View from Japan: Potential threats of Chinese IT companies
Top view of woman walking in the street with tik tok app on her mobile phone. Illustrative editorial
Editor’s note: this analysis was originally published by the Japan Institute for National Fundamentals and is reposted here with its permission.
On August 14, U.S. President Donald Trump ordered Chinese information technology company ByteDance to sell the U.S. operations of its TikTok short-form video app within 90 days. The U.S. president has the power to block corporate merger and acquisition deals and the sale of business operations based on recommendations by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S. that screens foreign investment in America for national security reasons. The new executive order by President Trump is based on this authorization. Microsoft has offered to acquire the TikTok service in the U.S. Behind the order is a national security concern that personal information collected through TikTok could be leaked to the Chinese government.
TikTok collecting user information without consent
In Japan, the YouTube video-sharing service has grown rapidly. In September 2019, students from Taiwan, which still bans food imports from five Japanese prefectures including Fukushima (known for the March 2011 nuclear power station accident), visited Japan, used radiation meters to measure radiation in fluke caught in Fukushima Prefecture and found that radiation levels were below measurable limits. They then uploaded the video footage from their trip to YouTube in Taiwan.
TikTok can be used for the same purpose. In a 2018 download ranking in Japan, TikTok ranked first, outdoing the LINE communications app and Google Maps.
On August 11, The Wall Street Journal reported that TikTok collected media access control (MAC) addresses of smartphones powered by Google’s Android operating system to track users’ information. This practice, done without users’ consent, might have violated Google rules. A MAC address amounts to an identification number of an IT device. TikTok terminated the collection of MAC addresses last November. Nevertheless, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo warns that TikTok users’ personal information could be transferred to the Chinese government.
Risks behind convenient Zoom
The Zoom video conference system, the use of which has soared in response to the novel coronavirus pandemic, was developed by a U.S. company started by Eric Yuan, a Chinese-born U.S. citizen. In June 2020, Zoom video conferences held as memorials to mark the 1989 Tiananmen Square military crackdown on pro-democracy protests were shut down, with three sponsors’ accounts suspended, under pressure from the Chinese government, according to Zoom.
A Zoom development site is located in China along with some Zoom servers, an indication that conferences using Zoom might be vulnerable to tapping by the Chinese government. Although Zoom has explained that security problems were quickly improved, some video conferences, such as those using ultrafine pictures, could still be tapped by China, allowing trade secrets to be stolen.
Japan should make more efforts to enhance information security and develop world-leading IT software. The world is in the middle of a U.S.-China information war.
Tadashi Narabayashi is a professor emeritus at Hokkaido University and a director at the Japan Institute for National Fundamentals.
