Turning Point USA

The White House has informed all federal agencies that they have 30 days to remove TikTok from all federal devices after Congress passed a law banning the app from government systems at the end of last year.

In a bipartisan fashion, Congress banned the video-sharing app on all federal government devices after concerns that the Chinese-owned app developer, ByteDance, is using TikTok to collect data information on its users that can be obtained by the Chinese government. In 2020, the Pentagon banned the app on all military devices for the same concerns.

The decision to ban TikTok on federal devices is in line with legislation enacted at the state level. Nearly half of all states in the U.S. have passed laws banning the social media app from state government devices. Other countries such as Canada and Taiwan have passed a federal ban on TikTok as well.

Investigators who claim to have back-engineered TikTok call it one of the most invasive apps of all time. But TikTok’s clear violation of privacy is not hidden or disguised. When users create an account, they agree to the platform’s Terms of Service and Privacy Policy. These terms explicitly state what data the app collects:

“We collect certain information about the device you use to access the Platform, such as your IP address, user agent, mobile carrier, time zone settings, identifiers for advertising purposes, model of your device, the device system, network type, device IDs, your screen resolution and operating system, app and file names and types, keystroke patterns or rhythms, battery state, audio settings and connected audio devices.

We automatically assign you a device ID and user ID. Where you log-in from multiple devices, we will be able to use information such as your device ID and user ID to identify your activity across devices. We may also associate you with information collected from devices other than those you use to log-in to the Platform.”

Tiktok’s Privacy Policy

TikTok’s Privacy Policy even states that the app will collect a user’s precise location as well as biometric information of a user such as their faceprint and voiceprint.

The Chinese government, which essentially dictates the actions of all businesses that operate in their country, purchased a stake in ByteDance and placed a government-appointed official on its board of directors. This has led many intelligence experts to speculate that the Chinese government can use TikTok as spyware on American citizens.

FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr publicly wrote a letter to Apple and Google last year calling for TikTok to be removed from their app stores. Carr expressed, “It is clear that TikTok poses an unacceptable national security risk due to its extensive data harvesting being combined with Beijing’s apparently unchecked access to sensitive data.”