A proposal to ban TikTok in the U.S. has garnered bipartisan support and raised bigger questions about data access laws.
TikTok has proposed a plan - Project Texas - to move all U.S. data to the United States to allay privacy and security concerns.
Shou Zi Chew told U.S. lawmakers that China-based ByteDance employees would have access to some U.S. TikTok user data until Project Texas is implemented.
TikTok does not condone any effort by its own employees to access U.S. user data.
TikTok releases a transparency report where it discloses formal legal requests for user data.
Gathering and selling data that TikTok doesn't need to make a profit is a concern.
There has been opposition to the bill from both TikTok, other U.S. lawmakers and TikTok users, all of whom deem the law unconstitutional and in violation of the First Amendment.
A group of TikTok users sued the state of Montana to overturn the ban in May 2023.
TikTok financed the suit by paying the legal fees of the five TikTok users suing the state.
The United States is not the only country that has full or partial TikTok bans in place.
The only two countries with full bans on TikTok are Afghanistan and India.
Other countries have banned TikTok in the past and have since rescinded the bans.
A third option involves criminalizing the application, which has been done before but not with an application anywhere near the size of TikTok.
Project Texas is a proposal from TikTok to move U.S. data into a third-party cloud infrastructure to create more transparency and security.
All TikTok user data is currently stored in Singapore and Virginia.
TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew said in an interview with The New York Times that he expected data localization to be a theme in the future.
While TikTok is not available in mainland China, Douyin is a short-form video application that is often portrayed as the Chinese version of TikTok.
One of the main challenges of banning TikTok is alienating young users politically.
A third challenge of banning TikTok is gathering and presenting evidence that the application is a national security threat or a danger to users in some way.
The investigation into TikTok has reinvigorated a larger conversation about data privacy on all social platforms, sparking calls for data privacy law reform.
This Cyber News was published on www.techtarget.com. Publication date: Fri, 01 Dec 2023 23:06:57 +0000