In recent years, we have seen the rise in the popularity of TikTok. For those who are unfamiliar, TikTok is an app in which users can set a song and dance to it and later add all kinds of funky and cool effects. It is basically a fun app that doesn’t seem to do much else, but could it potentially be a national security risk?That’s what US Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and Senator Tom Cotton want to find out, when they asked that intelligence officials investigate the app to see if it could pose a risk or threat to national security. This seems to stem from the fact that TikTok is owned by ByteDance, a company based in China.
According to Schumer, “With over 110 million downloads in the US alone, TikTok is a potential counterintelligence threat we cannot ignore.” This is because over in China, there is a law in which it would require companies to comply with data requests from the Chinese government, leading to concerns that such requests could be made not just to ByteDance, but to other Chinese companies in general. This is also why there are concerns about Huawei supplying communications equipment to the US.
In a statement made to Reuters, a TikTok spokesperson said, “TikTok is committed to being a trusted and responsible corporate citizen in the US, which includes working with Congress and all relevant regulatory agencies.”
Filed in . Read more about Apps, China, Entertainment, Music, Security and Tiktok. Source: scmp