Donald Trump, President of the United States of America, is allegedly going to ban the use of the TikTok app in the United States.
The diatribe between the United States and China is in fact a well-known thing from the time when Huawei was included in the Entity List of companies with which the American counterparts could not collaborate or have commercial interests, due to national security problems deriving from alleged spyware inserted in Chinese devices. The TikTok social network of the ByteDance company, launched in 2016 under the name Musical.ly, which, despite having its base in the United States, is Chinese-owned with the Douyin brand, has now ended up in the sights of the White House tenant.. The operation of this social network, for those who still do not know, is very simple: once the app has been downloaded and an account created, the user can create short video clips, inserting filters or effects.
It should be noted that the American President is not the only one to have taken action against TikTok: in fact, the Chinese social network is already the subject of a ban by the Indian government since it would be "prejudicial to the sovereignty and integrity of India, the security of the state and public order". At the root of the ban there are political reasons of absolute international importance, which resulted in the clash in Karakoram on the border between India and China, in which twenty Indian soldiers were killed. In addition to political issues, a real trade war is taking place between the two countries, also because Indian Prime Minister Narandra Modi heads a strongly nationalist party which, in fact, has no concrete opposition at home.
It initially appeared that President Donald Trump was considering signing an executive order requiring him to sell parts of TikTok to an American company due to national security issues, tuttavia following some statements made to journalists directly by Air Force One, it seems that we are even talking about banning the use of the app on American soil, a measure that would perfectly match the one launched by the Indian government. The initial rumors that spoke of a sales order with Microsoft interested in the acquisition therefore seem to be completely unfounded, also because Trump himself has categorically denied any good intentions regarding an acquisition of the product by an American company.
It all started when the hacker group Anonymous analyzed the TikTok app with the reverse-engineering technique, thanks to which it was established that the algorithm underlying the social network was essentially malware controlled directly by the Chinese government.. At the international level, it is known that China adopts a policy of total control over the population through technology, it is in fact impossible to live in China if you do not have a smartphone: the data of millions of Chinese are in fact constantly available to the government, since via mobile phones you do everything that characterizes daily life, such as payments.
Although President Donald Trump is a controversial person all over the world, especially in Europe, his strong stance not only echoes that of the Indian government, but also the creation of a European task force called to verify whether or not the Chinese social network could be dangerous for the privacy of users. In fact, nowadays, with the problem of cybersecurity becoming more and more pressing, nothing is as scary as the violation of people's data at an international level.
Initially, the fact that TikTok was based in the United States had silenced the problem of data integrity and security, however several experts consulted substantially confirmed that it does not matter where this data is kept, it matters the type of that exists. between who commands and who actually has access to this data. Put simply, even if the material is stored on American soil, if those who have access to the data themselves are under the command of Beijing, there is no guarantee that the data will not be available to the Chinese. In this regard, it should be remembered that TikTok must necessarily comply with Chinese laws on information control and management, with all the annexes and connected ones. Many times in fact, the difference between "moderation" and "censorship" is so thin that you hardly notice the difference.
Without delving into the law of electronic communication, know that in China, everything that is part of daily life is under strict government control. In the case of TikTok, if a content can spread or simply "exist", the government itself decides.. To date, no one has yet managed, after several investigations, to establish the criteria by which the platform is moderated. According to the statements of some former employees of the American headquarters of the company, for everything concerning the area of moderation and content management, everything has always been entrusted to Chinese moderators who have always had the last word on any content.
An emblematic case is that of the legal action brought by one Asian girl who accuses the company of having transferred her sensitive data to China without asking her for any consent. In fact, it would seem that an account has been created with his biometric data and mobile number, which is absolutely impossible without direct access to the user's data. Unfortunately, the precedents related to apps of Chinese origin are all there: just think of Grindr, an app of a company for homosexual encounters that tracked everything that was present on the smartphone of some American military.
Beyond the political-economic question of the matter, it is increasingly necessary to pay attention to how we use our data when we are online, because we are the first to have to protect them from malicious people. Great attention must be paid to minors, which is the category that more than any other uses TikTok and is perpetually connected to the internet with the smartphone. Remember that when a content is posted online, it is impossible to remove, becomes public and is virtually available to anyone. The very dangerous phenomenon of "deep fake", with which the face of a person is literally stolen to discredit him through compromising images, is only one of the dangers which you can run into online.
