Still in the sights of European and American authorities, TikTok acknowledges that the personal data of its users may be viewed by its employees. A disturbing admission about the exploitation of this precious information…
The omnipresence of social networks in daily life is enough to give rise to legitimate fears, especially in the area of privacy. It must be said that the giants of the Internet collect a phenomenal amount of personal data from their users every second. By using platforms like Facebook, Instagram or even TikTok, you have to agree to blindly trust companies so that they do not exploit the potential of these real gold mines while ensuring their safety. And when political tensions get involved, things get complicated. This is particularly the case for TikTok. For many years, the successful social network has been suspected of transferring the personal data of American and European users to its parent company, ByteDance, located in China. And, against all odds, the platform has recognized the facts of which it is accused in an article from his official blogon the occasion of the update of its privacy policy for the European Economic Area.
TikTok: personal data of users accessible by employees
Unsurprisingly, we learn in the press release that the personal data of European users is not stored on servers located on the Old Continent, but in Singapore and the United States. The same is true for data from American Internet users. The problem is that ByteDance “allows certain employees of our group located in Brazil, Canada, China, Israel, Japan, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, South Korea and the United States to access, remotely, the data of the TikTok users” – including those residing in Europe and the United States. The firm swears that it is only a way to control the performance of its services, such as its content recommendation algorithms.
Elaine Fox, TikTok’s chief privacy officer, tries to be reassuring, assuring that their “Efforts are focused on limiting the number of employees with access to European user data” and that security measures are in place before allowing any employee to access this data, including “a series of robust security controls and approval protocols through methods recognized by the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)”. Finally, the social network “does not collect precise location information” and just get information “approximate” about the general location of the user.
These statements add fuel to the fire by rekindling fears of interference by the Chinese government. Although ByteDance strongly denies that the data can be collected by Chinese authorities, the company is indeed a member of the China Federation of Companies and the Internet. However, as specified in the statutes of this organization, each member company undertakes to follow “the way of Xi Jinping” – the current president of China – while agreeing to be supervised by the Chinese administration of the cyberspace – the Chinese institution in charge of the monitoring and the censorship of the Web. This is also why, in September 2021, the Irish regulator, which has authority in the matter at European Union level, launched an investigation into transfers by TikTok of personal data to China.
Personal data in China: TikTok soon banned from the United States?
In the United States, many voices have once again been raised to demand the outright banning of TikTok on American territory. This is particularly the case of Brendan Carr, commissioner of the FCC (Federal Communications Commission) – the American telecoms regulatory agency –, who expressed concern in a interview given by Axios the amount of data collected by ByteDance and its potential use, especially for an attempt to interfere in political processes in the United States. Indeed, many still remember the events of Cambridge Analytica, when the data collected by Facebook enabled a third party organization to influence political opinions during the presidential elections, for the benefit of Donald Trump. Especially since at the moment, relations are somewhat tense with China… This is why, for Brendan Carr, it is only possible to move forward through a total ban on TikTok in the United States.
The FCC commissioner had already declared at the beginning of the yearin front of members of the House of Representatives, that TikTok was “a sophisticated surveillance tool that collects large amounts of sensitive data“. But if he does not have the power to ban the platform, his words reinforce the pressure on the Chinese social network, currently in full negotiation with the government of Joe Biden, who has asked the US Department of Commerce to conduct an investigation and produce recommendations to protect citizens’ data against “foreign adversaries”. Is a TikTok ban on American territory possible? India is the only country to have already done so, but what is certain is that it would not please the 94.1 million users of the application present in the United States.