"FBI Director Say He's 'Extremely Concerned' About China's Ability to Weaponize TikTok"
On Tuesday, during a House Homeland Security Committee hearing on worldwide threats, FBI Director Christopher Wray told Congress he is “extremely concerned” that Beijing could weaponize data collected through TikTok, the wildly popular app owned by the Chinese company ByteDance. Wray stated that application programming interfaces, or APIs, that ByteDance embeds in TikTok are a national security concern since Beijing could use them to “control data collection of millions of users or control the recommendation algorithm, which can be used for influence operations.” Wray noted that while America faces cyber threats from various nations, “China’s fast hacking program is the world’s largest, and they have stolen more Americans’ personal and business data than every other nation combined.” Wray stated that APIs in TikTok could be harnessed by China to control software on millions of devices, meaning the Chinese government could conceivably technically compromise Americans’ personal devices.