The distrust has already been expressed in scrutiny from regulators and politicians around the world, worried about the amount of data TikTok collects and whether Chinese authorities have access to it.
“As the geopolitical situation changes I suspect we will see companies such as TikTok will continue to be treated with some caution in the west,” says Alan Woodward, a professor of cybersecurity at Surrey University. Owned by the Chinese company ByteDance, TikTok’s success – more than 1 billion users worldwide – is combining with well-established fears about social media’s data collection practices and concerns over China’s geo-political ambitions to generate a background hum of distrust about the app.
