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India’s ban on 59 Chinese apps, including the popular TikTok app, has been widely noted in the US, including by some prominent lawmakers, who have urged the American government to follow suit as it is widely believed that the short video-sharing app is a major security risk to the country.
On Monday, India took this step saying they were prejudicial to sovereignty, integrity and security of the country. This move comes in the backdrop of India’s current stand-off along the Line of Actual Control in Ladakh with Chinese troops, is also applicable for WeChat and Bigo Live.
“India bans TikTok and dozens of other Chinese apps in the wake of the deadly clash,” powerful Republican Senator John Cornyn said in a tweet as he tagged a news report in The Washington Post.
Republican Congressman Rick Crawford tweeted that “TikTok must go and it should have been gone yesterday.”
Last week, US National Security Advisor, Robert O’Brien had said that the Chinese Government is using TikTok for its own purposes.
“On TikTok, a Chinese-owned social media platform with over 40 million American users, probably a lot of your kids, and younger colleagues, accounts criticizing the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) and Beijing’s policies are routinely removed or deleted,” Mr O’Brien said in his public remarks.
In fact, the US Army has already banned app to its soldiers, calling it a security threat. And now they trying to apply that ban to res of the country as well.
At least two bills are pending in the US Congress to ban federal government officials from using TikTok on their cell phones, reflecting such a sentiment can gain momentum in the US after India’s decision.
Author Gordon Chang said that India just banned 59 Chinese apps, including TikTok. “Why can’t the US do the same?” he asked.
According to Forbes, with the release of the new clipboard warning in the beta version of iOS 14, now with developers, TikTok seems to have been caught abusing the clipboard in a quite extraordinary way.
According to Clyde Wallace, deputy assistant director of the Cyber Division at the FBI, where he oversees Cyber Division Operations and the National Cyber Investigative Joint Task Force, TikTok is one example of an application that the average citizen doesn’t understand the implications of what’s behind it and what data can flow from an application like that’s basically controlled by a state-sponsored actor.
“I think that lends into the bigger threat that China poses today in that it’s a holistic society approach to the United States. It’s not just the TikTok application. It’s the data warehouses that store that data. Whether they be here in the United States, owned by the Chinese, or within the Chinese borders themselves where that information is stored,” Clyde Wallace said.
In a statement on Tuesday, TikTok India Head Nikhil Gandhi said the company, which has some 200 million subscribers in India, has not shared any information of its users in India with any foreign government, including the Chinese government, and that it places the highest importance on user privacy and integrity.
