Worrying reports indicate TikTok could be a 'notorious intelligence source’ for China

Retired Brigadier General Dr Robert Spalding says the Chinese company which owns viral-video app TikTok “is notorious for collecting data about the individual”.

US President Donald Trump has given ByteDance, the company behind TikTok, 45 days to negotiate its sale to Microsoft and is pushing for the US tech company to buy all of TikTok instead of 30 per cent.

Last week President Trump threatened to ban the popular social media app over national security concerns about the personal data it accesses.

General Spalding said the issue with tech companies like ByteDance is the collection of data “doesn’t stop merely at providing the service that they claim to provide”.

“In the report that ASPI talks about, they sent that data, 2-3 petabytes of data … to the Chinese Communist Party's propaganda arm and the People’s Liberation Army’s intelligence arm,” he told Sky News.

There is a very real possibility information gathered by TikTok would flow to the Chinese Communist Party for intelligence collection, he said.

Image: Getty

Видео Worrying reports indicate TikTok could be a 'notorious intelligence source’ for China канала Sky News Australia