A looming election joining me Steve Clemons in conversation with leading voices on the bottom line your weekly take on u. S. Politics and society on aljazeera. Are there im josh rushing welcome to the stream home edition im sitting in for the bear replaceable to me ok today broadcast and to you live from my home lets start off where on you tube right now right youre watching this check out that box over there and join me in this discussion give me some questions to ask the guest today id love to have you be a part of the show now let me ask you this have you heard of this app called tick tock its a social media app here check out some videos its mostly like you know short fun videos dance challenges cooking tips make up to i love what cat anytime i see a workout like the way these guys dance i dont personally have tech talk but im looking at this thinking maybe maybe i should this seems fun it Streams Streams there will look this app i have to tell you its actually grown into a behemoth i want to show you something on my computer real quick these are the top apps worldwide for may 2020 by downloads check out number one in the world is tick tock above zoom whats at Facebook Instagram ticktock over 2000000000 people have downloaded this app has over 800000000 regular users but when it begins this kind of fun video thing has actually become a bit of a center of International Intrigue and thats what were going to talk about today with an excellent panel of guests on this nominee as her guest interviews themselves to you were going to start with. Bethany Bethany Katie tell us a who you are why youre here today. Now my name is Bethany Allen abraham and im the china reporter at access where i had been following tic toc and National SecurityNational Security concerns ok cool and also joining us from bangalore is harsha. My name is marshall and im so ive been a tech journalist for about 4 to 5 years and right ive just been free lancing for the last 6 to 8 months writing about technology and picked up this is especially so all right and now from baltimore is matthew. My name is Matthew Green im a professor at Johns Hopkins in Computer Science i focus on the Computer Security and privacy arent so bad nick you set us up here with whats the issue why are countries talking about well not just talk about india the Worlds Largest democracy has already begun to talk and now there are rumors the u. S. Is considering something along those lines can he tell us what what was the issue here. So what you need to understand about ted talk is that you cant look at it through the lens of Silicon Valley companies you need to look at it through the lens of chinese law talk is owned by a Chinese Company and under chinese law any person any entity in china is required to hand over data or any information to chinas. Security services or government and not only that theyre also required to keep any assistance that they provide to chinas Security Services a secret that means that tick tock under chinese law would not be allowed to admit if it had handed over data or any other information to the Chinese Government well thats not the only concern so lets say lets just say that the Chinese Government does have some of this data what it would do is that is also really concerning because we have seen china turning into a almost totalitarian surveillance state thats what it wants to do it takes you know people who just you know talk about politics puts them in jail its engaged in a genocide and its northwestern a region is seen john you have a government that does not respect privacy is willing to put anyone in prison and is actively aiming to collect data on the math scale both within china and around the world and that company is required under chinese law to hand over data if requested that the issue so f. B. I. Director we go my computer for 2nd to show you a tweet from Jonathan Ching of the washington or the wall street journal hes quoting f. B. I. Director in a speech where he said if youre an american adult is more likely than not that china has stolen your personal data and i know its not just americans this is an International Issue varsha indias are ready to talk to talk is pretty popular there too right. Oh yeah i mean be unpopular i think indio is ticktock largest Market International market outside of china it launched in 2018 and since then it has had 2000 employees in the country it has had over like 200. 00 monthly active users it has the largest downloads only especially during the lock down so it has definitely a huge market but there. Are reviews concerns there are they really concerned about their own National Security or is this just of bali in the rising conflict between india and china over the border so i mean they havent exactly said that its a political move theyve made the mention firstly none of the apps that were mentioned they mention that its chinese they just mentioned those 59. 00 apps that have been banned to protect the serenity and National Security of india but this mall happened right after the political you know like a border battle between india and china where india lost 20 off their soldiers and it was a really brutal attack by the chinese you know from the chinese site and that happened in the middle of june and then 29 june 59. 00 tinys apps were banned and also as per the law the Indian Government did not have to reveal that theyre banning these apps but they made an announcement so its a very clear political move but that does not exclude you know. Excuse the fact that there are issues with respect to its privacy. So they answer isnt on National Security like internal concerns or external concerns its maybe both i want to go to you 2 comments right here right away weve got combi says to talk as a threat only according to those governments who have held their countries are real situations like india in the usa a new world is here. Usa does the same thank you new world Robert Montoya anything that gives china easy access to usa citizens at the moment in my opinion is not good period and one more from house a t. V. No technology is 100 percent safe in fact if you want to be safe out there. This is if you want to be safe out of new technology that gets them to get out of new technologies matthew is this something we should really be concerned about if so why i mean we should definitely be concerned about that right that we should be concerned about the fact that apps everywhere are soaking up huge amounts of private data theyre dragging our information into generalized data stores and basically selling them to the highest better sometimes the lowest bidder this is a big problem right its not just tick tock its face book its pretty much every single one of those apps you showed on that list a few slides ago. But now we have to ask a question like do we treat different pieces of software differently because the people have access to that data and they do Different Things with it and it kind of raises the question that if were in this concerned about our data going to china through this particular port should we be looking very hard at our data flows otherwise. Well mickey give us a clear sense what kind of data can tick tock actually get from your phone. So there have been people have torn apart the app they looked at a bunch of Different Things they found that it does a lot of the same things that other standard apps do just a little bit more aggressively so for example it tries to ping your location every 30 seconds and send that information up it tries to collect what other apps are running on your system what kind of phone youre using what kind of operating system youre using i want this is actually pretty standard stuff its just that if were to believe these reports its more the ticktock kind of dials up to 11 rather than doing it maybe 7 or 8 which is what you know your typical snap chat or facebook app does. But that was something certainly of china having all that information about i dont know 13 year olds in the us. Yeah i can sort of follow on match point there and now i understand that from a simple technical perspective certainly what matt said is accurate but again keep in mind that if if ticktock were not owned by a Chinese Company bite dance we would be having a completely different conversation about you know what about its privacy practices again the concern is that it is required by walk to hand over data if required to to the Chinese Government now what might the Chinese Government do with that data this is where we need to talk about what happened in 2016 with the russian meddling in the u. S. Elections so having access to a massive amount of data and now im not talking at the granular level and more of you know your individual data how they might sell that rather im talking about having an understanding of how a society interacts with the internet and with content and with politics you know that data in the back and you know from it from any social media. Or you know website can provide a huge amount of information about what makes a society move what goes viral what gets them upset how do they act this is the kind of information that is really dangerous in the hands of a hostile government and it is so clear that the Chinese Government under the Chinese Communist party views the u. S. With great hostility thats the concern. In there actually could use this information to influence the u. S. From with then an example of that just recently is president charles rally in tulsa. I think you set up the kind of what happened with that and how to talk was involved with that. Service so i know that the campaign is going to have this this rally and so what happened was that to talk users decided to kind of prank you know to kind of do a prank and buy out or to reserve a bunch of tickets for this rally so it appeared to you know to the people in the campaign that the rally was sold out and the idea is that potentially this may have discouraged people who actually wanted to a 10 im actually attending the rally now of course you know none of these to talk to people actually went and so you know the stadium was was quite empty now its hard to say if it would have been empty otherwise and if this was just sort of you know some kind of social media prank but but the lack of certainty there is is kind of the point and now this seems to have been just a completely organic thing that happened but you get a sense of what tick tock could be or could become and its also important to know that right now to talk seems like kind of a fine frivolous you know app thats Popular Among Young People well thats what facebook was 10 years ago now its Vital Communications infrastructure should we wait until take talk of the Vital Communications infrastructure before taking these concerns seriously and we know that you have mr she is not happy about tech talk we have a quote here from secretary of state might impale about it that we share with you. We are now evaluating each instance where we believe that u. S. Citizens data that they have on their phones or in their system or in their Health Care Records we want to make sure that the Chinese Communist party doesnt have a way to easily access that and so what youll see the administration do is take actions that preserve and protect that information and deny the Chinese Communist party access to the private information that belongs to americans macha the u. S. Government step in and do something here. I think you know there are 2 concerns here one is that stepping in against ticktock is not going to solve the problems that anybody is identifying here if youre worried about something more than just people getting information about what many as you watch on tick tock any game you download anything that you download is going to collect exactly the same kind of information and its going to be available to the Chinese Communist party anyway you cant close this door unless you do something much more aggressive that actually secures peoples fault and the 2nd thing i would say is that you know up until now and im not a lawyer this spring court has viewed software as protected speech so the question we should be asking is can we come in because the United States government come in and say this app is now banned i dont know the law on this but it scares me because what is the next step that gets banned after this one and all it does that affect our ability to communicate. How has the band and tick tock affected people in india. Well there are 2 sides to it one is you was a good 200000000 active users using picked out you know like least 2030 times 203030 minutes a day and its been a major impact on them and when it comes to the influence a community they have there have been about 1200000 creators and a lot of them have been devastated in their own words and are trying to figure out what to do next a lot of growing to have come up. With you know trying to replace picked up a lot of home grown apps have comment and theyre made you know that theyre proud. And thats what its note abstemious flooded with the clones which is funny you know so yeah and another point is that just i think a day ago there was a reuters report about Indian Government sending about 77 questions to tick dog and other chinese apps you know and theyve given them 3 weeks time to respond to those questions so we dont know whats going to happen after that but thats the stage at which we are right now i want to share with you a talk influencer since you just brought them by his name is michael lee is in the us he is 34000000 followers from what i gather he does mostly dancing is humorous things here he is part of a kind of save to talk in pain. Right now to talk in the very its been banned in the us and saying that you petition with hashtags saved to talk 20 twentieths had so many tragedies and take stock is the one most positive al is for us all whether its watching or creating content although it has flaws this one app has created me with people from all over the world thats been able to bring joy and inspire people is because so many including mine and its been able to give me the opportunity to support my family to have a voice and bring joy to my fans i personally had people d. M. Me say that ive helped them go through hard times in depression because my content i love you guys so so much and all im asking for us to do is take a stand me. So it feels like were calling out tick tock were calling out the Chinese Government they were calling out the indian govern the us committed doesnt the control of this really lie with 2 companies matt apple and google they have the operating systems that allow the apps to collect this data right can they stop this if they wanted to. At the end of the day that is the situation right are our phone just not to protect us from the random app you download and that would stick out and so the question is you know if the information that is critically critical doors of purity is leaking out of our phones into ticktock then the question is should we be talking to apple and should we be talking to google about fixing that and then should they be making decisions in their app stores about whether you know this kind of app is malicious or not and then maybe guiding ticktock to doing less of that or you know banning technical together so the question is whether the government should really be the ones doing this well is it a Business Opportunity i mean i will give my business to whichever Company Gives me an ability in the operating system to flip one switch that protects me from all of this why dont they see that as as a Business Opportunity so i think they do i mean if i think if you look at whats happened with phones in the last few years theres been a real push to adding privacy features nowadays you get warnings one in the app doesnt like copy something from your clipboard you can turn off Location Tracking and there are all sorts of features that didnt exist 5 years ago that now do exist apple even as a whole series of commercials on privacy where they just say look privacy is the most important thing and of commercial and so i think that there is an understanding in this entire kind of scandal with ticktock illustrates how critically people care about privacy so there is a Business Opportunity or the question is whether a company like tick tock which is ad supported can take advantage of that or whether we have to look at some really harder hardware maker like apple. So bethany with the internet started it seemed like it was this thing that could actually troops and nation states go beyond borders time it seems to be unable to break that down with the great fire wall not only really trying to strictly control whats happening there nationally but are there really trying to control whats happening around the world on it when it comes to their fears is that correct and you can explain some that to me. Sure so the Chinese Government has a view of the internet