Saturday, July 04, 2020

India's TikTok ban may be the beginning of the popular app's end

Much has been made of the fall from grace of the Chinese-owned video app TikTok.
India has banned the app (along with 58 other Chinese-owned apps) for its citizens, not only for future downwnloads, but existing ones too, and India was a huge chunk of its market (in fact, its biggest overseas market). TikTok's parent company ByteDance has spent upwards of $1 billion developing its Indian user base, and it now stands to lose $6 billion in revenues (THAT is how big TikTok is!) India says that TikTok and the other Chinese apps "pose a threat to sovereignty and security of our country".
This is more about politics than technology - TikTok does extract and store data from users' phones (that's how it makes its advertising income), but no more so than many another app. Specifically, this is more about India trying to get back at China after the skirmishes in the Himalayas recently.
However, TikTok has also been "caught" copying data from users' clipboards "secretly", after a new iOS update made such interventions more obvious. TikTok claimed this was an inadvertent function of its anti-spam filter, but this is also is no more than many other apps do these days. A Reddit user has also reverse engineered the app and flooded the internet with calls to delete it immediately, calling TikTok "a data collection service thinly veiled as a social network".
It seems more than likely that the USA will use the Indian action and the iOS revelations as an excuse to further its own anti-Chinese ambitions, along with its campaign against Huawei. US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was quick to praise India's "clean app" actions, claiming that such apps serve as an extension of China's "surveillance state". There is much less evidence that TikTok owner ByteDance is in the pocket of the Chinese state in quite the same way that Huawei is (although all Chinese companies are to some extent), but, essentially, no-one trusts China as far as they can throw it these days, and modern China is quite unthrowable.
We certainly haven't seen the last of this story, and TikTok's dizzying rise to prominence could well be followed by an equally dramatic fall if international opposition coalesces, as seems likely.

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