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TikTok Deal Likely To Leave US Data Leaking To China (bloomberg.com) 31

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: TikTok users would still risk having personal data exposed to hacking and espionage by China even if the Biden administration forges a security agreement designed to spare the video platform from a total US ban. That's the conclusion of former national security officials and other experts as the Justice Department reviews an accord that would keep the popular video-streaming app, which is owned by China's ByteDance, accessible to its millions of US users.

TikTok has been under US scrutiny since 2019 over concerns that Chinese actors might tap those users' information for espionage or other harmful purposes. "They built the whole system in China," said Stewart Baker, a national security lawyer at Steptoe & Johnson LLP. "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." This analysis of the agreement is based on interviews with former national security officials, lawyers who have worked on similar deals and experts who have studied data security, social media platforms and telecommunications companies. There's no indication a decision has been made.

TikTok is routing all its US user traffic through servers maintained by Oracle and the database giant is auditing the app's algorithms. Still, additional restrictions on how US user data is stored and accessed will be necessary -- and might not resolve US security concerns no matter how strong a deal looks on paper, the experts said. The experts' skepticism is shared by Senator Mark Warner, the Virginia Democrat who chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee. He said he's aware of the conversations around TikTok and couldn't give details. Nonetheless, he said the company has "a big mountain to climb with me to prove the case that it can really be safe." Warner said China has a bad track record on protecting users' privacy. "They've shown repeatedly the ability to create this surveillance state that ought to scare the dickens out of all of us." He added that it's much harder today to wall off TikTok's data technically or ban it outright than it was five or six years ago as the popularity of the app has surged. "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."
Brooke Oberwetter, a spokesperson for TikTok, said that while the company would not comment on the specifics of its discussions with the US government, "We are confident that we are on a path to fully satisfy all reasonable U.S. national security concerns."

Oberwetter said that while some employees based in China would have access to public data posted by users, they would not have access to private user information, and their use of the public data -- including videos and comments -- would be very limited.
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TikTok Deal Likely To Leave US Data Leaking To China

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  • by Big Hairy Gorilla ( 9839972 ) on Thursday October 20, 2022 @08:05AM (#62982559)
    Betteridge. No.
  • This is a problem? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by GoJays ( 1793832 ) on Thursday October 20, 2022 @08:14AM (#62982581)
    If somebody is concerned about their data being leaked to China, the solutions is simple; stop using a Chinese based product. Nobody NEEDS to use Tik Tok.
    • If somebody is concerned about their data being leaked to China, the solutions is simple; stop using a Chinese based product. Nobody NEEDS to use Tik Tok.

      That's like telling a smoker to just stop because (... long list of reasons ...). Tik tok users are hooked, and they're not thinking about individual and societal effects in the future. Just like smokers, who are not concerned about health effects, at least not at this moment.

  • by DontBeAMoran ( 4843879 ) on Thursday October 20, 2022 @08:26AM (#62982595)

    STOP USING TIKTOK!

    Why are people so obsessed with something from China?

    • by dohzer ( 867770 )

      Why are people so obsessed with something from China?

      Because they placed an obnoxious advert (an animated watermark) onto all "their" videos, which then were shared, and, Voilà!

    • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      Because it's good. Western rivals have tried to clone it many times, and they all failed.

      I don't like it personally, but millions of Americans do.

      • by NFN_NLN ( 633283 )

        Yes. In 2012 Vine tried to copy Tiktok by creating a platform for users to share short video loops. Unfortunately, Vine had poor success in copying Tiktok because they weren't around until 2016, which made the task very... shall we say... difficult.

        • by Anonymous Coward

          Don't get me started on that Facebook knock-off called MySpace!

          --
          const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
          Woke, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC

        • by EvilSS ( 557649 )
          You realize just because it wasn't first doesn't negate what AmiMoJo said, yes? Facebook and Youtube are both trying to emulate TikTok today and it's not working for either of them. Strawman with Vine all you like but they are correct.
        • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

          I was thinking more of YouTube Shorts, Instagram Reels, Byte, Triller, Clash, Snapchat Spotlight, Zynn...

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Tablizer ( 95088 )

      > STOP USING TIKTOK! Why are people so obsessed with something from China?

      Addicts don't care where their drugs come from.

  • Data controls (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Everybody collects the same data and most of them sell it. You think Meta is policing the customers who buy their data? Alphabet? Hell, is there anything against selling directly to China?

  • It looks just like all others social networks under the sun for Europeans. American companies are heavily siphoning personal data of Europeans and we still cannot do anything about it, even with the GPDR.
  • It used to be if you wanted to control a population, you turned to the clerics. In today's secular society, you turn to news outlets and social media.

    Social media has also become a new battleground as ruthless politicians use news outlets and social media to manipulate foreign and domestic populations, often for corrupt aims.

    The US created the FCC to govern communications for the public good. We need to revitalize the FCC in a non-partisan way to manage this for the benefit of US citizens and humanity i
  • .. US TikTok is just young women advertising their PornHub, Pro-Ukraine vloggers, unqualified quacks pushing psuedoscientific medical information, and a razor thin handful of credentialed experts attempting to counter the tsunami of quacks and agitprop. "Lieutenant Chen, have you gathered any useful intelligence today?" ".. Yes sir, the Israeli mlitary PsyOp / Airsoft girl has a much fatter ass than the American farmer woman from the MidWest posting thinly veiled advertisements for her adult page."
  • ... to mindfuck our morons. They saw how successful Russia was with Facebook.
  • How will we recover now that China knows that our teenage boys like to look at ass and tits on tik tok. Oh no!
  • If Tik Tok is banned in China, similar to FB, Twitter, etc, then Tik Tok should itself have system in place to make sure all China IPs are blocked from access to even the public info.

    And maybe forced to have a 3rd party security firm safeguarding the public info from being visible from China(firewalls, IP blocks, monitoring weird spider activities etc)

    That will probably make things abit harder. Maybe have the same rule for all social media which is banned in China.

    This is assuming Oracle is able to safeguar

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

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