If you have any gray hair, you’re probably unfamiliar with “TikTok” which is an app to upload and watch short videos, which are usually less than a minute and produced by millions of our friends and neighbors, mostly young friends and neighbors.  It has been in the news recently, because President Trump wants the app to be owned by an American company, instead of the current Chinese owners, who have close ties to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

One reason TikTok has been so successful is that it is “free”.  There is an old saying in Silicon Valley that “if you don’t know what product is being sold, it is YOU.”  Like so many apps, TikTok collects data on its users, which can easily be fed to the data-hungry CCP.  It is believed the TikTok app can harvest data from other close-by cell phones, such as key strokes and contacts.  All this data may enable the CCP to identify security risks that they might cultivate, as well as identities they can hack.  Of course, TikTok swears they would never feed their data to the CCP.  I don’t believe them.

Kudos to President Trump for identifying the problem and doing something about it.  Now, why doesn’t he protect us from the equally data-hungry Google and Facebook?

By the way, if you want to better protect yourself from Google, go to https://www.foxnews.com/tech/google-search-alternatives-that-respect-your-privacy