- Kyle Chua
US Legislation That Would Give Joe Biden Power To Ban TikTok Advances in Congress
The U.S. is one step closer to imposing a nationwide ban on Chinese-owned, short-form video app TikTok.
Legislation that would give Joe Biden the power to ban the app on all devices in the U.S. has advanced in Congress, according to Reuters. Lawmakers on the House Foreign Affairs Committee voted 24 to 16 in favour of approving the legislation, which was sponsored by the committee's chairman Michael McCaul, a Texas Republican.
Democrats, however, are reportedly opposing the bill as they would rather Congress not interfere with the pending review of TikTok by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), an interbody agency tasked with determining if the Chinese government can gain access to the personal data stored on the app.
"We’ve been negotiating this [with Democrats] for a solid month, without a whole lot of progress," McCaul told Politico after the vote. "They would prefer to defer to the CFIUS process, where we want to move forward as a Congress."
While only TikTok is mentioned, the legislation gives the White House the power to ban other apps that have connections with Beijing, whether directly or indirectly.
The legislation cites an assessment by FBI Director Christopher Wray last year claiming ByteDance, the Beijing-based internet giant that owns TikTok "is controlled by the Chinese government". Wray warns that the app could be used by the Chinese Communist Party "to manipulate content and, if they want to, to use it for influence operations".
McCaul said he expects Congress to tackle the bill "fairly soon", with a full vote coming as early as this month.
In December, the U.S. banned TikTok on all government-issued devices. The White House this week issued a notice that it's giving federal agencies 30 days to comply with the ban, with only a few exceptions for national security, law enforcement and research purposes. Canada and the European Commission also recently imposed similar bans.
For those unfamiliar, TikTok leverages an algorithm to serve users the content they might like, and that algorithm is powered by user data.
With regards to what it collects, according to a 2021 Wired report, the app collects data about the user's activities and preferences based on videos they watch. It also knows the device users are using, their location, IP addresses, search history and content of their messages, among others. The app can even harvest some data from users who aren't signed up through cookies and other browser trackers. In the U.S., it can also collect biometric information like face and voiceprints.
The data TikTok collects is all meant to satisfy advertisers by serving tailored ads to the app's users, so that they're more likely to engage with them.
As to how the data collection works, TikTok details a lot of its practices in its privacy policy. The app, for example, obtains a user's email address, phone number, date of birth and other related information upon sign-up. It additionally collects the content users create, regardless if they upload them or not, along with the metadata associated with the content. TikTok also collects content from a user's device clipboard if they copy and paste them to or from the app, or a third-party platform.
But TikTok is a little less clear where the data goes, as Rowenna Fielding, a data protection enthusiast and consultant, told Wired. "They explain more about tracking and data collection than most other social media companies, but the app employs a lot of techniques to conceal how it is functioning, which makes it difficult to work out which data is going where." And because TikTok isn't specific about which data goes where, Fielding advised "to assume it could be anything”.
"The reason given is to help develop filters and recommendations, but there are much darker uses, including behavioural profiling and targeting," Fielding added. “It would be extremely unusual for a for-profit business to not make for-profit uses of these things.”
Legislation that would give Joe Biden the power to ban the app on all devices in the U.S. has advanced in Congress after securing a 24 to 16 vote in favour of approval among lawmakers from the House Foreign Affairs Committee.
While only TikTok is mentioned, the legislation gives the White House the power to ban other apps that have connections with Beijing, whether directly or indirectly.
The legislation cites an assessment by FBI Director Christopher Wray last year claiming ByteDance, the Beijing-based internet giant that owns TikTok "is controlled by the Chinese government".
Congress is expected to tackle the legislation "fairly soon," with a full vote coming as early as this month.