 Hi guys, Eddie here with another video. Today, we're going to be discussing why TikTok, the popular video sharing app, is potentially getting banned and actually more excitingly diving into how it's being used potentially as a surveillance device and what implications that has for things like the US election. So I'm doing another video like this because obviously you enjoyed the Wirecard video, which got 50,000 views, which is great. So please do subscribe to the channel below, go and watch that Wirecard video if you haven't already, but let's get into it. So what is TikTok, first of all? So TikTok is this Chinese video sharing social media networking service and it's owned by a company called ByteDance and essentially this is a Beijing-based internet technology company. It was founded in 2012 by Zhang Yingming and it essentially creates short dance, lip sync, comedy and talent videos and it's really gaining some popularity amongst Western users, particularly in the United States, but it is fast growing the reputation of this Chinese state spying tool potentially. And while TikTok has never really agreed or argued that it shares its data with the Chinese government, this new Hong Kong law would likely have actually undermined the company's case if it continued to operate in Hong Kong. It's recently been banned in India along with 58 other Chinese apps and this comes after the border clash between India and China. This TikTok app actually merged with a US company called Musically, if you are familiar with that and obviously that's an easy way to gain a kind of domestic base in the United States and it's been really repeatedly criticized by US politicians of becoming or being a national security threat because of the ties to China and they essentially allege that the company could be compelled to support and cooperate with the intelligence work controlled by the Chinese Communist Party and of course the app denies that it carries out any acts of censorship on behalf of the Chinese government and it did say in a recent statement it wouldn't do or share the information if asked. TikTok says also all of the data is stored outside of China and this includes payment information, age, gender, contacts and I'm actually later in the video gonna discuss how this tech engineer, reverse engineered the app and he found some really shocking things. TikTok has 800 million users at the moment and this is up from 500 million in November and the funny thing obviously about this year, coronavirus, everyone is at home on their phones constantly, obviously using this app but also it falls quite suspiciously in an election year and if you flashback all the way to 2016 there were reports, you know, widely reported from all major news information services that Russia had some part to play in influencing the US election via social media apps like Facebook and Twitter and this app is kind of interesting because it provides users with this taste of virality so going viral to entice them to stay on this platform and it's actually quite a cynically designed where your first post will actually get a lot of likes regardless of how good it is and then obviously that entices you to, you know keep using the app and keep providing basically information and this comes off the US looking to ban these social media apps so Pompeo's come out and said, he doesn't wanna get in front of Donald Trump, the president but it's something that we're looking at and this is basically this national security concern over how TikTok, remember it's owned by ByteDance in Beijing and how they handle the user data and is that gonna be shared with the Chinese Communist Party and this obviously comes on the back of US-China relations souring yet again and these kind of tensions regarding the coronavirus outbreak and obviously Hong Kong again, another contentious issue but I did do another video on that if you just type in US-China trade war it's also on the Amplify YouTube channel. It is losing a lot of international markets so India is one that's come out and said TikTok is now banned in India, Australia as well is basically saying that it's gonna ban it so it's not just the United States it's lots of other nations and of course this has a geopolitical twinge to it but actually ByteDance forecasted that 1 billion in advertising revenue would have been there in India it's one of the biggest markets that TikTok has and as you can see from this chart which is not specific to India but it's in terms of the number of US adults actually using TikTok you can clearly see that it's gone through the roof since the chart started in October 2017 all the way up to the data available on March 20. It's also owned by some of China's most elusive billionaires and it's linked heavily to a surveillance app called Duoyin as well but this is some of the concerns endemic cyberbullying it's easy to put up fake videos propaganda, there's all with all social media companies there's a kind of element of controlling the content and how much, how far should you go how relaxed should you be and obviously Twitter, Facebook are all coming under fire and have been under fire for this of course it's a platform for child abuse and human exploitation and there's a ton of users that obviously want to use the app for the wrong reasons with the kind of user-based being targeted towards that younger generation addiction as well, all the kind of common themes privacy and even hackers have exploited the weak code in the app and this is of course quite synonymous with free apps but this is the juicy part and I wanted to get to this relatively quickly and this actually comes from a Reddit thread of a tech guy, a tech engineer that essentially reverse engineered this app and he basically claimed that he felt very confident stating that he had a very good understanding about how the actual app operated when he did this analysis a few months ago and he's basically termed it as a data collection service that is thinly veiled as a social network and calling it an advertising platform is an understatement and he's claimed that it's essentially a malware software that is targeting children and he's saying as a warning don't let your family and friends use it but it's the interesting things of what it tracks so phone hardware, so CPU type, number of course hardware IDs, screen dimensions, DPI, memory usage, disk space so other apps you've installed even some that you've deleted that shows up in your analytics payload through cache and things like that that it can actually track everything network related this is IP, local IP, router Mac, your Mac, the Wi-Fi access point name, whether or not you jail broken your iPhone or Android device more very worryingly GPS is pinging roughly every 30 seconds which is incredibly worrying obviously if we're talking about tracking users movements and things like that and there's things like zero authentication and the scariest part he says is that most of the logging that they're doing on this is remotely configurable and unless you essentially reverse every single one of their native libraries and he says, have fun reading that you know, it's gonna be provides some real problems for you so there's several different also protection protections in place to prevent you from reversing or debugging the app as well and scarily it kind of morphs and the app behavior changes slightly if they know what you're trying to do which is really, really worrying and here's the thing they don't want to know how much information you to know how much information they're collecting on you and there's all these kind of things in place to do so so there's really worrying things coming out of the backend code of this and of course they're now pulling out of Hong Kong due to this new security law in light of recent events this is from the company itself they've decided to stop the operations of the TikTok app in Hong Kong and the exit from Hong Kong is coming within the next days so TikTok has actually been trying to change its global image of course it's got a very Western name unlike a traditional let's say Chinese name so obviously trying to appeal to all these Western users and things like that and TikTok's also consistently said that if asked it would never hand over data to Beijing so why does this all matter? It's very funny timing where obviously the popularity of this app has kind of emerged in this year of the election or even before that from 2017 kind of roaming into this and of course there's echoes of Russia interfering in the US election according to reports and the situation now with TikTok is so serious that US Senators branded TikTok as a counterintelligence threat that we cannot ignore and that is an actual quote and in December 2019 the Australian research report that Bikedance actively collaborates with security bureaus across China and it's uniquely susceptible to other problems that come with the closeness of the censorship and surveillance apparatus of the Communist Party of China led state so through this meteoric growth this kind of social media service is thinly veiled according to reports as really just an information surveillance collection device and of course with the acquisition of Musically they've gained immediate access to the American market and of course with the Western name as well this appeals to Western users so of course the timing is very suspect so let's watch how this develops and of course in the run up to November Trump is gonna be bashing China to strum up his domestic base and of course this comes as a result of the kind of pronged effect of the trade war the currency war and all of these different things so I hope you enjoyed this again another investigative piece just like the Wirecard one subscribe to the channel if you don't wanna miss any other videos like this but have a good day and take care.