In mid March, the United States House of Representatives passed a bill that could ban the social network TikTok in that county. Many have considered the move as unusual. To avoid it, the platform must divest its parent company ByteDance, because — as legislators allege — in its hands, the platform has become a powerful tool for the Chinese government to spy and politically manipulate more than 170 million Americans.
According to The New York Times, this vote is the most recent affair in a “cold war” that has been taking place between the United States and China in recent years. The objective is to control valuable technology, “from microchips to artificial intelligence,” analysts David McCabe and Sapna Maheshwari write.
In response, on March 14, Wang Wenbin, spokesman for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of China, said in a press conference that this “puts the US on the wrong side of the principles of fair competition and international trade rules.”
Regarding the motives of national security pointed out by the American government, Wenbin stated that “if national security can be abused to bring down other countries’ competitive companies, there would be no fairness or justice at all. It is sheer robbers’ logic to try every means to snatch from others all the good things that they have.”
Also, he defended his government against the accusation that TikTok captures personal data of American citizens for political purposes. “We have never asked and will never ask businesses or individuals to collect or provide data in other countries for the Chinese government in violation of local laws,” he stressed. And added that the United States does not have “evidence of TikTok threatening its national security.”
This social network, created by ByteDance in 2016 under the name of Douyin, had a remarkable surge during the pandemic. A group of academics, led by Carlos Trejos-Gil at Universidad Catolica Luis Amigo (in Colombia), expounds that there were over 56 million downloads in December 2020, and by the beginning of 2022, it was the most downloaded app at global level. Today, it is still one of the most used social networks. In 2023, it amassed 1.5 billion users worldwide, according to data by Business of Apps.
In an article entitled “Adiccion a la red social TikTok en jovenes universitarios colombianos”, Trejos-Gil’s team defines it as a horizontal network “where you can consume and share all types of content.” Likewise, it considers the platform “satisfies the user’s need of expression, realization, interaction and, mostly, of escaping reality.” The majority of its users are young: 41% are aged 16 to 22.
Another team of Colombian researchers, led by Jaime Wilches, admits that one of the platform’s most appealing traits is its algorithm. Indeed, it enables it to determine tastes and preferences of people “based on their interactions with the app, even at the risk of content that drives addiction and mental health problems.”
TikTok’s impressive surge has not gone unnoticed by several countries’ electoral races. Wilches and his group, write in the article “Emociones politicas y narrativas prototipicas: TikTok en las campañas politicas”, that in Latin America, Salvadoran Nayib Bukele was one of the first presidents to tap into its potential.
@nayibbukeleDe ahora en adelante, construiremos nuestro propio destino.♬ original sound – Nayib Bukele
The list also includes former President of Ecuador Guillermo Lasso, and Gustavo Petro, current president of Colombia, who ran an attractive, informal and unconventional campaign that appealed to the collective emotions and to citizens feeling close to the candidate, for which TikTok was key, resorting to “empathy with language and symbols of what is common and popular,” the academics state. Therefore, the authors underscore its “capacity to capture voters.” This fact, as they analyze, has managed to create “a collective and self-representation identification of Generation Z,” and to surpass Google as this cohort’s main source of information.
In that sense, lawyer Cynthia Solis, an expert certified in personal data protection, says that the real cause for the vote in the United States House of Representatives is political. “The United States is afraid that citizens’ information is being poured out through this channel and that it could be badly used, particularly with political and electoral purposes.” She believes that said fear is substantiated because human beings are prone to manipulation. “It has been proven that platforms, depending on the information they throw our way, can manipulate us. The most harmless example is by motivating you to purchase certain goods or services.” In fact, TikTok is highly attractive and engaging.
Others, however, think that there is an additional decisive factor underlying Washington’s congressional decision. According to El Pais, the fact that users spend an average of an hour and a half per day watching videos is partly due to its “very powerful recommendation system,” which can be alarming in electoral contexts.
Hiram Camarillo, cofounder and executive director of Seekurity, concurs with this interpretation. For him, the defense of America’s security against a Chinese threat is a pretext. “What they are after, more than anything, is the algorithm that other social media haven’t been able to get,” he says. The United States wants to develop platforms that are capable of generating the same level of engagement towards users to “collect more information from national and international citizens.”
And there are even more interpretations. For Juan Carlos Lara, executive director of Derechos Digitales, if TikTok is a disruptive platform it is because it hails from the country that has been more critical to the American “hegemonic reach.” According to data from Statista, the United States is the country with the highest TikTok user count, with more than 148 million, a figure that accounts for 44% of its total population. Followed by Indonesia, with over 126 million users; Brazil, with more than 98 million; Mexico, with 74 million; and Vietnam, exceeding 67 million. Lara asserts that, as per Washington’s standards, massive exploitation of personal data is actually fine. “What they are avoiding is for it to be in the hands of a non-American company.”
Moreover, there is the element of competition. For Natalia Zuazo, journalist and expert in technology and digital policy, it is a “a technological race which the United States had been winning or spearheading, quote unquote”. However, China has become a major player in the technological field, not only in terms of hardware (equipment) but of software (computing systems). Prior to the emergence of TikTok, “brand placement in the minds of people used to be ruled by American brands, yet that today, if you say TikTok — a Chinese company — that says something.”
For his part, Lara says that the case of TikTok in the United States is paradigmatic because it shows “a significant level of data transfer at transnational level, i.e., from one country to another.” For Camarillo, personal data is “a major asset” since it helps companies generate income, for instance. Nevertheless, it also enables cybercriminals to conduct attacks using phishing or via SMS to commit financial fraud. “If you are a victim of these attacks, banking institutions don’t have to give you back your money because, in the end, you provided the data yourself.”
But there is another side of the coin. While the US Congress criticizes the Chinese government for being able to use its citizens’ personal data, American project Tools for Humanity Corporation has caused concern in several countries because it scans people’s iris in exchange for the cryptocurrency Worldcoin, developed among others by Sam Altman, who’s behind the OpenAI and ChatGPT projects. In its website, it claims they only seek to distinguish humans from bots for online services. However, Zuazo affirms that it is a case of “unusual seriousness.”
Worldcoin presents itself as a “versatile project with an ambitious mission: building the largest human network in the world to improve online trust and access to the global economy.” One of its plans is to move forward “towards open code.” It is a “growing” community of almost 4.5 million “unique human beings” in the five continents.
The problem is that people willingly decide to give its iris information “for economic purposes”, and these companies are aware that there are countries with many needs, explains Zuazo, author of the book Guerras de internet. “That explains why they come to Latin America or to Africa, and not to Belgium,” says the journalist. The worst, he underscores, is that it is “a biometric experiment of rich kids from California”.
On March 6, the AEPD (Spanish Data Protection Agency) was adamant: it demanded Tools for Humanity Corporation to stop scanning its citizens’ irises. According to the site Observatorio Blockchain, the AAIP (Argentinean Agency of Access to Public Information) is also taking matters into its own hands and investigating possible impact to the rights acknowledged in Law 25326, based on Worldcoin’s personal data treatment in that country. It has been suspended in Kenya and Portugal.
Moreover, Worldcoin has alerted other countries. For example, Observatorio Blockchain assures that the CNIL (Data Protection Authority in France) is concerned “about the legality of data compilation,” as well as the United Kingdom’s ICO (Information Commissioner’s Office), which claims it will inquire on the project. The situation is similar in Germany.
Biometric personal data is the new treasure coveted by governments, corporations, and even cybercriminals. It represents a powerful weapon for the holder. Laws and regulations, albeit good, are always lagging behind technological development. The real solution to this problem is digital education, which would teach people the implications of easily relinquishing this information. The risk is so large that, according to Camarillo, it would be easier nowadays for people to give away their passwords than their biometric data, “because passwords can be reset, but the iris can’t.”
But, how protected are Latin Americans in terms of personal information? The experts differ. On the one hand, Solis claims that in Mexico, for example, laws are almost as good as in Europe. On the other hand, Camarillo thinks that, despite it all, regulation exists only on paper. “That is one of the reasons why leaks or information theft takes place,” he says.
Similarly, for Lara, personal data protection in Latin America is paradoxical. He says that many countries have made regulatory progress, such as Argentina and Chile, although that protection is undermined by commercial and state practices to compile large volumes of information that exceed the need or the purpose for which it is collected. “In that regard, it seems we are not moving forward as much as we are supposed to.”
In any case, Latin America will remain a passive spectator in this story, as it is bound to be in the rear of technological advancements and to contribute its millions of potential users, who incidentally are especially vulnerable as a result of their low income and education. Governments have the floor.