TikTok is currently an app available in the United States. Chances are you’ll be using it yourself. (Maybe you just got off a binge to read this article.) But the app’s fate, at least in the U.S., is uncertain: lawmakers seem ready, if not insatiable, to either force the app to be sold to a U.S. company, or ban it altogether. The question is: what happens if they do?
Why would the U.S. government want to block TikTok?
While those of us who love the platform may not want to hear about it, there are legitimate national security concerns when it comes to TikTok – namely, how parent company ByteTok handles U.S. data. There are plenty of Americans using the app: 150 million active users in the U.S., according to TikTok CEO Shouzi Zhou. Like many popular social media apps, TikTok gets a lot of information from us, from contacts to browsing history to activity across other apps and sites. We all know that our data is collected by these companies; however, the fact that ByteTok is a company based in China complicates the issue of user privacy.
The company admitted last December that employees obtained inappropriate data from U.S. journalists in an attempt to discover the source of internal leaks. The employees accessed the IP addresses of the journalists and data on people close to those journalists to try to discover if those journalists were near any ByteDance employees. Creepy stuff.
While ByteDance subsequently fired the employees in question, the issue highlights the ability of the China-based company to access the sensitive data of U.S. users. Under Chinese law, the government also has the right to request this information from companies like ByteDance if national security is involved. It’s easy to see how this data could be misused. There are even concerns that the government may be instructing ByteDance to influence the type of content provided to Americans, offering everything from misinformation to propaganda.
While these concerns are valid, Congress didn’t make itself look as good as it did at the big TikTok hearing. Many on the committee saw the hearings more as a media show than an opportunity to investigate the truth about how TikTok uses (or misuses) U.S. user data. In their skepticism and claptrap, some lawmakers revealed just how ignorant they are when it comes to technology. You know you’re in trouble when “whether TikTok accesses home wifi networks” is a trap question from a U.S. representative:
TikTok may be popular among Americans, but it’s very popular among teens and young adults, who see the potential ban as an attack on a platform that lawmakers don’t understand and have little control over. The real concerns raised, such as whether TikTok is selling its user data to third parties, are undermined by moments such as
Haven’t we been here before?
Yes! Out of similar concerns, the Trump administration tried to ban TikTok by executive order in 2020. The order was struck down in court, but the uncertainty of the situation led TikTok to develop the “Texas Project,” a plan to divest any TikTok operations that handle U.S. user data to an independent organization that does not report to ByteTok. . The Project Texas transition has been underway since July 2022 and includes hosting all U.S. TikTok user data in the U.S.-based Oracle Cloud.
While TikTok hoped Project Texas would alleviate concerns about data misuse, it doesn’t appear to have worked, as U.S. lawmakers are adamant about banning the app or forcing it to be sold to U.S. companies.
What happens if the U.S. bans TikTok?
In short, let’s say you’re one of the hundreds of millions of Americans who use TikTok on your smartphone, nothing at first. If the ban does go through and wins any objections from the inevitable courts, Apple and Google will immediately remove it from their app stores. This means that if you don’t have the post-ban app installed on your device, you won’t be able to download the app.
However, neither Google nor Apple can remove apps from your phone on their own. If you already have TikTok installed on your device, it will stay there, even if the government nukes it. In theory, you can still access the service, albeit to a limited audience (hundreds of millions of Americans) right now. However, it is possible that Congress will force ISPs to block access to TikTok, which would effectively kill the platform, whether you install it on your device in advance or not. That’s what the Indian government did when it banned TikTok, so no one could access the app as is.
However, the real problem will come with time. Because the app will no longer exist in the App Store and Play Store, it will not receive future software updates. Your particular TikTok app will be frozen in time, forever stuck with the latest version available before the ban took effect. This is a problem for two reasons: First, TikTok’s developers will not be able to release security updates for the app to address any future vulnerabilities that are discovered. This poses a significant security risk: if bad guys try to find vulnerabilities through TikTok exploits, you leave yourself vulnerable, and since TikTok is banned in this case, the company can’t do anything to help you.
The bigger survival issue for TikTok, however, is blocking software updates after a potential ban. Not only will the company be unable to issue patches for security vulnerabilities, but they will no longer be able to send regular updates to get the app working properly on your iPhone or Android device. Eventually, the app will lose compatibility with the latest versions of iOS and Android and stop working. Rest in peace.
Here’s a potential workaround. VPNs will become the preferred way for Americans to access TikTok because the technology makes your connection look like it’s coming from another country. But for most U.S. TikTok users there, that might be a few extra steps too many. As a result, any sort of ban would effectively kill the app’s reach to most Americans.
In short, it’s a mess
There are many different aspects to this story. Creators who built their brands and businesses on the app now fear what will happen in a post-TikTok world; the ban could spark a political backlash because young people are already sick of the government chasing their favorite social media platform; and U.S. social media companies are eager for a ban because their stock prices could soar. instagram and YouTube aren’t spending all their time replicating TikTok’s video features.
However, it also shows the lack of interest from our government to seriously address the problems with TikTok. Banning TikTok would stop Americans from leaking their data to ByteBeat, but it wouldn’t do anything to prevent massive data leaks to all the other companies Americans use, including other software owned by Chinese companies. As Fight for the Future principal Even Gr eer put it, “If policymakers want to protect Americans from surveillance, they should advocate for a basic privacy law that prohibits all companies from collecting so much sensitive data about us in the first place, rather than engaging in xenophobic braggadocio that does absolutely nothing to protect anyone .”
