FBI Director Wray Says TikTok APIs Are a National Security Concern

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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 popular video app owned by the Chinese company ByteDance.

Wray said 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.”

Because Beijing forces companies to “basically do whatever the Chinese government wants to do in terms of sharing information or serving as a tool of the Chinese government … that’s plenty of reason by itself to be extremely concerned” about TikTok and the more significant threat posed by Chinese cyber aggression, he …