TikTok CEO Says Xi Jinping Not Hiding In App
TikTok CEO Shou Chew spent his Thursday being interrogated by US lawmakers on Capitol Hill.
I'm not sure we learned much from the spectacle, other than that Americans have a very difficult time pronouncing Chinese names properly, even when they've presumably rehearsed.
Various media reports have indicated the Biden administration intends to compel parent ByteDance to sell its stake in the wildly popular app, which might otherwise be banned in the US. This is one of the only matters of national
Can Byte Dance staff access user data? You can bet on it. And my guess is the CCP would want the data too. They would collect it over a long term. And you can bet that they don’t give a lick about the videos.
The NSA collects and stores every digital communication from every American, every day. My health care provider provides all of my health care and personal info to any “company” who wants it. The only person who can’t see my data is me. Facebook provided subscriber data to a research company without permission to use in the 2016 election. Come on folks, if your on the internet everyone who’s got your data uses it for whatever they want. Any clerk in the office at Visa and other such places can get access to data about everything you buy with your card. This is a tempest in a teapot. Does anyone seriously thing their personal info is being accessed by some solitary Chinese worker somewhere? For what. Well into the MASH TV series Frank Burns is ranting about the horrible Chinese communists and says they are coming for our toilets to steal our way of life.
Amazon as well.
Prodded along by the SEC, we all do our best to secure client data. That makes good sense. But when the friggin’ Pentagon can get hacked, I sometimes wonder how much of this work is for show.
Almost all US and other Western owned social media and messaging platforms are banned or blocked in China – Google, Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Snapchat, Messenger, WhatsApp, Linked In, Instagram, etc – as are almost all US based news and media platforms and streaming platforms.
Heck, even Tik Tok is blocked in China.
China has no leg to stand on, even before data security is considered, and yes, it is laughable to suggest that ByteDance doesn’t have access to Tik Tok user data, so much that Tik Tok’s CEO daren’t testify otherwise.
Shut it down already. Users will migrate to another platform – Facebook and Youtube are waiting with open arms and basically equivalent services.
While we’re at it, legislate that data on US users on any platform can only be held or accessed in the US and a shortlist of approved countries.