Most of us are aware that social media companies collect massive amounts of information about us. This allows them to target us with ads and monetize our attention. The most recent chapter in the data-privacy debate involves TikTok, one of the world’s most popular apps among young people. However, anecdotally, it appears that the potential risks aren’t something that young people are concerned about. Some were interviewed this week by The Project about the possibility of their TikTok data being accessed from China.
They stated that it would not prevent them from using the app. “At the moment, everyone has access to everything,” one person said. According to another, they “don’t have much to hide from the Chinese government.”
Are these assessments accurate? Should Australians be concerned about yet another social media company stealing their data? What’s going on with TikTok? TikTok representatives stated in a 2020 Australian parliamentary hearing on foreign interference through social media, “TikTok Australia data is stored in the US and Singapore, and the security and privacy of this data are our highest priority.” However, as Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) analyst Fergus Ryan points out, it is not so much about where the data is stored as it is about who has access to it.
On June 17, BuzzFeed published a report based on 80 leaked internal TikTok meetings that appeared to confirm Chinese actors’ access to US TikTok data. The report cites numerous examples of data access by TikTok’s parent company, China-based ByteDance.
Then, in July, TikTok Australia’s director of public policy, Brent Thomas, wrote to James Paterson, the shadow minister for cyber security, about China’s access to Australian user data.
Thomas denied being asked for data from China or having “given data to the Chinese government,” but added that access is “based on the need to access data.” As a result, there is reason to believe that data from Australian users may be accessed from China.
Is TikTok inferior to other platforms? TikTok collects rich consumer data, such as personal information and behavioral data, from people’s app activity. In this regard, it is similar to other social media companies.
They all require vast amounts of user data to serve ads to us and run data analytics behind a gleaming facade of cute cats and trendy dances.
However, TikTok’s corporate roots are in authoritarian China, not the United States, where most of our other social media originate. This has ramifications for TikTok users.
Because TikTok moderates content based on Beijing’s foreign policy goals, it’s possible that TikTok will impose censorship controls on Australian users.
This means that users’ feeds would be filtered to exclude anything that contradicts the Chinese government’s agenda, such as support for Taiwan’s sovereignty. Shadowbanning occurs when a user’s posts appear to have been published to the user but are not visible to anyone else.
It’s important to note that this censorship risk isn’t speculative. In 2019, it was reported that information about Hong Kong protests had been censored not only on Douyin, China’s domestic version of TikTok, but also on TikTok itself.
Then, in 2020, ASPI discovered that on TikTok, LGBTQ+-related hashtags are blocked in at least eight different languages. A TikTok spokesperson said the hashtags may be restricted as part of the company’s localization strategy and due to local laws in response to ASPI’s research.
Keywords like #acab, #gayArab, and anti-monarchy hashtags have been discovered to be shadowbanned in Thailand.
Douyin abides by stringent national content laws inside of China. This includes, among other things, censoring information about the Tiananmen massacre and the spiritual movement Falun Gong.
Chinese internet service and product providers are compelled by the legal system to cooperate with the government. Chinese businesses may face financial penalties and/or forced closure if they disagree with or fail to understand their responsibilities.
Another social media platform run by Yiming Zhang, the company’s founder, had to shut down in 2012. Zhang’s public apology followed a political line. He acknowledged that by not policing content that violates “socialist core values,” the platform strayed from “public opinion guidance.”
TikTok users should seriously consider discontinuing use of the app until issues with global censorship are satisfactorily resolved.
Remember, however, that it’s not just TikTok; other Meta products, like Facebook and Instagram, also gauge our interests by the amount of time we spend perusing particular posts. They combine our personal information with those behavioral data in an effort to keep us interested in the ads for as long as possible.
The practice of using technology to maintain social discrimination is known as “digital redlining,” and there have been some actual instances of targeted advertising on social media.
Facebook faced criticism in 2018 for displaying some job postings to men only. In 2019, it reached a settlement in a different case of digital redlining involving discriminatory practices in which housing advertisements were sent to particular users based on their “race, color, national origin, and religion.”
And in 2021, prior to the attack on the US Capitol, talk of a coup coexisted with advertisements for military and defense products.
The worst-case scenarios are next. The 2018 Cambridge Analytica scandal exposed how Meta (then Facebook) improperly disclosed user data to Cambridge Analytica, a political consulting firm.
For the typical Australian user of TikTok, content censorship—and not actual prosecution—is their top concern. However, there are frequent reports of Chinese citizens being detained or even imprisoned in China for using both domestic and foreign social media.
You can see that there is actual evidence supporting the effects of mass data collection. We must demand greater openness regarding the use of data from all significant social media platforms, not just TikTok.
Let’s continue the regulation discussion that TikTok has sped up. For whatever the next big social media app may be, we should look to update privacy protections and incorporate transparency into Australia’s national regulatory guidelines.
