In short, the video-sharing social network is no more dangerous to the average person than any other app.
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Unfortunately, the answer is a lot more complex than headlines or politicians may have you believe. We’ve spent weeks looking through every news article, security review, lawsuit and whitepaper to finally get to the bottom of the TikTok debate. Is TikTok spyware? Should it be banned? Is it just the same as every other social media platform? If we really want to protect ourselves and our national security, we need meaningful legislation that limits data collection, storage and use for all companies, not just the ones based in China. It wouldn’t necessarily need TikTok if all it wanted was access to US user data. If the Chinese Government really wanted it, it could just buy it. A lot of important personal data is already collected and sold at scale. While there are legitimate concerns about a company from an adversarial nation potentially having access to so much data, we still need to examine things in the proper context.
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This doesn’t mean that China never spies on the US–we have countless examples of this–it just means that TikTok is often dragged into this unfairly because it is Chinese. But few who read an article about its problems would go away from it thinking that Facebook is spying on behalf of the US Government.Įvidence that TikTok is being used to spy for the Chinese Government is tenuous at best. But Facebook currently has very similar issues regarding processing the data of European users on US servers, and it too is struggling with the technical challenges of abiding by regulations and consumer demands. There are certainly serious issues between China and the West, as well as Chinese companies operating in the West. The BuzzFeed News leaks do not reveal any information that disputes this statement. In a statement to Newsweek in 2021, the company did not deny that staff in China had access to US user data in the past, only that TikTok does “…not share information with the Chinese government,” and that any access it does have is the responsibility of a “…world-renowned U.S.-based security team that handles access.” Project Texas is the company’s codename for its mission to overhaul its systems so that in the future, certain types of personal information on US users will no longer be accessible from China at all. “In the recordings, the vast majority of situations where China-based staff accessed US user data were in service of Project Texas’s aim to halt this data access.”
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When you dig down into the story, it’s really about audio leaks that show the immense technical challenges involved in the long term effort to protect US data from Chinese access: Despite being headlined by a provocative title, “Leaked Audio From 80 Internal TikTok Meetings Shows That US User Data Has Been Repeatedly Accessed From China” and leading with terms like “backdoor”, the article doesn’t really contain any revelatory information.
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At the same time, TikTok has gone on to become even more popular.īuzzFeed News recently broke a story that user data was being accessed from China.
#Should i download tiktok update
Update July 2022: Things have changed significantly since the publication of this piece and Western-Chinese relations have deteriorated.