Tik-Tok Ban
By Scott Hamilton
I am sure you have probably heard a lot about the plan to ban Tik-Tok in the United States. The good news is the bill to ban this social media platform is struggling to pass. The House passed the bill on March 13, 2024, but the Senate is holding out and so far in a grid lock when it comes to making a decision. I know you will probably find it strange, that even though I am against the bill banning Tik-Tok, I do not believe it is a safe application to utilize.
Let me explain myself a little here. I also do not believe Facebook, YouTube, WhatsApp, Instagram, or Linked-In are safe applications to utilize on a regular basis; in fact the Internet as a whole is not really safe. Regardless of how safe a website, social media platform or computer application may or may not be, it should not be a decision left to the government to ban the platform. I will say that TikTok is blocked on my home network and I plan to keep it that way, but consider for a moment the number of jobs and amount of revenue a social media giant like TikTok brings into the United States.
A platform like TikTok, which is currently number five in the world, has to actively support their 1.56 billion users, and to do this requires an extreme amount of data storage as well as computing hardware. Currently TikTok utilizes data centers managed by third party companies. One of the world’s largest data center real estate investment groups, Digital Realty lists TikTok as its number two customer. They currently lease 25 locations at an annual cost of $212.2 million, which is all income for the U.S. based data center provider.
TikTok is in the process of migrating all American citizen-based data to Oracle Cloud and promises to keep this data managed solely by the Austin, Texas, based Oracle Corporation in an effort to meet the strict requirements that the American data is to be protected. They formed a US-based subsidiary, TikTok US Data Security Inc., which currently employs 1,500 full-time employees and expects significant growth in the coming year. The company also employs 8,500 full-time employees based in Los Angeles, Calif., bringing an annual revenue of $450 million into the state.
We are in a dire situation in the U.S. when it comes to technology jobs already, without taking the risk of removing 8,500 U.S. based jobs from the market by banning a platform that is making the best efforts to protect our information. The biggest argument I have seen in the efforts to ban the platform are related to Chinese government access to U.S. citizens’ private information. This private information is things like your date of birth, phone number, address and general contact information, which most of us already have posted on more than one social media platform.
If you think that this same personal information put into your profile on Facebook is any safer there than on TikTok, you are sadly mistaken. Last February allegations were made by House representatives Mark Warner and Marco Rubio that Meta, the parent company of Facebook, knowingly released U.S. citizen private data to Chinese based technology companies. This data breach came as part of a release of Facebook development code to developers from blacklisted nations such as China and Russia. These developer tools allow the user to access private data on the Facebook platform via software interfaces, making it easy to develop applications that gather data from the platform in an automated fashion.
The letter from these senators claim while Facebook’s data sharing with potential undesirables from China is common knowledge dating back to September 2018, the extent at which the social media giant allowed it to happen was much greater than previously thought. Having this brought to light makes me wonder, why ban TikTok for the same actions Facebook, a U.S.-based company, is also guilty of committing. The bottom line, as I have stated many times before, is that nothing on the Internet is private, so do not be surprised when people all over the globe have access to your social media “private” messages and chats.
The banning of TikTok equates to silencing the freedom of speech in this country, and is the first step down a slippery slope of government control, all in the name of safety, when it ultimately will not make our personal data any safer. Until next week, stay safe and learn something new.
Scott Hamilton is an Expert in Emerging Technologies at ATOS and can be reached with questions and comments via email to sh*******@te**********.org or through his website at https://www.techshepherd.org.
