Tech News: TikTok in the Crosshairs

as a national security threat to various countries and up. First, US lawmakers are looking to amend a proposed law that would give the US president broad powers to ban TikTok in the United States as well as other Chinese made apps. Already, we've seen bans for various federal and state agencies here that you are not supposed to install TikTok on a

government owned device in a lot of these places. But this legislation would give the president the authority to block transactions that would allow foreign companies to even build out information and communications infrastructure here in the United States. And in a lot of ways, this actually mirrors how the US treated radio way back in the early twentieth century.

As the First World War escalated, US authorities seized radio broadcast assets, essentially radio stations that had previously been under the ownership of companies that had a foreign parent company, namely the British Marconi Company. So after the war, the US declined to return those assets to those foreign companies, concerned that it might not be a good idea to allow a company that's native to some other country to

own and operate telecommunications infrastructure within America. So this legislation is taken kind of a similar approach. I think the legislation was introduced in early spring, but according to Senator Mark Warner, TikTok quote spent one hundred million dollars in lobbying and slowed a bit of our momentum end quote.

But this proposal is still on the table. I think the main concern among critics is that the law would expand the president's powers in ways that could have negative consequences down the road, which is a reasonable concern that you want to make sure that whatever solution you're proposing

doesn't end up being worse than whatever the perceived problem is. Meanwhile, down Under in Australia, the country's leaders are grilling TikTok executives about the company's operations as well as an incident that happened last December, and that incident was when Byteedance

admitted Bye Dance being the parent company to TikTok. It admitted that some of its employees had tracked journalists and these were journalists who were covering TikTok, and apparently this was in an attempt to cross reference the journalist's locations with byte Dance employees in an effort to track down

whistleblowers or leaks. The TikTok representatives said that while that incident did happen, the employees who did the tracking did so without the knowledge or direction of the company itself, So their explanation is that these employees went rogue. In other words, some of the Australian leaders became frustrated with the TikTok representatives and accused them of obfuscation. At one point, a TikTok rep said she could not say for certain

where Byte Dance's quote unquote formal headquarters were. That led Senator James Patterson to say, are you seriously not able to say how your parent company, which ultimately owns and controls you, is operated? So I think it's safe to say that TikTok isn't doing any favors for itself in the attempt to walk a little tightrope here to try

and answer questions without making themselves seem guilty. But also the company reps are in a pretty tough position because a lot of places around the world have already worked with the presumption that TikTok is guilty, and therefore they're looking for any bit of evidence that backs up that assumption. Now, back here in the United States, Clemson University announced this week that no one will be able to access TikTok

through the campus network. So if your device connects to either Clemson University's wired network or its Wi Fi, you would find access to TikTok blocked. Of course, you could swap to a cellular network and still access it. I assume you could also use a VPN and still access it, but campus provided internet would be a non starter. The ban began yesterday, and the reason Clemson gave her the band was to quote unquote protect the integrity of information

and resources. So with that wording, my guess is that this concern may relate to worries that TikTok could serve as sort of a carrier for other types of code that could be used to exploit networks. I can't say for sure. I mean, maybe they're just worried that someone's gonna do a TikTok dance in front of some sensitive records that relate to Clemson University. I don't know. News stories like the ones I have just mentioned probably contributed

to our next story. And that is according to a survey that the Few Research Center conducted, about fifty nine percent of Americans see TikTok as a threat to national security in the United States. Some of them think it is a major threat, others feel it's more like a minor threat. The survey found that conservatives were more likely to see TikTok as being dangerous. There there was something

like a seventy percent of conservatives said so. And also they found that the older the person was, the more likely they were to feel TikTok is a risk. I am guessing there's probably a correlation between people who have had little to no experience using the app and a fear that the app could potentially serve as a threat to national security, though I don't think the survey directly established that. It just again, it feels to me like

that's probably true. I know that the survey used a fairly modest sample size of five one hundred one respondents, so the headlines that generalize this to all Americans are perhaps a little bit over zealous, and any conclusions you would draw from this survey would need to have some really big qualifiers. You need to keep in mind that one what was the size of the sample? And two how did they word the questions? And for the record, the Pew Research Center actually shares all the information so

you can see that. But personally, I think the whole TikTok issue is one of those things where you can't see the forest for the trees kind of problem. I've said it a lot of times before, but it does bear repeating. Should a country be concerned about TikTok's ties to China, Well, probably, I mean that is something to be concerned about, but we shouldn't focus solely on that connection to the point where we ignore the broader problem

with data brokers and data collection. As long as there are platforms that are gobbling up data and then selling it to whomever pays for it, there's a potential threat to national security. The connection may not be as blatant as a company owned by a Chinese parent company. I mean, yeah, that's going to set up red flags immediately, but that's just obvious, right. Even without that, the connections are still there.

Even if the United States were to ban TikTok and any other Chinese based app, the data floodgates are still wide open. It does not us the problem, and that is that is something that we have to grapple with.

And my fear is that TikTok ends up being an enormous distraction, that whether TikTok is a danger or not is kind of beside the point, because the danger exists whether TikTok does or doesn't, and that we can't just have it become a conversation about TikTok, because then we have the false sense of security that we're all safe even if TikTok gets wiped off the face of the planet,

and that's just an incorrect assumption. On a related note, in the state of Massachusetts, legislators are proposing a law that would make it illegal for data brokers to buy and sell cellular location data. Now, this is in part an effort to protect people who seek abortions and it would keep their location data private so that some other entity can't deduce where those people have gone or what they've been up to, and that is really important here

in the United States. States here in the US are aggressively criminalizing abortion in the wake of the overturning of Roe Versus Way. That includes having laws that would punish citizens who travel out of state to seek an abortion. So even if an abortion is legal somewhere else, if you're a citizen of one of those states, you would be breaking the law. So this kind of law that Massachusetts is proposing would protect people who were seeking medical

help outside of their home state. The bill is called the Location Shield Act, and it would ban the buying, selling, renting, leasing, or trading of location data across the state of Massachusetts. Moreover, companies would first have to get consent from citizens before they could even collect that kind of data in the first place. They would have to have the express consent

of people in Massachusetts before they do that. Companies that failed to comply with this bill, if it does become law, would face finds as well as open up the possibility of class action lawsuits against the company. Chances are pretty good that this legislation is going to be passed into law in Massachusetts. It would become a pioneer piece of

legislation here in the US. Moreover, it would be a very tiny step toward oversight and regulation of the data brokerage industry, which has gone unchecked in the US for decades, And in my mind, it is the larger problem compared to the TikTok stuff that we talked about just a moment ago. I think this is a really good step. It's one of many steps that I think need to be taken in order to place some restrictions on the

rampant collection and exploitation of information. That information has real value, obviously, because companies are willing to buy it, and other companies make billions of dollars by selling it. And meanwhile, we, the people who are generating the information, end up being exploited by it as opposed to profiting from it or having any control of it whatsoever. So I think that this is a good step. Okay, we're going to take a quick break to thank our sponsors. When we come back,

we've got some more news to talk about. We're back. So the United States and the European Union have come to an agreement on data policies that will re establish transatlantic data transfers between the US and the EU, at least for the time being. So Previously, the European Union turned off the data valves and cited concerns that US intelligence officials could potentially comb through EU citizens data and that the data belonging to EU citizens would not be

safe from surveillance. And that is a perfectly reasonable concern, y'all, goodness knows, there are US intelligence agencies that are dedicated to specifically doing that kind of thing, even to the extent of doing it on American citizens. Anyway, the EU demanded assurances that EU citizen data would receive the same level of protection over in the US as it does in the EU, and that US intelligence agencies will have limited access to any kind of data from the EU.

This agreement, which is called the EU US Data Privacy Framework or DPF, is the third attempt to establish new safeguards that adequately meet EU concerns over citizen privacy and safety. That being said, critics of this new agreement argue that it doesn't actually make substantive changes in policy, and that inevitably there are going to be legal challenges to this new agreement, and in all likelihood it will end up

getting revoked as the previous two agreements had. So what the critics are saying is that this still isn't actually enough to meet the needs of the EU and to protect EU citizens, So chances are this is a temporary fix and we'll be back to the drawing board within a year or so. Apple has pushed out some Rapid Security Response or RSR updates to address zero day vulnerabilities that hackers can use to compromise devices like iPhones, iPads,

and max. This flaw is within the WebKit browser engine, so a hacker can essentially set up a web page that contains malicious content, and if you get tricked into visiting that web page, then you can end up downloading and executing some code that then allows the hacker to remotely execute code on your device, so essentially you hand

over control of your device to the hacker. And once again this illustrates how it's important to keep your devices up to date with the latest security patches, and that's a good idea to allow updates to install as they become available, rather than to hold off until later. To make sure you don't become one of the victims of

these kinds of schemes. CNN reports that Meta, while basking in the fact that more than one hundred million people have signed up for Threads already, has also made drastic cuts to its teams that focused on fighting misinformation and

disinformation across company platforms. Now, this has caused for concern for lots of reasons, not the least of which is that the United States is heading into an election year next year, and Meta is a company with a pretty awful reputation for facilitating the spread of election misinformation and worse. After all, it was Meta's platform Facebook that took center

stage during the Cambridge Analytica scandal. CNN has trouble getting firm answers to some pretty simple questions such as how many cuts to those departments have been made, or what was the size of those departments now compared to before, or even what tools do they have at their disposal to do their jobs? And the fact that there were

cuts at all isn't totally surprising obviously, you know. Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, famously said that twenty twenty three is the year of efficiency for the company and that mostly seems to boil down to making massive job cuts and trying to do more with fewer people. I imagine it's easier from a corporate standpoint to make cuts to departments like content moderation and trust in safety teams because they don't necessarily contribute directly to the bottom line the way

some other departments do. But as we have seen in past years, a lack of resources and policy can create massive negative consequences. So if Zuckerberg would like to avoid another future date with US Congress, it might be wise to make some investments in those departments rather than cuts. I talked a lot about Twitter in yesterday's Tech Stuff episode, but one thing I did not cover was how the company has changed its API policies. So an API is

an application programming interface. This is what allows a third party developer to a tool that can tap into some other platform or software. So for Twitter, this is the interface that app developers can use if they want to create their own third party Twitter client, for example, or any other tool that sends requests or posts to Twitter. Not long ago, Twitter changed its API policy to increase the amount charged to developers for this privilege, with three

different tiers. If you're at the enterprise tier, you're talking about starting at forty two thousand dollars per month, So it really depends upon which tier you're subscribed to and what the purpose is. But you are paying a good deal of money for access to the API, and yet, according to developers, the API has become unreliable and unstable

this year, meaning that apps are not always functional. Twitter will make changes without clearly communicating those changes to app developers ahead of time, and it kind of breaks the app, and meanwhile the developers have to scramble to fix things. So it's not due to flaws in the apps themselves. Instead's due to problems with the API or changes to the API, and that's something that developers don't have any

control over. So they're complaining that they're spending more money than ever to be able to work with Twitter, and that Twitter isn't working as well as it should a coin immashable. The problem has led to several developers abandoning Twitter altogether, which seems to be quite the trend because users and advertisers have been doing that as well. There have been countless apps and services designed to let you make notes and access them wherever you happen to be.

One of the most famous is ever note, which traces its history way back to two thousand, before the era of the consumer smartphone, although you could argue that really it was the explosion of the smartphone market that made Evernote rise to prominence. But last November, a Milan based company called Bending Spoons purchased Evernote, or at least announced that it was going to, and then the acquisition was

complete in early twenty twenty three. Evernote is based out of Redwood City in America, or at least it used to be, and this week news broke that Bending Spoons had laid off nearly all of Evernote's staff and the company plans to move all operations to Europe. This has prompted Evernote fans to worry about the future of the app. It's not the first time that Evernote has faced challenges. The company upset a lot of users with an overhaul

to the app several years ago. A lot of users felt that the company failed to deliver upon promised features and broke a lot of stuff that they liked about Evernote, but it kind of recovered from that, although the company also held layoffs in twenty fifteen, twenty eighteen, and even as recently as twenty twenty two, and now Evernote faces a whole lot more competition in the field, so a lot of people worry that this could be the end

of Evernote. And it may not be. Everynote may still be sticking around, but things are certainly looking a little dark at the moment. So here's hoping all the staff who formerly worked for Evernote are able to land on their feet. Finally, protesters in San Francisco who object to autonomous vehicles have employed a reportedly effective way to paralyze self driving cars, and that's to gently place a traffic cone on the hood of the vehicle, which then will

just make it sit still. The protesters, who belong to a group that calls themselves the Safe Streets Rebel, have dubbed this the Week of Cone. They object to startups that are putting more vehicles on the streets. They argue that cities should invest in making streets more pedestrian and bike friendly rather than to accommodate more vehicles. They also object to vehicles that are covered in various sensors and cameras.

They have likened autonomous vehicles to being surveillance pods because in order to operate, they have to be able to survey the entire area around them, but that also poses a potential risk to privacy and security for citizens. The protests aren't meant to cause physical damage to the vehicles, but they can still create a hazard because protesters have coned cars that just have come to a stop at an intersection, and then the self driving vehicle ends up

being stuck there and ends up blocking traffic. So it does have its consequences. And that's it for the news for today, Tuesday, July eleventh, twenty twenty three. I hope you are all well, and I'll talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff is an iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.