House Bill on Banning Bytedance's Tiktok Moves Forward to the Senate

canopic jug writes:

Multiple sites are covering H.R.7521 - Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act which aims to ban Bytedance's Tiktok, a platform for influence and surveillance, from the US.

- Tech giant: What is ByteDance, the TikTok parent in US crosshairs?

The app has been a diplomatic hot potato between the United States and China since the administration of former president Donald Trump, who once wanted to ban the app.

Now, a bill in Congress aims to force the company to cut ties with ByteDance or be barred from the United States.

The bill's supporters say ByteDance as a Chinese firm simply cannot go against the wishes of Beijing, and can provide access to the data on more than 170 million American users for everything from spying to election influence campaigns.

And

- TikTok's Security Threats Go Beyond the Scope of House Legislation

But that glosses over the deeper TikTok security problem, which the legislation does not fully address. In the four years this battle has gone on, it has become clear that the security threat posed by TikTok has far less to do with who owns it than it does with who writes the code and algorithms that make TikTok tick.

Those algorithms, which guide how TikTok watches its users and feeds them more of what they want, are the magic sauce of an app that 170 million Americans now have on their phones. That's half the country.

But TikTok doesn't own those algorithms; they are developed by engineers who work for its Chinese parent company, ByteDance, which assembles the code in great secrecy in its software labs, in Beijing, Singapore and Mountain View, Calif. But China has issued regulations that appear designed to require government review before any of ByteDance's algorithms could be licensed to outsiders. Few expect those licenses to be issued - meaning that selling TikTok to an American owner without the underlying code might be like selling a Ferrari without its famed engine.

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