That was fully in evidence with TikTok’s defense against its ban in India last week. “I can confirm that the Chinese government has never made a request to us for the TikTok data of Indian users,” CEO Kevin Mayer assured the Indian government. “If we do receive such a request in the future,” he added, “we would not comply.” That data, TikTok says, is stored in Singapore anyway, beyond the reach of Beijing.
Data of Indian users? But what of other nationalities? You neither can deny or confirm that was not the case.
And stored in Singapore. So what? If the data is first sent thru Beijing before it is stored in a server in Singapore. Why ask for data if they already have a copy of everything. Anyone who has studied how data moves in the internet knows this can easily be the case. So while the statement is true, it is what it does not say everyone should be concerned with.
Anyone who has ever used those IP programs which takes your IP and masks it to whatever nation you want, shows you that your information is being sent ALL OVER THE WORLD, even if you are connecting to a website that is in your city. How many servers does your data pass thru?
Let’s put this into perspective. India didn’t just ban TikTok, it banned 58 other apps, including major titles from other Chinese tech giants. But the commercial impact on TikTok was greater than the rest combined. Similarly, TikTok made headlines when a new Apple iOS 14 beta privacy feature caught the app secretly reading user clipboards. TikTok was not alone—many other well-known apps seemed to do the same. But none made headlines in the way TikTok had done.
By stopping the biggest abuser, the rest will see it is not worth doing, and will voluntarily stop it or face just as harsh punishments.
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