US House OKs bill for TickTock to be sold or banned

The US House of Representatives voted 352-65 on March 13 to require TikTok’s parent company, China-based ByteDance, to sell the app or face a nationwide ban on TikTok.

President Joe Biden said on March 8 that he would sign the legislation if it reached his desk. The popular video social media app had 149 million users in the US as of January 2024. Many of them contacted Congress to protest the possibility of a ban.

The bill’s fate in the Senate is unclear. It’s also unclear whether any resulting legislation would survive a court challenge.

On May 17, 2023, Montana Gov. Greg Gianforte signed legislation banning TikTok in the state, the first total ban by a US state government. The law would impose fines of $10,000 per day on any app store that offers TikTok and on the app-maker itself if it operates in the state. Individual users would not be subject to penalties. The law was scheduled to go into effect Jan. 1, 2024, but a federal judge blocked it pending a trial to determine whether the state overstepped its authority and whether the law violates the First Amendment.

The federal government, along with many state and foreign governments and some companies, has already banned TikTok on work-provided phones. This type of ban can be effective for protecting data related to government work.

But a full national ban of the app is another matter, which raises a number of questions: What data privacy risk does TikTok pose? What could the Chinese government do with data collected by the app? Is its content recommendation algorithm dangerous? Is it legal for a government to impose a total ban on the app? And is it even possible to ban an app?

Vacuuming up data

As a cybersecurity researcher I’ve noted that, every few years, a newly