September 4, 2022
Lisa Visentin
The Sydney Morning Herald
Sunday September 4 2022
The federal government should not rule out banning TikTok and other China-based social media companies before a formal review of their alleged data-harvesting practices has been completed, Liberal senator James Paterson says.
Home Affairs Minister Clare O'Neil has asked her department to provide a briefing by next year on a range of options to tackle TikTok and other companies with questionable data collection practices, amid growing concern that staff in China can access the personal information of Australians.
Paterson, the opposition spokesman for cybersecurity who has been raising concerns about Tiktok due to its ownership by ByteDance, a private Chinese company, said the Coalition would back "any appropriate initiatives the government proposes" following the review, but said all options including bans must be considered.
"I am concerned that prior to receiving any advice from the Department of Home Affairs, the minister has pre-emptively ruled out banning any social media apps which pose an unacceptable national security risk," Paterson said.
"It's possible that some of the privacy and cybersecurity risks with some of these apps can be successfully mitigated by regulation, but is also foreseeable that tougher measures including banning are the only satisfactory solution with others."
O'Neill, who is also the cybersecurity minister, told The Sunday Age the review was "not just about TikTok" and will look at other social media companies, such as WeChat, identifying the problem as being one stemming from technology companies "based in countries with a more authoritarian approach to the private sector".
For years TikTok had responded to privacy concerns by promising that information gathered about users in countries such as Australia was not sent back to China where its parent company, ByteDance, is based. But last month it was leaked that the app had been sharing US users' data with employees in China.
In July, in response to a letter from Paterson seeking clarity about its data practices, TikTok admitted that its staff in China had access to Australian data.
"Our security teams minimise the number of people who have access to data and limit it only to people who need that access in order to do their jobs" the company's Australian director of public policy, Brent Thomas, wrote.
"We have policies and procedures that limit internal access to Australian user data by our employees, wherever they're based, based on need."
Thomas said the company had never provided Australian user data to the Chinese government, and would not if asked to do so.
Paterson said options for cracking down on the platforms could include enhanced data security regulations, such as requiring Australian data to be stored in Australia and prohibiting access from authoritarian countries such as China. Foreign interference disclosure measures, such as requiring accounts to identify when they are associated with foreign governments, as occurs on Twitter, could also be considered, he said.
