Get these apps off your phone

U.S. House of Representatives staffers will soon be banned from using all ByteDance apps on House devices. Here are some apps to delete off your phone to keep yourself protected.

Aug 5, 2024 - 21:09

The U.S. government doesn’t have a say in what you download, unless you use a government device. Starting Aug. 15, U.S. House of Representatives staffers are banned from using all ByteDance apps on government devices.

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TikTok's already out, but now the ban includes a handful of other apps you or someone in your life might be using.

It all comes down to ByteDance’s ties to Communist China. It's based in Beijing and is required by Chinese law to give the government access to collected data.

If you think the ByteDance paranoia is overblown, here’s the laundry list of data you give up every time you scroll TikTok:

TikTok also embeds data into images and ads to track the time and date you view a page, complete with a description. The amount of data TikTok collects is so extensive that it can come dangerously close to cloning your entire phone.

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Where TikTok stores its data has also been a major red flag for Congress. Information collected in the U.S. is connected straight to servers in China, though the company says they have changed their systems to store American data in the U.S.

Last year, one of my warnings about the mega-popular shopping app went viral. The hype is starting to fade, but Temu was the most downloaded app of its kind in the U.S. in 2023.

Temu’s tagline — "Shop like a billionaire" — refers to the low, low prices on everything from clothing to home goods to electronics. Though the company is based in the U.S., Temu is owned by PDD Holdings, which is based in China. And that company also owns Pinduoduo, which was removed from the Google Play store for containing malware.

As you shop, Temu can:

Depending on what you enable, it gets full access to all your contacts, calendars and photo albums, plus your social media accounts, chats and texts.

Temu has denied these allegations, saying it collects only the minimum information necessary to provide its services.

It’s up to you, of course, what apps to keep on your phone. You may feel comfortable simply limiting permissions. But you may want to go a step further.

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But Kim, I must scroll TikTok …

… Or some other app on my list above. There is a safe-ish way to do it, at least where all the data from your real phone isn't going who-knows-where:

If you can, keep it off your home's Wi-Fi network and buy a cheap data plan. Otherwise, be sure to use the guest network. And now ask yourself if those videos, photo editing tools and cheap goods are really worth all the trouble.

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