It was recently announced that President Donald Trump plans to prohibit business with the owners of TikTok by decree. The American head of state issued the order that comes into effect one and a half month after the announcement.
After Donald Trump issued the threat, Microsoft showed interest of TikTok’s business and said it wanted to sign a contract with the owner by mid-September. The deal should then also be part of the agreement. The deadline set by the US President is also in mid-September. Trump believes that a solution for the sale of the video portal should be found by this date. The self declared goal of Microsoft is to ensure that all personal data of US citizens is transferred there and will only be collected there in the future.
The government officially said that TikTok automatically collects a large amount of user data, including search histories. The White House announced that the Chinese government could use this information to spy on or blackmail state employees and service providers. The background here is the assumption that the company could be very close to the Chinese Communist Party and its interests and that information is passed on to them. For Trump, this derivation is probably the justification for taking political action against the Chinese company.
TikTok Had Direct Access To A Disproportionate Data
The fact that TikTok collects a huge amount of data from its users is now true. In March, security experts found out that TikTok had direct access to a disproportionate amount of data from their users. TikTok could read practically all of the information it copied to its clipboard. This included messages, account details, passwords and addresses. It is also fatal that the experts discovered that access to the user’s clipboard does not only affect local data on the respective end device. When using the same ID, the data is read out across all devices .
