The TikTok CEO has agreed to a survey in the US Congress, Shou Zi Chew is scheduled to appear before the Energy and Trade Committee in the House of Representatives on March 23. The performance could mark a climax in the escalating conflict between US politicians and the popular video app. Committee Chair Cathy McMorris Rodgers (Republican) writes in the announcement that the subsidiary of the Chinese group ByteDance “knowingly allowed” the Chinese Communist Party to access usage data from Americans. It is now time that people knew about the consequences for their privacy and data protection: “Big Tech has increasingly become a destructive force in American society”. TikTok has announced that it wants to correct some things in the hearing.
Both parties against TikTok
With the hearing, the debate about TikTok in the USA is finally reaching federal politics. US states have been banning the app for weeks, but it’s always only about business mobile devices. There are now such bans in the majority of US states, especially in the central and southeastern United States. Most of these are Republican-controlled states, but some Democrat-controlled states have also enacted such bans. In addition, several universities have now banned the use of TikTok on provided mobile devices and block the app in internal networks.
Concerns about national security are given as the main justification for the bans, with reference to reports that data is viewed by users in China. Last June, the US magazine Buzzfeed reported from internal meetings that, among other things, the statement was made: “Everything is seen in China.” Shortly before Christmas it became known that Bytedance had misused TikTok to monitor the movements of several US journalists and their relatives who had the app installed on their cell phones.
TikTok has mostly rejected the allegations and criticized the measures as politically motivated. In response to McMorris Rodgers’ statements, the company has again claimed that the Chinese Communist Party does not have access to user data, according to The Wall Street Journal. You control neither directly nor indirectly ByteDance and TikTok. The company will explain to the committee how it is addressing national security concerns.
It is striking that concerns about possible access to data from US citizens are now emerging in US politics, since for the first time an app not from the USA has secured large market shares there. Criticism of insufficient data protection at US services such as Facebook and Google and far-reaching access rights for US secret services has been around in Europe for years. Efforts to improve the legal situation and limit surveillance have so far been largely fruitless. In the USA, meanwhile, there are already discussions about blocking TikTok completely. The US House of Representatives is scheduled to vote on a motion in February, Reuters reports.
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