News of the Cyber World

[kyonides]

Well, it seems that just another US state banned TikTok recently.

Texas Bans TikTok From Government Devices, Joining Several Other GOP-Led States

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott on Wednesday ordered all state agencies in the state to ban video sharing app TikTok on all government-issued devices, joining several Republican-led states in doing the same.

The governor’s office said the “aggressive action” against TikTok comes amid a growing threat of “the Chinese Communist Party gaining access to critical U.S. information and infrastructure.”
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“TikTok harvests vast amounts of data from its users’ devices—including when, where, and how they conduct Internet activity—and offers this trove of potentially sensitive information to the Chinese government,” Abbott stated in a letter to state agencies.

“While TikTok has claimed that it stores U.S. data within the U.S., the company admitted in a letter to Congress that China-based employees can have access to U.S. data. It has also been reported that ByteDance planned to use TikTok location information to surveil individual American citizens.

“Further, under China’s 2017 National Intelligence Law, all businesses are required to assist China in intelligence work including data sharing, and TikTok’s algorithm has already censored topics politically sensitive to the Chinese Communist Party, including the Tiananmen Square protests.”

TikTok is owned by private Chinese company Bytedance, which is based in Beijing, although it is not registered in China. Abbott’s office noted that TikTok “is owned by a Chinese company that employs Chinese Communist Party members.”

The office also noted that TikTok “has a subsidiary partially owned by the Chinese Communist Party.”
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The governor also stipulated that each state agency will have until Feb. 15, 2023, to implement its own policy over the use of TikTok on personal devices.

The list of states against TikTok now includes Texas, Maryland, South Dakota and South Carolina.

Indiana Sues TikTok for Allegedly Endangering Children, Sending Data to China

The state of Indiana is suing social media giant TikTok, accusing it of falsely claiming the company’s product was safe for children and illicitly sending U.S.-based users’ data to communist China.

Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita announced two separate lawsuits against the Chinese-owned TikTok on Dec. 7, both related to what he described as “false claims” made by the company about its app, also called TikTok.
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“With this pair of lawsuits, we hope to force TikTok to stop its false, deceptive, and misleading practices, which violate Indiana law.”

The first lawsuit alleges that TikTok lured children onto the platform by misrepresenting the amount of sexual content, profanity, and drug references made as “infrequent” when in fact the app is rife with what he described as “extreme examples of such material.”

The lawsuit further alleges that an essential part of TikTok’s business model is presenting the application as safe and appropriate for children ages 13 to 17.

The second lawsuit asserts that TikTok controls massive amounts of highly-sensitive data and personal information about Indiana consumers and deceived those consumers to believe that this information was protected from the Chinee Communist Party (CCP), which rules China as a single-party state.