Adam Savit, director of the China Policy Initiative for the America First Policy Institute (AFPI); and Royce Hood, policy analyst for AFPI's China Policy Initiative; recently authored a report outlining the threats posed by TikTok, the popular China-based app.
The report highlighted actions that have been taken in the U.S. to address those threats. The authors asserted that while efforts to ban TikTok on government-issued devices are a step in the right direction, more comprehensive action is needed to protect Americans' data and privacy.
The brief, titled "Alarm Over TikTok Threat Reaches Critical Mass as Government Responds," explains that short-form video app TikTok is a subsidiary of ByteDance Ltd., which is based in Beijing and controlled by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). The authors stated that TikTok "serves as an ingenious data-harvesting weapon for the CCP disguised as a social media platform and has become a dominant force in American youth culture." TikTok was the most downloaded app of 2020, three years after its launch, and its popularity skyrocketed during COVID-19 lockdowns. The app now boasts 1 billion daily users who are able to consume content curated by a personalized algorithm on topics ranging from sports to beauty to politics.
A study of TikTok and its source code conducted by security research firm Internet 2.0 found that the app "aggressively and surreptitiously collects data" from users' devices, including a list of all other apps on the device, Wi-Fi network information (SSIDs), phone numbers and IP addresses associated with the device or SIM card, contacts, folders and files, calendar events, and GPS information. Internet 2.0's report asserts that all of this data is gathered at least once per hour, and TikTok can access and communicate with China-based servers owned by Guizhou Baishan Cloud Technology Co. Ltd. Furthermore, TikTok "can and will run successfully without any of this data being gathered,” which Savit and Hood suggest means that data harvesting is the reason the information is collected.
The AFPI brief referenced an October 2022 Forbes magazine article that found TikTok developers had the ability and intention to track and target certain U.S. residents, highlighting at least two cases in which a TikTok internal audit team intended to track a U.S. citizen who had no relationship with the company. The brief also highlighted a November 2022 voluntary disclosure from ByteDance that said, "[TikTok] allows certain employees with our corporate group located in Brazil, Canada, China, Israel, Japan, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, South Korea, and the United States, remote access to TikTok European user data." The authors stated that if ByteDance's statement is true for American TikTok users as well, then users' data "may be freely transmitted all over the world by TikTok with the approval of ByteDance for use by its employees, including those in the People’s Republic of China (PRC)." This data transmission would contradict statements made by TikTok Chief Operating Officer Vanessa Pappas, who said in September 2022 to the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee that "under no circumstances would we give [U.S. user] data to China.” ByteDance admitted in December 2022 that its employees had improperly accessed the data of American journalists in an attempt to uncover the source of a leak.
State and federal lawmakers have responded to these concerns in the forms of letters, bans and proposed legislation, the brief said. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Commissioner Brendan Carr sent a letter to Apple and Google in June 2022 calling on them to remove TikTok from their app stores. The following month, Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA), chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee; and Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), a ranking committee member; sent a letter to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) asking for an investigation into TikTok's handling of data. Carr asked the Council on Foreign Investment in the U.S. (CFIUS) to enact a TikTok ban in November. CIA Director Bill Burns commented in a December interview on PBS Newshour that he and FBI Director Christopher Wray agree that TikTok poses a threat to U.S. national security, and “the Chinese government is able to insist upon extracting the private data of a lot of TikTok users in this country.”
At the state level, Alabama, Georgia, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Maryland, Montana, Nebraska, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah and Virginia have enacted total bans of TikTok from government devices; while Florida, Louisiana, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia have enacted partial bans. On the federal level, Rubio and Reps. Mike Gallagher (R-WI 8th Dist.) and Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-IL 8th Dist.) introduced the Averting the National Threat of Internet Surveillance, Oppressive Censorship and Influence, and Algorithmic Learning by the Chinese Communist Party Act (ANTI-SOCIAL CCP Act) in December. The legislation would effectively serve as a blanket ban of TikTok in the U.S. The brief's authors called the bill a "landmark step" and stated that the bill "would protect Americans by blocking and prohibiting all transactions from any social media company in, or under the influence of, China, Russia, and several other foreign countries of concern."
The authors concluded that TikTok must be totally banned in the U.S. to ensure data protection and privacy, "or it must be divorced from the Chinese Communist government through a forced sale of ownership to an American company." They stated that measures banning the app from government-issued devices are commendable but "only affect a few million government employees and do not account for their personal phones, which are separate vectors and may access government networks." The authors acknowledged that the challenges posed by TikTok are complex, so "executive and legislative measures at the federal and state levels should be employed with the goal of making the space in which TikTok is allowed to operate smaller and smaller...An all-of-the-above approach may be the best strategy for this unprecedented policy problem."
