The latest Chinese tech threat to US security? Lawmakers take aim at TikTok
- A Senate subcommittee says the personal data of the popular video app’s users is at risk of hacking by Beijing
- Also drawing fire was US tech giant Apple, for accommodating China’s new cybersecurity law and storing its users’ data on local servers
TikTok, the popular short-video app owned by China’s ByteDance – as well as Apple, the American technology giant – came under heavy fire in Washington on Tuesday as lawmakers and experts called to testify at a US Senate hearing dismissed assurances by both companies that the data of their American users is secure from hacking by Beijing.
“TikTok claims they don’t store American user data in China,” Senator Josh Hawley, chairman of the Senate Subcommittee on Crime and Terrorism, said in opening remarks at the hearing titled: “How corporations and big tech leave our data exposed to criminals, China, and other bad actors”.
“That’s nice, but all it takes is one knock on the door of their parent company, based in China, from a Communist Party official, for that data to be transferred to the Chinese government’s hands whenever they want it,” said Hawley, a Republican representing Missouri, who has emerged as a leading congressional critic of Beijing.
Experts at the hearing largely agreed with the way Hawley and the subcommittee’s ranking Democrat, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, characterised the cybersecurity threat that TikTok and Apple pose.
“While TikTok claims to store its data in the United States as of today, its Beijing-headquartered parent company, ByteDance, is subject to” a new cybersecurity law that China will fully institute in 2020, Kara Frederick, a fellow for technology and national security at the Washington-based think tank Centre for a New American Security, said.