Bianca Harkless
Editor-In-Chief
On September 15th, 2020, President Donald Trump is set to ban the app TikTok and other Chinese apps on claims of them selling United States Citizen's data, including names, birthdays and other information to China.
TikTok was once an app called Musical.ly where people would lip-sync to popular songs but when it was bought in November of 2017 by the company ByteDance for an estimated $800 million to $1 billion dollars. At the time of the purchase, Musical.ly had 60 million users in the United States and Europe.
ByteDance claimed they would keep Musical.ly separate from any of their other Chinese apps, but less than a year after the purchase they merged Musical.ly and an app of their own, TikTok, to create what is now one of the world’s biggest apps. According to the research firm Sensor Tower, over the past 12 months, TikTok has been downloaded more than 750 million times, more than Facebook, Instagram, Youtube and Snapchat.
Due to other Chinese apps being used as spyware, lawmakers and President Donald Trump’s Administration officials see the app as a threat concerning American data and technology. ByteDance has since denied that TikTok sends user data to China. Having concerns towards an app selling American data is something that has happened before and was handled in a similar way. The company Huawei and other Chinese tech firms have been placed on a blacklist which blocks them from purchasing American products over national security and human rights concerns.
America was not the only place to put a hold on the people's use of the app. The Government of India banned TikTok from its people as well for the same reason that the United States Government is planning on doing.
Something to note is that in February, ByteDance agreed to pay a sum of $5.7 million dollars in fines to the Federal Trade Commision to settle accusations that Musical.ly illegally colluded information on users under 13 years of age. TikTok also is not available on mainland China, but is instead replaced by an app called Douyin which is similar to the hit app.
Trying to prove their innocence, ByteDance hired a consulting firm in Colorado called Special Counsel in order to analyse TikTok to confirm and understand where it sent user data. Special Counsel found that the user data was stored on computer servers in Virginia and Singapore and said that there was no way for ByteDance to send the data to China while they were working on the case.
A few months ago ByteDance announced that it was working with the law firm K&L Gates on its moderation policies and joined a nonprofit organization which focuses on children’s online safety, though it was not enough to convince President Trump and his officials that TikTok was not invading on the privacy and human rights of American citizens. On August 6th, 2020, President Trump put out an executive order stating that within 45 days, TikTok would be banned.
Although banning TikTok may not be favorable for the younger people of this generation, the United States Government is of the opinion that they are trying to do the right thing and keep its people safe from foreign attacks.
Image Credit: Kon Karampelas on Unsplash
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