The TikTok app is hugely popular, but it's owned by a Chinese company and that means the Communist Party has access to all the data it scoops up from workers' phones, Sen. Josh Hawley said Monday while discussing a new privacy bill he's sponsoring.
"Lots of teenagers are using it," the Missouri Republican told Fox News' "Fox and Friends."
"More teenagers are on TikTok than Facebook."
But the problem is that TikTok, which is used to create short-form mobile videos, is "dangerous" because it shares items such as contact lists and visited websites, and possibly even text messages, said Hawley.
"Here's the thing that's really scary," Hawley said. TikTok not only has all of this information, "but under Chinese law, the Chinese Communist Party can also get all of that information, which means they have got access to the personal information of millions of Americans. Teenagers. Adults."
This means the Chinese could build profiles that can be used for many purposes, including to train their artificial intelligence programming, said Hawley.
He added that his proposed legislation, the National Security and Personal Data Protection Act, would prohibit Tiktok from transmitting data to any entity in China while creating similar provisions keeping data from being transferred to Russia or to any other country the State Department deems a security risk.
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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