> Fed government could simply order all federal employees off tiktok or any other service without legal hurdles.
They already have [0]. Federal employees, however, do have personal cell phones. There have been multiple cases of militairy information being leaked through Facebook posts [1]. Also, these people have conversations with their significant others, who also have personal cell phones. Recently, a list of PoI's leaked from a Chinese data collection company, some of which were children of people in power [2]. It is not completely unthinkable that the phone of a child is hacked and is then used to compromise the home network of an influential person, or something like that.
I'm not saying that TikTok would facilitate this, I don't know. If there's any intelligence indicating that it's a possibility I fully understand that there is a response, however.
They already have [0]. Federal employees, however, do have personal cell phones. There have been multiple cases of militairy information being leaked through Facebook posts [1]. Also, these people have conversations with their significant others, who also have personal cell phones. Recently, a list of PoI's leaked from a Chinese data collection company, some of which were children of people in power [2]. It is not completely unthinkable that the phone of a child is hacked and is then used to compromise the home network of an influential person, or something like that.
I'm not saying that TikTok would facilitate this, I don't know. If there's any intelligence indicating that it's a possibility I fully understand that there is a response, however.
0: https://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/senate-tiktok-ban-1.56767...
1: https://www.portsmouth.co.uk/news/defence-leaks-soar-mod-emp...
2: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/sep/14/zhenhua-data-f...