Commentary: Banning TikTok won’t solve social media’s foreign influence, teen harm and data privacy problems

DATA SECURITY AND PRIVACY

Proponents of the TikTok sale-or-ban law also claim that the app constitutes an unacceptable threat to data privacy. Gallagher asserted that the Chinese government could use TikTok for espionage to “find Americans, exfiltrate data and track the location of journalists”.

Yet, there is little reason to believe Americans’ data is safer with US-based companies. Meta has had a wide range of data privacy scandals. Last year, leaked documents showed that even Meta engineers themselves have minimal understanding or control over how people’s data is used.

Representative Raja Krishnamoorthi, co-sponsor of the House Bill on TikTok, invoked a case involving the dating app Grindr as a successful precedent for forcing ByteDance to divest TikTok. In 2020, the Chinese company that owned Grindr sold the app to a US company following security concerns similar to those surrounding TikTok. But, just last year, a fringe Catholic group in Denver purchased location and usage data from Grindr and other dating apps to track LGBTQ+ priests.

Additionally, the Chinese government hardly needs control of TikTok to access the troves of data that apps, devices and smart appliances collect from Americans. Much of this data can be purchased, completely legally, from commercial data brokers, regardless of who owns it.

Data freely available for purchase on the open market has been shown to include the location data for people visiting Planned Parenthood and mobile device location pings that can be deanonymised to reveal the whereabouts of the president of the United States.