A Clear Understanding of TikTok App
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A Clear Understanding of TikTok App
Part One of the Assignment
Founded in 2006, TikTok has been growing massively at an alarming rate. It’s like every person has an account with TikTik. I once used this app, then I stopped. The increase in information about the dangers of the app made me delete the app. It is challenging to pay serious attention when using this app. But once you take a step back, you will realize the other things the app doesn’t want the public to see. TikTok is a social media app that allows its users to share a short video, 60 seconds long, with family, friends, and the whole world (Internet Matters Team, 2020). It is an exciting app since videos shared by the users range from lip-syncing to funny sketch videos that feature special effects. According to the Internet Matters Team, the app currently has almost 1 billion active users with up to 75 languages.
The short-form video app, originating from Beijing’s ByteDance, had a 275 percent growth. From 20 million users, the app added in December 2017 to 75 million new uses in December 2019 (Perez, 2019). Despite this enormous and steady growth, there are many people, mostly the older people, who are not very sure about the TikTok app. Reports from Zack Doffman claimed that Amazon, one of the world’s largest companies, had asked its staff to delete the TikTok app from their phones (Doffman, 2020). Although Amazon came to retract the news quickly to avoid any negative attention, the company had already set a vivid inference that TikTok, the social app used by millions of users globally, may be tapping into their emails (Doffman, 2020). And this shows how dangerous the TikTok app is when it comes to stealing data.
It is pretty noticeable how dangerous TikTok has been in mining data, storage, and even data selling. The privacy risks the TikTok app possesses are drastic, and this social app, at least in part, is monitoring our data (Neeson, 2020). Karen North, a professor at the University of Southern California teaching social media, once told her two little children that they are can have any other social app on their phones, but not TikTok (Graham, 2020). It is alarming to consider that the same app is loved and embraced by many young people due to its funny videos, and still, they are denied from using it. Karen North’s reason was that “their data is being mined, and the company doesn’t have to adhere to our privacy laws” (Graham, 2020). She continues to explain that TikTok is owned by ByteDance company from China. And therefore, if asked by the Chinese communist government to hand over their data, the ByteDance Company would comply since they do not choose (Graham, 2020).
Marriott International, on 30 November 2018, accepted that “an unauthorized party had copied and encrypted information” that belonged to “hundreds of millions of unique guests” (Geltzer & Jones, 2019). Just two weeks, what looked like a typical hacking case had a massive and even more worrying change of events. According to reports, Mike Pompeo, the Secretary of State, had publicly acknowledged these reports stating that “Chinese Government-linked hackers” were the ones responsible for mining or breaching the data (Geltzer & Jones, 2019). Therefore, it is very hard to trust the TikTok social media app with my data with all these cases and reports.
Part Two of the Assignment
One of the major worries that surround TikTok is where users’ data and other information are stored (Degrippo, 2020). And this makes it already a severe issue with the criminal justice system. When installing the TikTok app, it requests several permissions, which are noticeably for social media apps. These requests focus primarily on video and audio permissions (Degrippo, 2020). But what the TikTok users do not see is where the information provided is kept and how safe the data storage can be.
The United States Privacy Policy claimed that TikTok collects numerous information without the users knowing. It has access to the users’ country location, their internet address and the device types they are using (Fowler, 2020). If the TikTok users give the social media app permission to their data, it gathers their precise location, their contacts and other social networks information from their phones, at the same time grab their contact number and age (Fowler, 2020). This makes the TikTok users’ security vulnerable because they will have full access to their helpful information and target ads. With all that information, they clearly understand who we are, who our family and friends are, what we like, and what we say to our friends and any other person.
According to Shirin Ghaffray, Trump has, in many instances, accused ByteDance and other Chinese applications, such as WeChat, of being a severe threat to the United States National Security. The fear is that Tiktok can efficiently channel US users’ personal information to the Chinese Communist Party (Ghaffary, 2020). This, according to the US government, will possibly allow China to trace the Federal employees and contractors’ location, thus creating files of personal data “for blackmail, and conduct corporate espionage” (Ghaffary, 2020). According to Louise Matsakis, both Mike Pompeo, secretary of state, and Peter Navarro, the White House adviser, used the Fox News platform to warn Americans that the United States government was considering banning all Chinese apps, including TikTok. They termed the reasons as security concerns (Matsakis, 2020). Mark Meadows, Trump’s chief of staff, reported that there are “a number of administration officials who are looking at the national security risk as it relates to TikTok and other apps” (Matsakis, 2020). This heightens the many reasons why the TikTok social media app is a significant threat to the US criminal justice system.
References
Degrippo, S. (2020). Understanding the information TikTok gathers and stores | Proofpoint US. Proofpoint. Retrieved 24 March 2021, from https://www.proofpoint.com/us/blog/threat-protection/understanding-information-tiktok-gathers-and-stores.
Doffman, Z. (2020). Is TikTok Seriously Dangerous—Do You Need To Delete It?. Forbes. Retrieved 24 March 2021, from https://www.forbes.com/sites/zakdoffman/2020/07/11/tiktok-seriously-dangerous-warning-delete-app-trump-ban/?sh=57d89c2f2b0e.
Fowler, G. (2020). Is it time to delete TikTok? A guide to the rumors and the real privacy risks. The Washington Post. Retrieved 24 March 2021, from https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/07/13/tiktok-privacy/.
Geltzer, J., & Jones, B. (2019). Weapons of Mass Consumerism: Why China Wants Your Personal Information – Just Security. Just Security. Retrieved 24 March 2021, from https://www.justsecurity.org/62187/weapons-mass-consumerism-china-personal-information/.
Ghaffary, S. (2020). Do you really need to worry about your security on TikTok? Here’s what we know.. Vox. Retrieved 24 March 2021, from https://www.vox.com/recode/2020/8/11/21363092/why-is-tiktok-national-security-threat-wechat-trump-ban.
Graham, J. (2020). TikTok and privacy: What’s the problem? Perhaps the video-sharing app gathers too much data. USA TODAY. Retrieved 24 March 2021, from https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2020/08/06/tiktok-any-worse-privacy-and-data-mining-than-facebook/3311726001/.
Internet Matters Team. (2020). How safe is TikTok app? | Internet Matters. Internet Matters. Retrieved 24 March 2021, from https://www.internetmatters.org/hub/esafety-news/tik-tok-app-safety-what-parents-need-to-know/.
Matsakis, L. (2020). Does TikTok Really Pose a Risk to US National Security?. Wired. Retrieved 24 March 2021, from https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-ban-us-national-security-risk/.
Neeson, J. (2020). The Dangers of TikTok That Are Worth Your Attention. Reader’s Digest. Retrieved 24 March 2021, from https://www.rd.com/article/the-dangers-of-tiktok-that-are-worth-your-attention/.
Perez, S. (2019). TechCrunch is now a part of Verizon Media. Techcrunch.com. Retrieved 24 March 2021, from https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/29/its-time-to-pay-serious-attention-to-tiktok/.