Not exactly, and nothing that I can think of that would really fit in this circumstance.
Had TikTok originated in the US and been bought by a foreign company, The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States could have ordered the foreign company to divest itself of that asset. An example was Grindr being purchased by Kunlun Tech, and CFIUS deciding that this wasn't allowable. --The idea being that the type of data Grindr has could pose national security issues (due to government employees or elected officials being blackmailed, not that Grindr has ever been known for any form of security).
With TikTok, however, it seems to be more about posturing. I'm not sure what legal mechanism they could really use to force the app to be blocked.
Sort of. There are a lot of international regulations that prevent things like SaaS companies from servicing Iran and Korea - so they could just introduce some “justifiable” legislation and then ask Apple to enforce it which they probably would.
Informally, the US government pressured payment processors to cut off WikiLeaks. All the major players complied. I'm not a lawyer, but that certainly feels like a violation of the 1st Amendment to me.
> I don't think someone in China seeing my TikTok videos
Leaving aside mechanisms and policies, this is not about seeing videos, this is about the invasive amount of information TikTok collects from devices it runs on.
But it isn't about you. We already know that social media can be, and is, used to track details by nation states on all sorts of things, from the movement of individuals of interest, as well as things such as estimating the population of military bases, discovering military operations, etc.
A foreign government having access to all of that data for a huge portion of the population is 100% a national security risk.
Then ban military people from using it, problem solved.
This level of paranoia looks more like the Soviet Union[1] than it does like a free country.
[1] Where you couldn't even buy a map, because heaven forbid, foreign spies might use them to compromise... National security. They might learn the distances between the army base, and the hospital, and then who knows what diabolical plot they may hatch?
It could be for example if your neighbor works for CIA or at some secret research laboratory. They can learn a lot about them by watching your funny cat videos.
A) Your neighbor's laptop is partially compromised, and part of what is obtained is a list of APs with which it has been associated.
B) Your phone has TikTok installed, and part of what is obtained is your location and the available APs (while you're using the app, only).
C) You use your phone to view TikTok videos in the middle of the night, at home.
Because of B+C, the foreign actor now knows where you live (via location services) and the wireless APs nearby. Because of A, they know where your neighbor's laptop has associated. Taken together, they now have a reasonable level of confidence where your neighbor lives even though they have never installed TikTok.
If your neighour's machine is pwned, they could just look at the addresses on the bills he receives in his e-mail.
And if they want to know where my neighbour lives, they could just consult a... Land deed registry. Or their resume.
Or... Run a credit check on them. That last one will also give personal information at a level of fidelity right down to the number of nose hairs that they plucked this morning.
But let's cycle back to that. How does knowing my neighbour's address compromise national security? Am I compromising national security by telling you that John Leslie lives in Apt 341 on my floor? Even if he works for the Air Force?
Keep in mind - the man has to live somewhere. What relevance of note does where he lives in particular have to a nation state?
For example match car plate numbers with locations and timestamps. By analyzing millions of videos they can build a driving pattern for a particular vehicle.
Given that ~99.999% of the time, the average cellphone user is not recording a video, and ~99.9% of the time, license plates are not visible in videos, and ~99.9% of license plates are utterly uninteresting, this is an absolutely horrible example of a non-threat.
If this is the best argument that can be made, then national security is safe as houses.
they can't ask ISPs to block connections for particular servers? no need national firewall for that it's not like you have that many ISP options and people will switch ISP to have access to bunch of Chinese spyware
Apple regularly punishes privacy-invasive apps, and also apps that they and other tech giants deem misinformation (all apps are banned from presenting COVID-19 data, Infowars was deplatformed, etc). While they do stand up to OS-level encryption-breaking requests, they don't necessarily have a problem with banning apps.
What makes you say Apple is well-known for refusing invasive government requests? They’ve gladly been handling over all iCloud data for Chinese users to the CCP (meaning many of its users were unknowingly sharing all their sensitive videos/pictures/text with the authoritarian government). They’ve also been banning foreign apps from the Chinese App Store, and have similarly banned foreign apps in other countries, such as India.
In the US, they've repeatedly refused the FBI's demands to help unlock people's phones. They seem to view censorship as the price of doing business in other countries; I'm not exactly happy about that, but as far as I can tell it doesn't transfer over to their attitude stateside.
Which law are you referring to? To my knowledge there isn't a "Just do what I tell you to" law on the books. Apple and Google could decide willingly to ban the apps from their app stores but outside of that I'm curious what law could be brought to bear that would force them.
I'm not sure that a foreign company has any rights under the constitution to begin with. It's contentious whether or not it grants rights to a foreign citizen while they are outside of the US's borders, so claiming that ByteDance would have their constitutional rights violated by such a ban would be even more so.
However, if this were to happen, it would almost certainly be under national security law, which has pretty far reaching powers for this sort of thing. Knowing how much the app spies on you, and knowing that they are ultimately under control by the Chinese government, there's a very strong case to be made.
(Yes, I know this is a company owned by the Beijing based ByteDance but that’s not immediately disqualifying of this US corporation run under US law being able to defend itself in a US court system as any other US company would.)
It's not immediately disqualifying, no, but it would almost certainly be squashed quite quickly by the US's NSL. (Funny how the NSL in HK and the US are both so pertinent in China related discussions these past few days!)
Having set up a corporation on US soil does not grant free pass to a foreign government to spy on US citizens.
I would think it's actually Google and Apple's constitutional rights that would be at issue, since they're the ones hypothetically being restrained from publishing certain apps.
