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Many people will simply weigh the benefits and risks: are the goofy videos entertaining enough to justify the risks of exposing their data to companies and potentially state actors?

The reality is, at the end of the day, very few American users are actively thinking about what country an app originates from. The political narrative around TikTok as a national security threat may drive away some users-if TikTok is no good for government employees, shouldn’t I be concerned and stay away from it too? But unless the US government implements a comprehensive ban on TikTok, I believe many more are going to keep using it. Enforcing that separation of user data-and using third-party audits to prove that it’s being done-would be a first step. “There are a few things they have said they’re going to do, but they haven’t. For years, ByteDance has vowed to store and process US data only in the US, but there are still reports that company engineers in China are inappropriately accessing US user data. There are things companies like ByteDance, which owns TikTok, can do to address the concerns. China has been developing a legal framework for protecting personal data, but it is focused on holding private companies accountable, not restricting what kind of data the government gets from companies or what it does with that data. “We have a tendency to securitize everything now,” Ruan says, “It’s important, but we have to be very careful when we apply a national security framework to data.” Concerns about what these apps could have been doing should be built on actual technical research instead of speculation and insinuation, she says.Įven so, journalists and those in policy circles should closely watch how these apps process their data, with particular attention to whether any user data is being transferred back to China.Īs Xu tells me, there’s a legitimate national security concern about what happens to US user data once it is inside China’s borders. In 2021, a technical review of TikTok, conducted by a colleague of Ruan’s, reported that it “did not observe collecting contact lists, recording and sending photos, audio, videos or geolocation coordinates without user permission.” (WeChat, on the other hand, was found to surveil chats even in accounts not registered in China.) The actual differences between these apps and American apps are pretty small, Ruan says. Lotus Ruan, who has conducted technical analyses of Chinese apps like WeChat and is currently a senior research fellow at the Toronto-based research group Citizen Lab, echoes this view: “With the rise of TikTok and the Chinese apps going global, are looking at the Chinese apps with a magnifying glass.” As a result, the risks are often exaggerated. “There is currently an evidentiary gap of actual harm that TikTok has done to any actual American that’s of a national security nature,” he tells me. Kevin Xu, a technologist and the author behind the bilingual newsletter Interconnected, wrote last week that “the DC policymaking circle has moved beyond TikTok to construct an all-encompassing worldview where all apps made by Chinese tech companies are bad.”Īnd Xu says even the risks surrounding TikTok have been overblown. But I believe most of the anxiety around having Chinese apps on our phones is overblown and politicized. There are real concerns about these apps’ privacy protocols. For example, the Special Competitive Studies Project, a new think tank founded by former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, specifically named Shein, Temu, and CapCut (as well as WeChat) as apps that “could pose similar challenges” as TikTok in a February 15 post. Although public awareness of their links to the Chinese government might not be as strong, some people are trying to change that. The same treatment could easily spread to other Chinese apps. The premise of these bans is that the Chinese government could use TikTok to manipulate what federal workers see or to acquire sensitive information like their GPS locations. This week, it was joined by the European Commission and the Canadian government, both of which decided to ban TikTok on staffers’ work phones. The US has been trying to limit the app’s reach at the state and federal level since December. The unprecedented popularity of Chinese apps is a bit jarring juxtaposed against another story currently dominating the news cycle: expanding bans of TikTok use on government devices. But it’s also because they are spending generously on marketing: Temu is estimated to have spent some $14 million on its two Super Bowl ads (in which it also promised a $10 million giveaway).

Their success is partly because Chinese tech companies, having survived a decade of cutthroat competition in the domestic consumer tech industry, can now be even better than Silicon Valley at making easy-to-use and addictive apps.

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