national intelligence work in accordance with the law.
This law is often cited by the suspect, not only for Tiktok, but also for other Chinese companies.
However, researchers at Georgia Institute of Technology believed that this sentence was disconnected and pointed out that the law also included clauses that protect the rights of users and private companies.
Since 2020, TIKTOK executives have repeatedly tried to reassure people to ensure that Chinese employees cannot reach data from non -Chinese users.
But in 2022, the byte beating acknowledged that several employees in Beijing did visit data from at least two reporters in the United States and Britain to track their positions and check whether they leaked to the media suspected of leaking to the media.The tiktok employee meeting of information.
Tiktok's spokesman said that the employees who visited the data had been fired by the company.
The company insisted that user data has never been stored in China.The company is using data centers in Texas and Europe to store data from US and EU citizens.
In the European Union, Tiktok is far more than other social media companies.It establishes independent data security centers to monitor all user data in their European sites.Tiktok said, "European users' data is protected in a specially designed environment. Only approved employees that have been rigorously supervised and verified can be accessed."
3.Tiktok may be used as a "brainwashing" tool
Tiktok quoted its community standards that "prohibit error information that may cause harm to our community or a wider public, including participating in synergy fraud."
In November 2022, Christopher Wray, director of the Federal Investigation Bureau, told the US legislators: "The Chinese government can ... control the recommendation algorithm, and then affect the operation of the (software)."Second-rate.
Tiktok's sister applied Douyin (only available in China) was strictly reviewed. According to reports, its design purpose is to encourage education and health content to spread in young user groups.This fact has further exacerbated these concerns.
Tiktok and Douyin use the same format and basic code.
Since then, there are almost no censorship cases except for the controversial review decisions that all platforms must deal with.
Citizen Lab researchers have conducted a set of TIKTOK comparative experiments.The results showed that Tiktok did not implement the same political review as Douyin.
Researchers said in 2021: "The platform has no obvious review."
Analysts at Georgia Institute of Technology have also searched Taiwan's independence and related jokes, and concluded: "All these categories can be easily found on TIKTOK. Many of them are very popular and have been widely extensive.Share.
theoretical risk
So, in general, this is a theoretical fear and risk.
Critics believe that TIKTOK is a "Trojan" -Although it looks harmless, it may prove a powerful weapon during the conflict period.
The application has been banned by India in 2020.In the same year, India issued a ban on dozens of Chinese software.
But the United States' ban on TIKTOK may have a huge impact on the platform because American allies usually follow this decision.
This point in the United States has successfully led and prevented the Chinese communications giant Huawei, Huawei, which is very obvious when it comes to the deployment of 5G infrastructure -it is also based on theoretical risks.
Of course, it is worth noting that these risks are one -way.China does not have to worry about American applications because it has been blocked for many years.
