TikTok, the popular video-sharing app owned by the Chinese firm ByteDance, whose users are now estimated to exceed 1.5 billion worldwide, has come under harsh criticism from Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.), chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, who said during a Feb. 2 interview with Fox Business that his “patience is running thin” over the Biden administration’s lack of progress in determining the extent of Chinese engineers’ access to the personal data of TikTok users in the United States.
“I’ve been raising concerns about TikTok for months, and let’s go into the two concerns I have. One, the amount of data that TikTok is collecting, since so many of our users are kids, on our kids, that that data resides in China. And even though TikTok has said that’s not the case, there have been constant examples where it has been proven that Chinese engineers are still getting access to that data.”
