If we had responsible leaders, the influence of China and the promulgation of Chinese spyware as a fun music and dancing app would be the country’s top priority, writes ZacharyFaria. But we do not.
According to materials viewed by Forbes, TikTok’s parent company planned to track the locations of specific American citizens using the popular app. ByteDance’s Internal Audit and Risk Control department planned, in at least two instances, to collect the location data of American citizens who had no ties to the company. According to Forbes, the location gathering had nothing to do with targeted ads and everything to do with spying on individual U.S. citizens.
The Chinese Communist Party collects stockpiles of data to keep its own citizens under its authoritarian thumb. Now, ByteDance is helpfully compiling data profiles for an entire generation of future American leaders as it lives up to its promise to “further deepen cooperation” with the CCP. There is a reason that banks and the Department of Defense have told employees to delete the app from company, government, and personal devices. Even the Democratic Party, which has happily embraced the app to reach the youths, uses separate, dedicated devices just for TikTok to ensure that no important files will be compromised. Everyone knows it's Chinese spyware, and yet few American leaders want to do anything about it.
When former President Donald Trump set out to ban the app, reporters from the Washington Post and the New York Times who used the app to farm content were outraged. Joe Biden’s campaign told staffers to remove the app from their devices, but he let TikTok and ByteDance off the hook once he became president.
If we had responsible leaders, the influence of China and the promulgation of Chinese spyware as a fun music and dancing app would be the country’s top priority. But we do not, and the Chinese Communist Party is once again being allowed to reach its tendrils into American life in an increasingly personal, and dangerous, way.