Liberals cheer Chinese app TikTok that spies on their kids
Former John McCain campaign senior adviser, Steve Schmidt, an infamous Never-Trumper, bragged over the weekend that his teen daughter and her friends “struck a savage blow” at Donald Trump by using the TikTok app to order hundreds of tickets for the Trump rally that would ultimately go unused.
“This is what happened tonight,” tweeted Schmidt, “I’m dead serious when I say this. The teens of America have struck a savage blow against @realDonaldTrump. All across America teens ordered tickets to this event. The fools on the campaign bragged about a million tickets. Lol.”
But the truly savage blow might be aimed at the teens instead.
A bipartisan group of U.S. legislators last year called upon the government to investigate TikTok’s ties to the Chinese government citing the app’s ability to spy on U.S. citizens.
“Senators Chuck Schumer and Tom Cotton want the US intelligence community to assess the national security risks of TikTok and other Chinese-owned platforms,” reports CNN, “saying in a statement Thursday that such apps could be used to spy on US citizens or become targets of foreign influence campaigns like the Russian meddling campaign to influence the 2016 US presidential election.”
Of more concern is the facial recognition technology that allows the Chinese government to personally identify the faces of users. China has the most sophisticated facial recognition systems in the world that allow the government to recognize faces even with masks on.
The U.S. military has banned the app on official devices and warned military members against the use of the app on personal devices.
“The guidance directs all Defense Department employees to ‘be wary of applications you download, monitor your phones for unusual and unsolicited texts etc., and delete them immediately and uninstall TikTok to circumvent any exposure of personal information,’” reports Military.com.
In May, four Illinois teens sued TikTok, seeking class-action status, for collecting biometric information, including facial information protected under U.S. law.
“The company does not inform its users or their guardians their biometric information will be collected, the lawsuit alleges,” says the Herald and Review. “Illinois’ biometric law requires companies collecting such data to obtain prior consent from consumers, detail how they’ll use it and how long it will be kept.”
More ominously, facial information can be collated and matched from various sources like Instagram, Facebook and financial repositories like Equifax to personally identify and target individuals, like say, teens whose parents play a prominent part in politics.
The Department of Justice, in a criminal indictment this year, said the Chinese military is behind the largest hacking ever when it hacked Equifax in 2017. That hack gained the personally identifiable information of 148 million Americans. When combined with facial recognition technology, such information can then be used to track, monitor and potentially exploit a teen victim, especially teens who upload sensitive videos.
Schmidt, however, wasn’t the only prominent politician cheering for the TikTok teens for trying to stump Trump.
“Actually you just got ROCKED by teens on TikTok who flooded the Trump campaign w/ fake ticket reservations & tricked you into believing a million people wanted your white supremacist open mic enough to pack an arena during COVID,” tweeted Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC).
Chalk another win up to AOC and her socialist handlers, who care so much about children who could eventually get rocked right back.
Scroll down to comment!
