Unless you’ve got been caught underneath a rock currently, you are most likely conscious that TikTok is in some scorching water proper now. The app is at the moment going through a nationwide ban within the U.S., and CEO Shou Zi Chew was lately grilled by lawmakers about TikTok’s practices and the way it handles client app information.
The U.S. fears the Chinese authorities might accumulate information from U.S. customers through TikTok proprietor ByteDance. Because of this, the app has already been banned on authorities units in each the United States and Canada, with the U.Okay. additionally contemplating a ban. However, this current transfer would unfold the ban nationwide, which might not be fashionable among the many app’s viewers of greater than 113 million U.S. customers.
That mentioned, with all of the drama surrounding TikTok and this aggressive push by lawmakers, do you agree that the app ought to be banned?
TikTok is aware of it is in a really precarious predicament with the United States. This is probably going why the app lately refreshed its neighborhood pointers with extra moderation of AI-generated content material and hate speech. It additionally revealed its neighborhood rules for the primary time as a way to give customers a greater understanding of how the app goals to maintain its customers protected.
However, lawmakers pressed on with their efforts to ban the app.
During Friday’s testimony, Chew informed lawmakers that Chinese-based staff at ByteDance have entry to U.S. information (through CNBC), at the least for now. TikTok is seemingly within the strategy of deleting information from servers in Singapore and Virginia that may nonetheless be accessed by ByteDance, an effort dubbed “Project Texas” that might see its information being saved within the U.S. by Oracle. He additionally states that the Chinese authorities has by no means requested for TikTok’s information and that the corporate would refuse such a request.
Still, that didn’t appear to be sufficient for U.S. lawmakers, who appeared simply as involved as earlier than the listening to.
Yet, with all of the drama round TikTok and claims that the decision to ban the app is about defending American information, Android Central’s Jerry Hildenbrand writes that it is extra about politics than privateness and that the U.S. has already failed us relating to defending consumer information.
“The big problem here is that there are a lot of other apps that are just as bad (maybe even worse) when it comes to consumer privacy violations,” he writes. “We know about the few times companies took it too far and got caught, as Facebook (now Meta) and Twitter were both caught doing things their own privacy policies said would never happen. So why ban TikTok and not Twitter?”
He says the reply comes all the way down to Americans being afraid of China, regardless that the United States authorities additionally has workarounds it may possibly use to take no matter information it needs. He believes the perfect factor the U.S. authorities can do is instill harder information privateness protections that U.S. firms should abide by.
“In any case, banning TikTok is just a Band-Aid that will piss off a lot of people. It’s not even a very good Band-Aid and this is coming from someone who thinks the app is every bit as bad as the ‘government’ says it is.”
