Tech Support: Should you delete TikTok?

Yahoo Finance's Dan Howley breaks down if users should worry about using TikTok

Video Transcript

ADAM SHAPIRO: Temperatures are rising when it comes to relations with China and the United States. And at the center of that is TikTok. Dan Howley joins us right now to explain some of the fears and the facts that people have regarding TikTok. Dan.

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DAN HOWLEY: Ooh, yeah! This is my TikTok dance! That's what all the kids do, we dance to TikTok. We're gonna get started. So let's get a little of that going. But seriously, let's go over TikTok. I'll still stay dressed as a kid. There's been a lot of hand-wringing over this app. And it's not just the usual, kids are spending too much time on their phones. It's really about whether or not this app has deep relations to China and what those relations are.

So let's go over what TikTok really is. First of all, it is owned by a Chinese company. That is true. They also have a secondary app that runs in mainland China. That's called Douyin. And that is completely separate from what TikTok has right now. ByteDance is the parent company.

They are run by a American CEO. And they are based in the US. Now, they do have some problems, though. There has been no evidence that any information that's used by TikTok or collected by TikTok has been used to spy on Americans. But they have run into legal problems. They had to pay a $5.7 million settlement to the Federal Trade Commission for violating the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act, COPPA.

Basically, what they were doing was allowing kids under 13 to sign up for the service without their parents' permission. That's a big no-no. They've also been banned by all branches of the armed services. You can't put the app on any government-issued phone. Wells Fargo banned the app on all of their employees' phones as well.

And we're seeing more of this coming down. Amazon kind of gave a stutter start to their ban. They said, yes, we're banning this. And then they pulled that back and said, no, that was an accident. Apple recently released iOS 14's beta. In it, it showed the TikTok, as well as other apps, were actually copying information from people's clipboards. That's where you copy and paste information from your phone and then paste it into something else.

The problem is, TikTok and some of those other apps were caught doing the same thing in March and said that they would change that. But obviously, with the iOS beta coming this month in July, they did not do that. So there have been some issues with TikTok. The big question though, is, is it something that you should worry about? Well, not particularly.

See, TikTok collects just as much information as other social networks like Facebook, like Twitter. And other social networks have had egregious breaches before, as well. Look at what just happened with Twitter, for instance, where they were hacked and had accounts from Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, all taken over.

Facebook famously had the Cambridge Analytica scandal where user data was used to help with the election of Donald Trump by a political consultancy firm. So it's not something that's unique to a TikTok to have these kinds of issues. Now, what does that mean? What does it mean for the average user, for yourself, for the teens out there watching? Well, it really means that what you post online stays there. So what you post should be limited to as little information about yourself as possible to ensure that that doesn't live out there forever.

Be careful about what you post. Don't post anything that you may regret in years to come. For China, really, what security experts say is that they may eventually be able to figure out what kids currently using TikTok could go into the government and then kind of blackmail them in the future. It's really kind of hard to say that that's going to be an issue for most kids.

I think the biggest is to post carefully online and just put as many dumb videos of yourself dancing as possible, like I would. You know, a little [INAUDIBLE]. Mm!

ADAM SHAPIRO: Mr. Howley, Deney Terrio is calling for you, those of us old enough to remember "Dance Fever."