Florida Senator Marco Rubio doesn’t think banning TikTok is enough, according to his commentary on the meager success of previous TikTok bans. Rubio wants people to know that even a ban may be only a superficial fix — not enough to battle communist China’s spying agenda, which the TikTok app, with its powerful data collection, essentially supercharges.
Rubio hangs his suspicions on recent history. The United States wouldn’t be the first huge democracy to ban TikTok in an effort to prevent the Chinese Communist Party from obtaining valuable data about its citizens. India — the world’s most populous democracy — banned TikTok in 2020.
India banned TikTok in 2020
— Marco Rubio (@marcorubio) March 22, 2023
But the Chinese Communist Party controlled company still has a social mapping tool—which TikTok employees called “NSA-To-Go”—a digital dossier of every past user that includes their location,contacts and search behavior across other social platforms https://t.co/keqj8XFaSY
Here’s the problem: Despite the TikTok ban in effect in India, Rubio writes, “The Chinese Communist Party controlled company still has a social mapping tool—which TikTok employees called “NSA-To-Go”—a digital dossier of every past user that includes their location, contacts and search behavior across other social platforms.”
A TikTok employee who spoke to Forbes revealed that the tool embedded in the TikTok app is “a key to building a ‘digital dossier’ on any user, including those with private accounts.”
The article Rubio shared says TikTok employees (and by extension the Chinese government) can easily access, for any user past or present, “hundreds of friends and acquaintances; the region where they live; and how they share TikTok content with phone contacts and users across other social platforms.”
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