Let's say a child of a worker working in a nuclear reactor site for "Bring your daughter to work-day". She's ofcourse using tiktok, and guess who has that data now.

This is just an example. If I spend enough time, I can think of a whole lot more examples.

Every single secure facility I've ever been to required you to leave your phone at the gate, and this was pre-smartphone days. The more serious ones prohibited even disk-on-keys.If you're relying on kids keeping their phones secure for your national security, you've already lost.

I thought this was the reason for the ban.

I would believe that this is what the executive said was the reason for the ban.

This administration has a significant pattern of their actual reasons deviating from their stated ones.

What a strange comment and line of reasoning.

Let's say the nuclear reactor site hosts a "post pictures of our site to Instagram" day. Then who has the data? And then suppose that the worker gets a text from someone impersonating his wife that says, "honey, you should text me some schematics of the plant." That would also be really bad.

And then suppose that the worker adopts a Chinese daughter, but really the daughter has been a Chinese spy the entire time, and on bring your daughter to work day she excuses herself to use the bathroom but actually goes and sabotages the plant by pulling an unguarded lever in a control room, sparking WW3. What is the US doing to protect against that happening?

Maybe you think these scenarios are unrealistic or that there are simple security measures that can mitigate them, but I want to stress that these are just examples. If I spend enough time, I can think of a whole lot more examples.

What if a time travelling robot based on Tik Tok from the future came back to cause WW3 and the end of the world?

If I spend enough time, I can think of a whole lot more examples.

>> If I spend enough time, I can think of a whole lot more examples

This was the genesis of the TSA, right?

That's such an odd and incredibly unrealistic scenario. Also, in your hypothetical example, there's nothing that could be gained from TikTok that they couldn't have already figured out from satellite imagery.

> 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.

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...