China urges Australia to treat all companies, including TikTok, fairly

China said Australia’s “discriminatory” ban on TikTok from all federally-owned devices harmed the interests of Australian businesses and the public and called on Canberra to treat all companies fairly, the trade department said in a statement on Friday.

“Australia treated TikTok differently from other social media platforms and introduced discriminatory restrictive measures that are not conducive to maintaining Australia’s national security,” the statement said.

China also urged Australia to create a favorable environment for bilateral economic and trade cooperation.

While there is a nationwide ban in the US, Chinese short-form video-making platform TikTok still has access to “personal data of Indian citizens” who once used the app before the Indian government banned it in June 2020 due to national security concerns. concerns as well as several other Chinese applications.

According to a Forbes report, data on Indian users “remains widely available to employees of the company and its Beijing-based parent ByteDance.”

Before the ban, TikTok had about 150 million monthly active users in the country. “I don’t think Indians are aware of how much of their data is exposed to China right now, even with the ban in place,” a current TikTok employee told Forbes.

Almost anyone at a company with basic access to its tools can search and analyze detailed information about past TikTok users in India, “including every prominent public figure to the average person.”

ByteDance has more than 110,000 employees around the world, including in China, the United States, and Russia. A spokesperson for TikTok said in a statement that they “have steadfastly complied and continue to fully comply with the Indian government’s order since its introduction.” “All user data is subject to our strict internal policies regarding access, retention, and deletion,” a company spokesperson said.

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