President Trump signed an executive order on Thursday that gives TikTok, a social media app owned by a Chinese parent company, 45 days to sell to its U.S.-based operations or cease operating within the United States.
This was the right call. TikTok is currently owned by ByteDance, a Chinese company that has long partnered with the Chinese Communist Party to suppress and control information. Indeed, the company is so closely tied to the Chinese government that it created an internal committee for CCP members and agreed to give preference to Communist Party members in all future hires. Unsurprisingly, content about China’s Xinjiang region, where nearly 1 million Uighur Muslims are imprisoned, began to disappear from ByteDance’s platforms — TikTok included.
But the CCP doesn’t just control ByteDance’s content: It also exploits the data it gathers. Through ByteDance, the CCP has gained access to millions of individuals’ personal data using a technological backdoor that tracks and steals data from users who download the software. In this case, the software is TikTok, which is a “fundamentally parasitic” data collection app disguised as social media, according to Reddit CEO Steve Huffman.
According to one Reddit user who claims to have reverse-engineered the app, Huffman is right: TikTok steals more data than any other social media app. It can access phone hardware information, data from other installed apps, network information (including your IP address, router information, and Wi-Fi access point name) jailbreak information, and your location data. And it is specifically designed to hide just how much data it is stealing from its users, the Redditor explained.
For those skeptical of an anonymous user’s findings, the Peterson Institute released a study last year that found similar security concerns. There’s a reason the House of Representatives voted to forbid government employees from downloading the app, and there’s a reason major corporations, such as Wells Fargo, followed suit in forbidding its use. The app is a threat, and it must be treated as such.
Trump is doing just that. It’s fair to criticize his methods — executive authority should always be used sparingly — but we should at least be able to agree as a nation that our children should not be using an app built to steal their information and controlled by a malicious regime that will not hesitate to use that information against them. Until TikTok’s connection to the CCP is severed, it needs to go.
