Reuters reports President Joe Biden acknowledged the bipartisan push to ban TikTok in the United States over data security concerns. And concern may be warranted, as many have pointed out the app’s overly aggressive data collection. Additionally, Chinese parent company ByteDance publicly admitted employees misused user data to track two journalists. However, your data is just as unsafe with the social media juggernaut, Facebook, and Instagram parent company, Meta. Here’s why Meta is just as dangerous with your data as TikTok.
Meta allowed “high-risk” countries to scrape user information in the 2018 Cambridge Analytica data scandal.
Senators Marco Rubio (R-FL) and Mark Warner (D-VA), the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, raised concerns to CEO Mark Zuckerberg. TechCrunch reports the committee sent an official letter to Zuckerberg, questioning him about data leaks to foreign governments. The letter alleges Meta knew authoritarian governments gathered Facebook and Instagram user data since at least the Cambridge Analytica leak.
“[W]e have grave concerns about the extent to which this access could have enabled foreign intelligence service activity,” reads the letter. “[R]anging from foreign malign influence to targeting and counter-intelligence activity.”
The letter explicitly names the People’s Republic of China (PRC), Russia, North Korea, and Iran. And says “thousands of developers” in “high-risk jurisdictions” had access to the leaked data.
TikTok isn’t the only social media company scraping and selling your data.
Bloomberg recently obtained documents showing Meta paid data collection firm Bright Data to scrape others sites for public e-commerce information*. Meanwhile, for years Meta has publicly denounced the practice and even sued companies who scraped Facebook user data. Also, Ireland’s Data Protection Commission fined Meta $410 million for targeted advertisements on Facebook and Instagram.
Additionally, Facebook and Instagram are no strangers to massive data leaks. For example, Insider reports in early 2021, the personal data of over 500 million Facebook users leaked online. According to TechCrunch, a similar incident occurred in 2019, with nearly 420 million records of phone numbers leaked online. However, the recent revelations show Meta’s negligent data practices pose just as much of a national security risk as TikTok.
*Correction 2/10/23- Corrected wording of sentence regarding Bright Data to accurately reflect the nature of the scraped data.