Balloon isn’t the only spy among us
For many Americans last week, and many politicians only too happy to exploit the situation, the Chinese military’s spy balloon, a surveillance weapon that had flown across dozens of countries, was the physical manifestation of a fear born of decades of tense relations between rival superpowers: Big Brother — in this case, the Communist Chinese government — really is watching our every move.
And surely, there’s reason to be concerned about China’s covert surveillance of our lives, our bank accounts, our national security secrets, or whatever it was they were trying to see. But why fear only China’s prying eyes? There are so many more watching us, collecting our data, our location, our intimate pictures of family and children. And because those apps and devices are not “from China,” we willingly submit.
Consider TikTok, the hysteria over which has only been inflamed by the spy balloon revelation. The video-sharing app has grown enormously popular among young adults and adolescents, with an estimated 1 billion users worldwide.
But why would an app known for quirky lip-syncing and dance routine videos have politicians such as Gov. Greg Abbott in a tizzy? Because it is owned by ByteDance, a Beijing-based company. The implications of the company’s ownership have led Abbott to ban the app from state-issued devices as well as public universities across Texas. Last week, Abbott issued a nine-page security plan barring state employees and contractors from conducting state business with devices that have TikTok on them, including personal cellphones.
It'd be easy to dismiss Abbott's TikTok block as yet another attempt to genuflect to his conservative base with a glorified Red Scare tactic. After all, TikTok has become something of an obsession for right-wing politicians ever since President Trump attempted to ban the app through an executive order in 2020. The thinking goes that ByteDance is subject to the whims of Chinese national security and intelligence agencies, which can indeed force the company to hand over vast amounts of data on the roughly 50 million Americans who use the app every day.
There’s reason to believe that this is not simply a nightmare scenario peddled by Fox News commentators. Recordings of internal meetings obtained by BuzzFeed found that China-based employees of ByteDance admitted to repeatedly accessing nonpublic data about U.S. TikTok users. After Forbes reported that ByteDance planned to use the app to monitor specific location details of certain American citizens, a follow-up story found that ByteDance tracked multiple Forbes journalists as part of a covert surveillance campaign designed to unearth sources of leaks exposing the company’s links to China. FBI Director Christopher Wray warned members of the House Homeland Security Committee in November that TikTok’s algorithm was so sophisticated that it could “potentially technically compromise personal devices.”
The question is not whether downloading TikTok on your iPhone puts your privacy at risk; there is clearly enough evidence to suggest that it does. It’s why, simply by virtue of TikTok being operated by a foreign entity, we should treat it differently than the litany of homegrown multinational companies — Facebook, Google, and Amazon, to name a few — which also harvest our data, track our locations, and, in some cases, encourage extremism? These companies have not only been welcomed with open arms to set up offices and data centers here in Texas, each has received tens of millions of dollars in tax breaks to do so. None of them should be let off the hook.
The market and political power that Big Tech has accrued is a direct result of products which have become indispensable parts of our everyday lives, from Amazon’s Alexa to Apple’s iPhone and MacBook to Google’s internet search engine. The trade-off is these companies have carte blanche to use those products to build digital profiles of each and every consumer. Google collects location information, contact info, and search and browser history for advertising, analytics and “product personalization”; iPhone apps are tracking you even when you ask them not to; Amazon’s Alexa and Echo products use your voice data for targeted ads in ways that are not clearly disclosed in privacy policies, according to one research report.
Entrusting these companies with vast amounts of our personal data — from intimate photos to credit scores to bank information — does not raise the same national security red flags as handing over data to a foreign entity, but the concerns are similar. Any cyber-criminal, domestic or foreign, could get their hands on this information and use it to scam people for their login info, extort them for money or outright steal their identity. These breaches happen with frightening regularity, and companies such as Google and Facebook are not always forthcoming when they occur.
Yet simply banning these companies would be unheard of in Amerca. That's something, well, China does, currently outlawing a number of American apps and websites, including Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and Twitter. It forces global companies that want to gain access to China’s market to form joint ventures with Chinese firms. The very notion of free enterprise is antithetical to China’s system of government.
Our federal government can demonstrate a better way. The European Union has already provided a model of sorts, passing a law that forces large social media firms, many of which are based in the U.S., to limit false information, hate speech and extremism or face substantial fines. We can also look to California, which recently passed two landmark bills that require social networking platforms to publicly post policies on hate speech and disinformation and require any social network used by children to turn on the highest privacy settings by default and turn off location tracking features.
President Biden’s call in the State of the Union to “impose stricter limits on the personal data these companies collect on all of us” received bipartisan applause and should be seen as a galvanizing moment for greater tech regulation, which most Americans support. Rather than engage in an endless tit-for-tat with China, in which we’re just banning each other’s companies or apps in Cold War fashion, the U.S. should instead force Big Tech companies to safeguard our privacy.
Texas is obviously free to do what it wants within the confines of the constitution. Banning one app is easy — like a fighter jet shooting a single spy balloon out of the sky — but we shouldn’t delude ourselves that our monocular focus on one “foreign” threat will make us any safer from the “domestic” threats everpresent in our lives.