Rep. Mike Simpson (R-ID), who is serving his 12th term as the representative for Idaho's Second Congressional District, is in support of banning TikTok as a necessary step to protect sensitive data from the Chinese government.
“Like many other elected leaders across the United States, I support this ban to safeguard Americans’ personal data,” Simpson said. “China has already proved its intent to destabilize the current world order, and the United States needs to stand strong, particularly on matters of cybersecurity.”
Stemming from national security concerns, the popular cell phone application TikTok has been banned from being downloaded to federal government devices as well as government devices in 31 states, and other states have similar ban proposals in the works, Forbes reported. Last month, President Joe Biden signed a bill that banned TikTok from federal devices. Hawaii, California, New York, Massachusetts and Vermont have proposed bans for TikTok on government phones and other devices. Louisiana, West Virginia, Pennsylvania and Florida have also issued bans.
According to NBC News, in December, Catherine Szpindor, the House’s chief administrative officer issued an internal memo to staff that TikTok posed “high risk to users due to a number of security risks” and needed to be deleted from their mobile phones.
The memo stated: "House staff are NOT allowed to download the TikTok app on any House mobile devices. If you have the TikTok app on your House mobile device, you will be contacted to remove it."
TikTok said in a December statement that it is working to "meaningfully address any security concerns that have been raised at both the federal and state level. These plans have been developed under the oversight of our country’s top national security agencies — plans that we are well underway in implementing — to further secure our platform in the United States, and we will continue to brief lawmakers on them."
FBI Director Christopher Wray recently expressed concerns over the potential for the Chinese government to engage in espionage or influence via TikTok. In November, Wray told the House Homeland Security Committee that the FBI had national security concerns about TikTok, saying the Chinese government could even control their devices, according to a report by NPR.
Wray said the FBI’s concerns “include the possibility that the Chinese government could use it to control data collection on millions of users or control the recommendation algorithm, which could be used for influence operations if they so chose, or to control software on millions of devices, which gives it an opportunity to potentially technically compromise personal devices."
TikTok's parent company ByteDance is based in China, where national security laws state that companies must share data with the government if asked. Last summer, leaked audio from a ByteDance meeting confirmed that China-based ByteDance employees could and had accessed the non-public data of American TikTok users on multiple occasions, NPR reported.
In July, TikTok executive Shou Zi Chew wrote in a letter to nine senate Republicans that ByteDance employees were able to access the data of TikTok users when “subject to a series of robust cybersecurity controls and authorization approval protocols overseen by our U.S.-based security team,” the New York Times reported.
