Two US senators called TikTok a Chinese surveillance tool, issuing a bipartisan warning as the Biden administration considers a deal that could continue the video-sharing app keep operating in the US.
Tom Cotton, a Republican from Arkansas, claimed on “Fox News Sunday” that “it’s not just the stuff you submit to TikTok but all the data on your phone, other applications, all your personal information, even face imaging, even where your eyes are looking on your phone.” He claimed that “It’s not just the content you upload to TikTok but all the data on your phone, other apps, all your personal information, even facial imagery, even where your eyes are looking on your phone.”
The app is “an enormous threat,” Senate Intelligence Committee chair Mark Warner, a Virginia Democrat, said on the program. “All of that data that your child is inputting and receiving is being stored somewhere in Beijing,” he said.
The Joe Biden administration is attempting to reach a security agreement with TikTok in order to protect it from a US ban proposed by his predecessor, Donald Trump. Critics continue to worry that ByteDance Ltd.’s popular app, which is based in Beijing, may be used to send data to China.
Senator Marco Rubio of Florida and Representative Mike Gallagher of Wisconsin, two prominent Republicans, announced this month that they will introduce legislation to outlaw the usage of TikTok in the US and lambasted the Biden administration for not taking adequate action.
Last week, FBI Director Christopher Wray reaffirmed the agency’s concerns about national security, telling a House hearing that the possibility of Chinese government access to user data or software through Tiktok is a cause for “extreme concern.”
TikTok security proposal draws skepticism
TikTok acknowledges that some workers working outside of the US have access to data from US users. Data has, however, denied sharing any of it with the Chinese government.
The business is working on a project named Project Texas that will segregate sensitive data from its American consumers so that only staff in the US will have access, according to TikTok Chief Executive Officer Shou Zi Chew’s statement from last week. He described the initiative as “extremely difficult and expensive to build” while speaking at the Bloomberg New Economy Forum in Singapore.
