Trump and Tiktok

The Trump administration threatened TikTok with legal action if the Chinese app didn’t change ownership on the grounds of privacy concerns, but if the Trump administration was truly concerned about privacy then shouldn’t Google and Facebook face the same ultimatum?

Jim Watson/AFP via Getty Images; Samantha Lee/Business Insider

TikTok is owned by ByteDance, a company based in Beijing. The Trump administration claimed the company was using TikTok to steal information from U.S. users. And there are class action lawsuits being filed against the app right now, but TikTok denies the allegation. But TikTok’s legal team claims that they could send collected data back to China legally.

The lawsuits claim that TikTok is collecting user’s biometric data, which is illegal in the United States. Facebook was sued for collecting this data without user’s permission and was sued for $550 million dollars.

President Trump didn’t seem too concerned when Facebook was collecting data, so why the concern now?

The answer could go back to the simple fact that TikTok is a Chinese based company. The Trump administration tried working out a partnership between TikTok and the companies Walmart and Oracle. So the real problem isn’t the data collection, it’s whose getting control over the data. If a U.S. company owned TikTok, then the data collected would go straight back to the United States.