Despite its popularity with Gen Z, the social media app TikTok has come under fire by the Trump Administration due to its alleged predatory data collection and its connections with the Chinese government. How accurate are these allegations and what do they mean? Are Americans better off without TikTok?
In short, yes. Very much so.
TikTok has become ubiquitous for many Americans in this quarantine—content creators and influencers use the social media platform to make short-form videos, mostly about dances or memes. Millions of teens, just like me, have come to know TikTok and what it's all about, or so we thought.
According to experts however, TikTok is considered a data collection service made to function like a social media platform. The app has been found to contain a laundry list of information-collecting API—application collecting interface, think of it as a set of codes—that rival the most malicious and intrusive computer viruses. There is no comprehensive list of data that we known can be mined from TikTok users because so much of the app's code is locked away and configurable by company coders that can remotely sabotage any attempts to break into the source code, but what has been reverse-engineered from the app is unsettling to say the least.
Device information, like phone specs, screen dimensions, memory and disk space, and even the logging of typed words and phrases is definitely collected, as is a whole host of network information relating to your internet connection and IP addresses. What's worse is that, when the TikTok app is connected to the internet, your location can be pinged up to every thirty seconds by anyone that can access the libraries of data hosted by TikTok's servers, which for the record are notoriously easy to break into, as the code they use to encrypt is not nearly as safe as what most other applications (and websites) utilize. It's even suggested that the app has the ability to compress complex packets of data and transfer them through their libraries to your device, where they could unpack their contents and run their own code on your phone or tablet. It's harrowing to imagine that any application could have this kind of surveillance over its users, but the story doesn't end there.
TikTok is owned and developed by Chinese technology company ByteDance, which is operated under the tight regulations the Chinese government levy on their country's businesses. A clause in these regulations gives the Chinese government the ability to, at any point, demand all data collected by its companies for the government's own use. Despite the claims that TikTok "never provided user data to the Chinese government" and would never do so "if asked", ByteDance really has no say in the matter, unless it wanted to be broken up by China.
At any point, China can simply take the data collected by the hundreds of millions of TikTok users and use it for their own purposes, which I find pretty terrifying. In my opinion, TikTok can best be described as no better than malware targeted at children and teenagers.
