How TikTok is a potential threat to America’s national security

Last updated on February 27th, 2023 at 06:23 am

Believing that the Chinese make social media application TikTok could be a threat to national security of America. Considered the most downloaded application in 2019, the Republican Senator David Hawley has passed a legislation to ban the use of the app on any of the devices private or of governmental use, if held by any federal employee.

Hawley who is currently serving as the junior United States Senator from Missouri, spoke about the way the application invades into the privacy of the user. Seeing it as a huge breach in governmental handlings, the use of the same by any federal employee can be catastrophic.

According to Chinese government laws, the application is suppose to share all its user data. It is owned by a Chinese company which has Chinese communist members in leadership.
According to reliable sources, the information gathered by the application includes Information about messages, applications, sites you might be accessing, search history, location data and maybe lots more.

The Pentagon, Homeland Security and Transportation Security Administration (TSA) have all directed that none of their employees or family at home may have the TikTok application on their phones.
Owned by the company ByteDance, the company owns many other applications and is considered China’s facebook. It had come under scrutiny in 2017 when it was discovered that it was censoring content that ‘could anger and displease governments’ where they were operating. It was later discovered that on pressure from the Chinese lawmakers, the company was sharing user data with the leadership.

Several American lawmakers had already pressed for investigations into the working of the application in October 2017. Even other AI enabled instruments like Alexa could be a potential breach in confidentiality. Working from home in the lockdown period, a lot of lawyers have warned their clients to keep the Alexa at bay. It could be actually listening to confidential conversations.

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