Revealed: Why is Tik Tok getting banned? (China Data Surveillance, GPS, Payments, WiFi)

Hi guys, Eddie here with another video. Today we're going to be discussing why TikTok, uh, the popular video sharing app, uh, is potentially getting banned, uh, and actually more, uh, excitingly diving into, uh, how it's being used potentially as a surveillance device and what implications that has for things like the US election. So I'm doing another video like this because obviously you enjoyed the Wirecard video which got 50,000 views, which is great. So please do subscribe to the channel below. Go and watch that Wirecard video if you haven't already. But let's get into it. So what is TikTok? First of all, so TikTok is this Chinese video sharing social media networking service and it's owned by a company called ByteDance. And essentially this is a Beijing-based internet technology company. It was founded in 2012 by Zhang Yingming, and it essentially creates short dance, lip-sync comedy, and talent videos. And it's really gaining some popularity amongst Western users, particularly in the United States. But it is fast growing the reputation of this Chinese state spying tool, potentially. And while TikTok has never really agreed or argued that it shares its data with the Chinese government, this new Hong Kong law would likely have actually undermined the company's case if it continued to operate in Hong Kong. It's recently been banned in India along with 58 other Chinese apps, and this comes after the border clash between India and China. This TikTok app actually merged with a US company called Musical.ly, if you are familiar with that, and obviously that's a, an easy way to gain a kind of domestic base in the United States, and it's been really repeatedly criticized by US politicians of becoming or being a national security threat because of the ties to China. And they essentially allege that the company could be compelled to support and cooperate with the intelligence work controlled by the Chinese Communist Party. And of course, the app denies that it carries out any acts of censorship or on behalf of the Chinese government, and it did say in a recent statement it wouldn't do or share the information if asked. TikTok says also all of the data is stored outside of China, and this includes payment, payment information, age, gender, contacts. And I'm actually later in the video going to discuss how this tech engineer reverse engineered the app, and he found some really shocking things. TikTok has 800 million users at the moment, and this is up from 500 million in November. And the funny thing obviously about this year— coronavirus— everyone is at home on their phones constantly, obviously using this app. But also, it falls quite suspiciously in an election year. And if you flash back all the way to 2016, there were reports, you know, widely reported from all major news information services that Russia had some part to play in influencing the US election via social media apps like Facebook and Twitter. And this app is kind of interesting because it provides users with this taste of virality, so going viral, to entice them to stay on this platform. And it's actually quite sinisterly designed where your first post will actually get a lot of likes regardless of how good it is. Um, and then obviously that entices you to, you know, keep using the app and keep, um, providing basically information. And this comes off the US looking to ban these social media apps. So Pompeo's come out and said he doesn't want to get in front of Donald Trump, the president, but it's something that we're looking at. And this is basically this national security concern over how TikTok— remember, it's owned by ByteDance in Beijing— and how they handle the user data. And is that going to be shared with the Chinese Communist Party? And this obviously comes on the back of US-China relations souring yet again, and these kind of tensions regarding the coronavirus outbreak. And obviously Hong Kong, again, another contentious issue, but I did do another video on that. If you just type in US-China trade war, it's also on the Amplify YouTube channel. It is losing a lot of international markets, so India is one that's come out and said TikTok is now banned in India. Australia, uh, as well is basically saying that it's going to ban it. So it's not just, um, the United States, it's lots of other nations. And of course this has a geopolitical twinge, uh, to it. But actually ByteDance forecasted that $1 billion in advertising revenue, uh, would have been there in India. It's one of the biggest markets that TikTok has. And as you can see from this chart, which is not specific to India, but it's in terms of the number of US adults actually using TikTok, you can clearly see that it's, you know, gone through the roof since the chart started in October 2017, all the way up to the data available on March 20. It's also owned by, you know, some of China's most elusive billionaires, and it's linked heavily to a surveillance app called Douyin as well. But this is some of the concerns. Endemic cyberbullying. It's easy to put up fake videos, propaganda. With all social media companies, there's a kind of element of controlling the content and how far should you go, how relaxed should you be. And obviously Twitter, Facebook are all coming under fire and have been under fire for this. Of course, it's a platform for child abuse and human exploitation. And there's a ton of users that obviously want to use the app for the wrong reasons, with the kind of user base being targeted towards that younger generation. Addiction as well. All the kind of common themes, privacy, and even hackers have exploited the weak code in the app. And this is of course quite synonymous with free apps. But this is the juicy part. I wanted to get to this relatively quickly. This actually comes from a Reddit thread of a tech guy, a tech engineer that essentially reverse engineered this app. He basically claimed that he felt very confident in stating that he had a very good understanding about how the actual app operated when he did this analysis a few months ago. He's basically termed it as a data collection service that is thinly veiled as a social, social network. And calling it an advertising platform is an understatement. And he's claimed that it's essentially a malware, you know, software that is targeting children. And he's saying as a warning, don't let your family and friends use it. But the interesting things of what it tracks— so phone hardware, so CPU type, number of cores, hardware IDs, screen dimensions, DPI, memory usage, disk space, so other apps you've installed, even some that you've deleted, that shows up in your analytics payload through cache and things like that. That, um, it can actually track everything network related. This is IP, local IP, router MAC, your MAC, the Wi-Fi access point name, whether or not you've jailbroken your iPhone or Android device. More very worryingly, GPS is pinging roughly every 30 seconds which is incredibly worrying, obviously, if we're talking about tracking users' movements and things like that. There's things like zero authentication. The scariest part, he says, is that most of the logging that they're doing on this is remotely configurable. Unless you essentially reverse every single one of their native libraries, and he says, have fun reading that, it's going to provide some real problems for you. There's several different also protections in place to prevent you from reversing or debugging the app as well. Scarily, it morphs and the app behavior changes slightly if they know what you're trying to do, which is really worrying. Here's the thing, they don't want to know how much information— you to know how much information they're collecting on you. And there's all these kind of things in place to do so. So there's really worrying things coming out of the backend code of this. And of course, they're now pulling out of Hong Kong due to this new security law in light of recent events. This is from the company itself. They've decided to stop the operations of the TikTok app in Hong Kong, and the exit from Hong Kong is coming within the, within the next days. So TikTok has actually been trying to change its global image. Of course, it's got a very Western name, you know, unlike a traditional, let's say, Chinese name. So obviously trying to appeal to all these Western users and things like that. And TikTok's also consistently said that if asked, it would never hand over data to Beijing. So why does this all matter? It's very funny timing, right, where obviously the popularity of this app has kind of emerged in this year of the election, right? Or even before that, from 2017, kind of roaming into this. And of course, there's echoes of Russia interfering in the US election, according to reports. And the situation now with TikTok is so serious. That US senators branded TikTok as a counterintelligence threat that we cannot ignore. And that is an actual quote. And in December 2019, the Australian Research Report warned that ByteDance actively collaborates with security bureaus across China, and it's uniquely susceptible to other problems that come with the closeness of the censorship and surveillance apparatus of the Communist Party. Of China-led state. So through this meteoric growth, this kind of social media service is thinly veiled according to reports as really just an information surveillance collection device. And of course, with the acquisition of Musical.ly, they've gained immediate access to the American market, and of course with the Western name as well, this appeals to Western users. So of course the timing is very suspect. So let's watch how this develops. And of course, in the run-up to November, you know, Trump is going to be bashing China to strum up his domestic base. And of course, this comes as a result of the kind of pronged effect of the trade war, the currency war, and all of these different things. So I hope you enjoyed this. Again, another investor Gativ piece, just like the Wirecard one. Subscribe to the channel if you don't want to miss any other videos like this, but have a good day and take care.