[clashmoore]

The article mentioned the company sharing birthdates which is why I used it myself.

I'm just failing to understand why China using whatever data TikTok has on me to understand my tastes and personality is a national security issue for the United States.

The fear seems to be that China could tweak a US citizen's feed, based on their profiling, to inject Chinese propaganda?

[piva00]

> The fear seems to be that China could tweak a US citizen's feed, based on their profiling, to inject Chinese propaganda?

Yes, that's the assumption. And just to be clear, not feed you direct Chinese propaganda but drip-feed behaviour-changing content to make you more or less sensitive to some topics, and not necessarily you but maybe a different cohort they identify as being more easily manipulated. For example: teenagers or young adults (which are the majority of users on TikTok) that are still not mature enough to have developed critical thinking about what they are being fed.

It's exactly to avoid this kind of possible operation that the bells are ringing. Not necessarily because they are already exploiting it but because it's definitely a massive risk to allow such data to be vacuumed by an adversarial government.