Are China and the US interchangeable in your view?
From a physical safety perspective, I'm unlikely to ever go to China, but I do sometimes have to fly in to or through the US. In doing so I risk being held in solidarity confinement and extradited to a another country to be tortured (see Maher Arar). Or perhaps held in some prison with no rights because it's just slightly outside the US, and again tortured depending on the daily definition of what's not actually torture. That I haven't actually done anything doesn't seem to matter very much.
Plus a large amount of my data already passes through the US, where it's collected. Because I'm not an American I'm not even afforded the little bit of privacy protection of this data. For example it's not easy to use my Canadian voip provider without the traffic being routing through the US.
The US is also a much larger threat to country's sovereignty than China is. For example they've basically forced my government to hand over Canadian bank account data unless citizens explicitly decree that they're not from the US. They've forced through ridiculous DRM and drug laws.
Are you happy to rule out transiting in Hong Kong? How confident are you that none of your immediate family will ever go to China?
I maybe should add that I'm not saying I like any of the general data collection, and I'm not saying I think the risk is high that either government will 'disappear' me/family. I just read the article expecting to read about behaviour that was beyond what other companies were doing, but I didn't see it. I'd be willing to entertain that there's more the US intelligence knows but aren't saying though.
To be clear here I’m saying I would expect a ban of company X, for any X, to include every service from X not just their main app.
I’m not entirely convinced of a compelling argument in favour of banning TikTok specifically that does not also apply to Facebook, etc - e.g FB and co have both been used to perform illegal spying on “non US citizens” in other countries, just as the US is accusing China of doing with TikTok.