TikTok won’t implement end-to-end encryption within its messaging service due to the limits that E2E would place on criminal investigations, the platform said in a recent security briefing with the BBC in London.
According to the BBC, TikTok said that message encryption prevents police and safety teams from being able to investigate direct messages.
As per BBC: “It confirmed its approach in a briefing to the BBC about security at its London office — saying it wanted to protect users, especially young people, from harm. It described this stance as a deliberate decision to set itself apart from rivals.”
It’s a bold stance for the app to take. TikTok has long been under scrutiny over its connection to China’s government, as well as the potential that the app could be used as a vector to gather information on users.
And it has been used for exactly that. In 2022, the Financial Times reported that TikTok’s parent company ByteDance had been using TikTok to spy on several American journalists, whom the company believed had been in contact with ByteDance staff, in order to gain access to commercially sensitive information.
The Financial Times said that ByteDance had essentially used TikTok as a tool to track these journalists’ movements, and then correlated that data with tracking information on its own employees, in order to determine who could have leaked the info.
That’s perhaps not as extreme as reading someone’s DMs, but even so, it’s an example of how TikTok has already been used by its China-based parent company to gather data on users. The app could potentially be used to track down political targets in the same way.
The risk that TikTok poses in this respect was a key element in the U.S. government’s decision to force the app into local ownership, in order to sever its ties with its China-based owners.
China-owned companies are required by that country’s cybersecurity regulations to share data with its government on request.
But it goes further than that. Various cybersecurity reports have also regularly highlighted the threat posed by China-backed operatives, which seek to exploit system vulnerabilities, however they can. China-based groups seek to infiltrate U.S. social media platforms by creating profiles and promoting pro-China messaging.
Some of these are detected and removed, but the scale of such operations is significant. Google, for example, terminated more than 7,700 YouTube channels linked to coordinated influence operations run by China-based state actors in a single quarter last year.
In this context, the idea that TikTok could be used as a spying and propaganda tool seems to be well within logical reason, which is why the company’s stance on encryption could be a risky bet.
However, TikTok’s views align with the perspective of many officials, who believe that encryption protects criminals and hides their activity from view.
That’s been a major focus in the U.K., in particular, with government officials there repeatedly calling on Meta to reconsider its plans for expanded messaging encryption, as reported by The Guardian. Those calls have come in part because of the potential limitations encryption could impose on police attempting to investigate and prevent child abuse.
That, again, makes TikTok’s stance significant. And while this attitude could help enhance TikTok’s relationship with local MPs, which is likely the real aim of this announcement, it may not do much to improve general trust in the app.
