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Banning TikTok Won’t Protect Your Data 

A person in a black hoodie hacking into a computer.
Photo by Tima Miroshnichenko on Pexels.
Banning TikTok Won't Keep Our Data Safe

Reuters reports the Biden administration set a late-March deadline for all federal agencies to remove TikTok from government-issued devices. The decision stems from growing bipartisan support to ban the app entirely in the United States. According to Axios, a whistleblower from ByteDance, TikTok’s parent company, alleges the company can easily access U.S. user data. Will banning TikTok in the United States protect your data?

Banning TikTok in the U.S. won’t stop other companies from sending them your data.

According to Gizmodo, over 28,000 independent applications use TikTok’s software development kits. These programs send your data to TikTok’s servers for functions such as targeted advertisements. Additionally, the platform deploys “trackers” across the web that sends your browsing data back to the company. 

Reuters reports the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) urged Congress not to ban the app, citing the ban’s ineffectiveness. “[Banning the] app itself is not going to stop data flowing to TikTok,” said ACLU staff technologist Daniel Kahn Gillmor. “TikTok has software in other places, not to mention TikTok trackers across other parts of the web. I don’t have an account, but there are still plenty of ways the company can get data about me.” 

Other social media platforms collect just as much data as TikTok.

Additionally, Gizmodo reports that American companies pose just as much of a national security risk as the Chinese-owned platform. Why? Because they all partner with Chinese advertisement technology companies subject to the same data laws as TikTok. The only way to adequately address national security concerns is by preventing data brokers from selling info to other countries.” Even if TikTok did not exist, China could purchase confidential information on U.S. consumers,” the Brookings Institute reports.

The European Union fined Meta $410 million at the start of 2023 for violating data privacy laws. And Apple faces several class-action lawsuits for collecting data even after iPhone owners opted out of data collection. So TikTok is far from the only social media company employing excessive data tracking. And the ACLU fears banning TikTok will harm free speech without achieving the data security the federal government supposedly desires.

“[A]t a certain point, we’re going to start looking a lot like the folks we’re supposedly opposing,” said Kahn Gillmor. “We’re laying the groundwork for homogenized control over the internet.”

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