On the 13th, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill banning "TikTok"—the Chinese short-form platform—citing national-security concerns based on personal-data leakage. It contained the requirement that TikTok's parent company, ByteDance, sell TikTok's U.S. business rights within 165 days, and that if the sale fails, the app must be pushed out so it cannot be downloaded from app stores. As this bill passed by agreement of the Democratic and Republican parties just 8 days after its introduction, along with the assessment that the U.S.-China conflict has spread online, it brought the personal-information-protection obligation from an ESG standpoint to the surface.
The TikTok ban bill contained content that, citing national-security concerns, makes illegal the distribution, maintenance, and updating of the Chinese TikTok parent company ByteDance, as well as TikTok and its subsidiary apps. The U.S. government has continuously raised concerns that the data of U.S. TikTok users could be handed over to the Chinese government, and this past May, in the U.S. state of Montana, a bill that actually fully banned TikTok downloads and uploads passed. Former President Trump had announced an executive order banning TikTok use within the U.S., and President Biden banned TikTok downloads on official communication devices.
[A TikTok banner celebrating reaching 150 million TikTok users in the U.S. ©TikTok]
According to The Wall Street Journal (WSJ), the number of TikTok users in the U.S.—which was 150 million last year—recorded 170 million this year, so the scale of TikTok users in the U.S. has grown so large that more than half of the U.S. population can be seen as using it. The reason the U.S. government is trying to intervene so much in TikTok's method of handling personal information does not consist only of the U.S.-China conflict structure. Recently, as the personal-information-protection obligation among corporate social responsibilities has drawn attention, the fact that users' personal information must be managed safely and used only for its original purpose is being emphasized.
Corporate personal-information protection—also called "data privacy"—is closely related to the ESG framework, and this TikTok bill issue is connected to the S (Society) sector among these—that is, to the content that a company, in obtaining personal information from users, must (1) seek explicit consent, (2) use it only for the specific purpose the user permitted, and (3) restrict who can access the information. The U.S. government is questioning TikTok's social responsibility, raising the suspicion that TikTok could share personal information with a third party, the Chinese government.
Korea, too, is on a trend of emphasizing personal-information protection from an ESG standpoint. The Ministry of Science and ICT required the disclosure of information-protection status (hereafter the information-disclosure system) to be made mandatory for 603 companies in 2022. The information-disclosure system refers to a disclosure system that discloses companies' information-protection status for the purpose of service users' safe internet use and the activation of information-protection investment. Last year, the government also raised the fines it imposes on companies with poor disclosure. Foreign companies such as Google and Meta also have precedents of being fined for violating information-protection statutes in the past, so they are known to have actively taken part in the information-disclosure system, which was reorganized last year.
With opinions that it violates the First Amendment, which stipulates freedom of expression, it is uncertain whether the TikTok ban bill will pass the Senate, but this measure by the U.S. House can be interpreted as a signal that TikTok is not sufficiently fulfilling corporate social responsibility. The TikTok ban bill is an opportunity to think once again about the corporate social responsibility of data privacy.
by Editor N