It’s time for the start of the work of the Senate Committee of Inquiry on TikTok, this very popular social network of videos of Chinese origin which has made Facebook obsolete. This Wednesday, the 19 senators must meet for their first meeting. An appointment which will make it possible to appoint the president, the rapporteur and the office of this temporary structure, a prerequisite for other investigations.
The creation of this commission of inquiry had been requested by Senator Claude Malhuret, the president of the group Les Indépendants – Républiques et territories, which brings together elected members of the Horizons party, the party of former Prime Minister Edouard Philippe. In the absence of being himself on TikTok, as he reported to Public Senate, the senator can boast of having already had a foot in digital, with the co-founding of the Doctissimo site in 1999.
GDPR Compliance Concerns
Senators now have six months to work on the use of the social network, its use of data, and its influence strategy. As they explain in their motion for a resolution, the elected members of the Upper House are concerned about non-compliance by the application of the General Regulations on the Protection of Personal Data (GDPR).
The social network is the subject of two investigations launched by the Irish authority responsible for the protection of personal data. As such, the senators recall, he is “suspected of not observing the necessary confidentiality with regard to the personal data of his foreign users, or even of communicating them to third-party organizations”.
An internal report from TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, released by Forbes in December, showed that employees used data collected by TikTok to identify sources of journalists. The senators also wonder about the existence of a differentiated mode of operation between China and the rest of the world. “Seeking to increase the addictiveness of its application by spreading rowdy content abroad, the application would instead share educational content in China,” they note.
Bad winds for TikTok
The launch of the commission of inquiry comes in a very difficult context for TikTok. Two weeks ago, the European Commission, followed later by the European Parliament, asked its employees to remove the app from their work devices, citing data protection concerns. And in the United States, the White House supports a bill that would ban applications such as TikTok.
If the social network believes that it is the victim of a bad trial, its detractors are worried about the risk of the application being transformed into a spy tool given the wide range of data collected, a concrete risk since a Chinese law of 2017 intelligence requiring business cooperation.