China’s Spy Agencies Collect Intelligence with TikTok: Platform Influencers Should Be Concerned

Spy agencies in every major country use social media for open-source intelligence gathering and manipulation. This is a fact.

Apple is one of the only big tech companies that has tried to protect American consumer privacy, but it’s also not widely known that Steve Jobs was once a card-carrying CIA badge member.

Google?

Quite a different story.

From CBS News

Google (GOOG) has been a partner with the CIA since 2004, when the company bought Keyhole, a mapping technology business that eventually became Google Earth. In 2010, Google and In-Q-Tel made a joint investment in a company called Recorded Future, which has the Minority Report-style goal of creating a “temporal analytics engine” that scours the web and creates curves that predict where events may head.

Google is already helping the government write and rewrite history. Here, from its transparency report, are some stats on the amount of information it has either given to the government or wiped from the web-based on requests by US agencies:

• 4,601 requests from US government agencies for “user data“
• Google complied with government requests for user data 94% of the time.
• 1,421 requests for “content removal“
• Google complied with content removal requests 87% of the time.

Read the full CBS News article published in 2011 here. 

The move reflects fears in Britain and elsewhere in the West that the popular app’s Chinese ownership could share user information with Beijing.

Britain on Thursday became the latest Western country to prohibit the use of TikTok on “government devices,” citing security fears linked to the video-sharing app’s ownership by a Chinese company.

Speaking in Parliament, Oliver Dowden, a senior cabinet minister, announced the ban with immediate effect, describing it as “precautionary,” even though the United States, the European Union’s executive arm, Canada and India have already taken similar steps.

Social media apps collect and store “huge amounts of user data including contacts, user content and geolocation data on government devices that data can be sensitive,” Mr. Dowden said, but TikTok has aroused more suspicion than most because of its owner, the Chinese company ByteDance. –NY Times

Did you know the CIA has a Venture Capital arm called IN-Q-Tel? You can check it the site  here.

Summary

America, the EU, and the UK all know that China’s intelligence community certainly has a direct line with the Chinese-owned social media platform and are using it to collect intelligence.

Imagine the data they can collect on American, EU, and UK people (especially children’s behavioral patterns)  around the World…and imagine the content they can push to manipulate, especially young kids.

This is why Western governments are right to be nervous about TikTok and are banning it on government devices, the UK being the most recent.

I predict that TikTok will be banned or boycotted in America soon for the same concerns, and this is why if you’re an influencer on TikTok, you should be very concerned. That advertising revenue for clicks could dry up like the Salton Sea in the California desert.

Until then, we will monitor the situation and report back to you accordingly.