Users of the China-owned social media platform TikTok would still risk having personal data exposed to hacking and espionage by China — even if the U.S. government sets up a security agreement designed to prevent the platform from being banned, former national security officials and other experts say.
Meanwhile, the Justice Department is reviewing an agreement that would keep TikTok — which has been described as “a data collection service that is thinly veiled as a social network” — accessible to U.S. users.
“They built the whole system in China,” Stewart Baker, a national security lawyer at Steptoe & Johnson LLP, said, according to a report by Bloomberg.
“Unless they’re going to rebuild the system in the United States at great expense, sooner or later, when something goes wrong, there’s going to turn out to be only one engineer who knows how to fix it. And he or she is likely to be in China,” Baker added.
There is no indication that a decision has been made regarding the accord.
TikTok spokesperson Brooke Oberwetter said, “We are confident that we are on a path to fully satisfy all reasonable U.S. national security concerns.”
Oberwetter claimed that while some TikTok employees in China would have access to public data posted by users, they would not have access to private user information, and that their use of the public data would be very limited, and accessed under the supervision of an oversight board set up by the U.S. government.
TikTok currently routes all of its U.S. user traffic through servers maintained by Oracle Corp., which has been auditing the app’s algorithms.
Nonetheless, experts reportedly say that more restrictions on how U.S. user data is stored and accessed will be needed — and that those restrictions may not even resolve U.S. security concerns.
“The burden of proof that you can really segregate American data, particularly if the code is still being written in China — that would be a tough case to make,” noted Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA).
TikTok — which has roughly 1 billion users and is banned in China (in favor of the heavily-censored “Douyin” owned by the same parent company as TikTok — has been under scrutiny by U.S. officials since 2019, when the Trump administration’s Committee on Foreign Investment began reviewing a merger between ByteDance and Musical.ly.
You can follow Alana Mastrangelo on Facebook and Twitter at @ARmastrangelo, and on Instagram.