Hot off the heels of the US House Of Representatives passing a bill to potentially ban TikTok, come the news that the Canadian Government has been doing a national security review of TikTok:
The federal Liberals ordered a national security review of popular video app TikTok in September 2023 but did not disclose it publicly.
“This is still an ongoing case. We can’t comment further because of the confidentiality provisions of the Investment Canada Act,” a spokesperson for Industry Minister Francois-Philippe Champagne said.
“Our government has never hesitated to (take) action, when necessary, if a case under review is found to be injurious to Canada’s national security.”
The revelation comes after the U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill Wednesday to ban TikTok unless its China-based owner sells its stake in the business.
That’s interesting. I have a comment from Ken Westin, Field CISO, Panther Labs relative to what the US has done. But is likely applicable to Canada as well:
I fear the bill to ban TikTok is mostly political grandstanding close to an election year feeding off of xenophobic rhetoric against China. That’s not to say the fear of the Chinese government accessing TikTok data isn’t real, but one has to wonder what value this data has, as the platform isn’t a place where documents or sensitive PII is stored. If the real intent is on protecting the data of US citizens, then it seems there should be a more robust set of legislation around the collection, sharing and selling of personal data in general. China can and probably has purchased data on US citizens from the same data brokers US companies buy it from. There is also a wealth of data often from data breaches available in underground forums that is free or cheap to access. It seems it would be better for us to focus on the real source of the problem, regarding private data access as well as bolstering cybersecurity to protect intellectual property from foreign powers which is what we’ve seen China and the nation state actors target in the past.
I’ve gone on record multiple times as saying that TikTok needs to be banned because if we’re having this much discussion about it, it’s likely not a good thing. Or put another way, if there’s smoke there’s fire. Hopefully this whole episode leads to consumers on both sides of the border being better protected from adversaries like China.