In recent months, the US has banned TikTok because the Chinese government suspected that TikTok was accessing data belonging to US users. After President Biden signed the resolution banning the app, the government demanded that the app be sold to an American company within 6 months. Now Canadian intelligence is warning citizens not to use TikTok.
Is TikTok giving information to Chinese intelligence?
Canadian intelligence agency CSIS warned the public against TikTok. The head of CSIS says in a statement that the data received by the application can be used by Chinese intelligence and calls on the public not to use TikTok.
In a recent interview with CBC News, Canadian intelligence chief David Vigneault said that the Chinese government has different techniques to gather information from around the world. In the same way, the head of intelligence said that the Chinese government’s computers are very powerful, they have a good way of analyzing data, they process all this data with artificial intelligence and they should not use TikTok.
After the call not to use TikTok, the central company ByteDance said that no one had previously accessed the data of its users in the US and Europe. The company hosts user data from the US and Europe at Oracle in the US. The data hosted at Oracle is called Project Texas and Project Clover. A recent report shows that the company goes to great lengths to store the data of US users.
In an interview with The Verge, company spokesperson Danielle Morgan said:
“These allegations are not supported by evidence, and the truth is that our company has never shared Canadian users’ data with the Chinese government, and we would not do so even if asked.”
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