Last week’s big TikTok news saw the US House Foreign Affairs Committee granting President Joe Biden broad powers to ban TikTok from American phones. Since then, 30 US states, Canada and EU have banned TikTok from government phones.

How Will TikTok Keep Data Out of China

By keeping in user countries…

TikTok’s owner, ByteDance, announced plans to implement new data protection systems to keep TikTok data from going to China. The company announced Projects Clover and Texas to keep data local to the country users are located. Project Clover is a newly built data center in Ireland which will keep European users’ data inside Europe. Project Texas is a newly built data center in the US designed to keep American users’ data inside the States.

TikTok is undertaking big spending. Project Clover will cost them $1.2 billion a year. TikTok maintains the new data centers will be managed by a third party. This places another ‘Great Wall of China’ between TikTok’s users and the Chinese government.

What’s the Real Beef?

100 million Americans use TikTok. That’s a lot of American eyeballs using a Chinese made application. TikTok doesn’t steal anymore or less data than other social media applications. It’s just that we, America, didn’t make it. TikTok is another diplomatic excuse in rising tensions between the United States and America. The two countries are in a fight for the future similar to yesteryear’s Cold War.

The stakes are higher this time around. Russia is currently engaged in a war of choice with Ukraine, and is probably receiving support from China. The US has banned countries from shipping technology to Russia while at the same time limiting technology exports to China. Meanwhile, many US technology companies, like Apple, are beginning to pull up their stakes in China to go southward to Vietnam and other cheaper labor economies.

To quote De La Soul, “Stakes is High,” and the game is mighty.

-MJ