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You aren't wrong, but it's fairly easy to make a plausible argument for national security. You can argue nation security when it comes to any app that isn't doing end-to-end, especially if it's written in a way that could allow the first, or a third party, to get access to arbitrary user data with the plausible deniability that security bugs can offer. TikTok has had security bugs that made me outright mad when I looked at an expose on some of them. The kind of comedically terrible bugs they've had not too long ago makes it absolutely certain there are many, many more. Not even checking which user is logged in when you send a message for the user? Seriously, that's embarrassing in a rarely used feature on an app with a handful of users. Core functionality on a hundreds of millions users app? That's so terrible I almost can't believe it. Not that other apps don't have bugs, but the track record, and global spread would make a solid argument. Confound by their app appearing to spread the data over an absolutely massive number of domains, and hosts, making auditing very hard, and also attribution of blame if data gets in the wrong hand. I'm not saying eg Facebook is necessarily much different, only what argument can be made. Incidentally, what TikTok is doing is almost certainly illegal in EU, as I have no information that they have even attempted to follow GDPR rules. |