You might be one of 170 million TikTok users in the U.S. The Supreme Court decided to ban the app starting Sunday, but should you be concerned?
Face-prints, voice-prints, and keystrokes are some of the bits of information TikTok can collect from the millions of people that use the app.
On Friday, the Supreme Court upheld the ban on the app, which is owned by Chinese-based company, ByteDance.
Cybersecurity Professor Nikolas Behar with the University of San Diego said the U.S.' concern is data landing into the hands of the Chinese government.
"It’s harder for us to understand the algorithm that’s behind TikTok, and so it could potentially be used to sway the views of users that are using the application," said Behar. Instagram is more straightforward, it just shares images and short videos, whereas TikTok is just a continuous stream of video."
But you might be wondering, don't social media platforms like Instagram, Facebook, and others also collect this kind of data?
"These companies that are here in the U.S., the ones that you mentioned, a lot of the times they’re going to be subject to more stringent data security standards, and they’re easier for the government to reach out to and get more information, whereas TikTok, they can hide behind a lot of things for example," said Behar. "They can be, we’re not exactly sure how the application is running, so even though it’s hosted here in the U.S., the underlying technology could very well be Chinese technology that could potentially have a backdoor that we don’t know about."
As to how President-elect Trump will act, Behar said he's not certain.
"Honestly it’s too soon to tell. Sometimes he likes to do things at the last minute, so there could be a last minute sell where it gets sold to an entity or an individual here in the U.S. but he’s definitely a China hawk and he’s definitely trying to portray that image, so this could be playing into that," said Behar.
The U.S. isn't the first country to ban TikTok. India banned the app back in 2020, resulting in a rise of other apps, including the use of Instagram reels and YouTube shorts.
