TikTok A Security Threat?

Not long ago, the Government of India banned 59 Chinese apps including famous names like UCBrowser, ShareIt and even Tiktok. The official statement released by the Government stated that these apps were "prejudicial to sovereignty and integrity of India, defense of India, the security of the state and public order." A couple of days later, on a Friday evening, American e-commerce brand Amazon asked its employees via an email to delete the Chinese app owned by ByteDance due to security risks. Though the organization later claimed that the mail was an error and currently Amazon does not include any such policy regarding the usage of Tiktok by its employees.

Apart from it, a recent statement that came from the United States Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, revealed that the Trump administration is considering banning some Chinese apps which can be a threat to the security of the country and its citizens. A lot of resources claim that India banning 59 Chinese apps and the United States Government pondering about a similar action is because of the escalating tension China shares with a lot of countries. So is it just a digital strike by anti-Chinese Governments on the economy of this Asian superpower or are Chinese apps like TikTok actually working as a mobile spy agent for the Communist Party of China? A

Earlier this year, while investigating the beta version of iOS 14, security researchers Talal Haj Bakry and Tommy Mysk discovered that the Chinese social media app Tiktok is secretly reading the clipboard of its users. They on top found out a similar issue of TikTok copying the clipboard data from Android devices aswell. Moreover, in February 2020, co-founder and CEO of Reddit, Steve Huffman claimed that the app is fundamentally parasitic and is adopting fingerprinting technology that represents a truly terrifying act. He then labeled TikTok as "spyware" in his statement.

Interestingly, TikTok being a Chinese app is not being used in China. Alternatively, the Chinese population uses an app named DouYinvapp. DouYin is an authentic app whose international version is what we recognize by the name TikTok. The local Chinese version of TikTok is known to violate human rights, with sensors for identifying homosexual users, user age, their resemblance level with their passport photograph, nationality, dialect, etc. Also, if you are not Chinese or you speak in a foreign language, you are immediately prohibited from the platform. All this information collected by DouYin is constantly shared with Chinese Intelligence.

Let’s get practical! TikTok is a social media app and social media and privacy do not go hand-in-hand. TikTok is no different from Facebook, Instagram, or any other applications. All these apps store user data. However, how is it used is what matters? What actually makes TikTok a threat both at an independent and national level is that it is managed by the Chinese Government. Keeping in mind the horrifying things the local version of TikTok, DouYin does to its millions of users, the risk of TikTok secretly using similar sensors to gain information of the citizens of other countries is high. Moreover, the social media app is indirectly in control of an adversarial foreign government and any data transmission in their hand constitutes an extremely grave risk.

So should you stop using TikTok? It is up to you. Although there are certain things you should keep in mind. China shares mangled relationships with a lot of countries and this is what made India take this step, despite Indians being one of the most active users of TikTok. The bigger question is, How good are your country’s relationship with the Chinese Government? If the answer is ‘not so good’ then you should consider thrice before continuing using the app.