The IT Nerd

You might recall that the commissioner of the FCC called on Apple and Google to remove TikTok from their app stores because of the fact that it was discovered that the Chinese have access to US users data. Something that TikTok said wasn’t happening. Now that the company is facing being banned, they’re reacting:

Chinese-owned social media site TikTok told U.S. senators it was working on a final agreement with the Biden Administration that would “fully safeguard user data and U.S. national security interests,” according to a TikTok letter seen Friday by Reuters.

The letter dated Thursday came in response to questions raised in a June 27 letter by a few senators including Republicans Marsha Blackburn and Ted Cruz, TikTok said.

And:

Last month, TikTok said it had completed migrating U.S. users’ information to servers at Oracle but it was still using U.S. and Singapore data centers for backup.

TikTok’s letter acknowledged that China-based employees “can have access to TikTok U.S. user data subject to a series of robust cybersecurity controls and authorization approval protocols overseen by our U.S.-based security team.”

TikTok said it expected “to delete U.S. users’ protected data from our own systems and fully pivot to Oracle cloud servers located in the U.S.”

Some in Congress were not impressed with this response:

Senator Blackburn, of Tennessee, said TikTok “should have come clean from the start but instead tried to shroud their work in secrecy.” She said TikTok needs to “come back and testify before Congress.”

They should make a return trip to Congress and testify under oath why they should be believed now when clearly they’ve been playing fast and loose with the truth. But there’s more:

“TikTok’s response confirms our fears about the CCP’s influence in the company were well founded,” Republican Senator Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee told Bloomberg on Friday. “The Chinese-run company should have come clean from the start, but it attempted to shroud its work in secrecy. Americans need to know if they are on TikTok, Communist China has their information.” 

Here’s my $0.02 worth on this. Ban them. Ban them now. And get other countries to ban them. This discussion about if TikTok is a national security threat has been going on for years. And if you’re having this much discussion about a topic, and stuff keeps coming out that says that whatever it is that you’re talking about is bad, you should probably ban it. Because keeping TikTok around really doesn’t do anyone any good.

This entry was posted on July 2, 2022 at 9:05 am and is filed under Commentary. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.