Chinese apps remain hugely popular in the U.S. despite efforts to ban TikTok

Published

2 years ago

May 29, 2023

admin

TikTok Chief Executive Shou Zi Chew is pictured on the day he will testify before a House Energy and Commerce Committee hearing entitled “TikTok: How Congress can Safeguard American Data Privacy and Protect Children from Online Harms,” as lawmakers scrutinize the Chinese-owned video-sharing app, on Capitol Hill in Washington, U.S., March 23, 2023.

Evelyn Hockstein | Reuters

For several years now, ByteDance’s TikTok has been the focus of lawmakers and intelligence officials who fear it could be used to spy on Americans. Those concerns took center stage during a five-hour grilling of TikTok’s CEO back in March.

But while TikTok has been the one in the spotlight, other Chinese apps that present similar issues are also experiencing massive popularity in the U.S.

Concerns about ByteDance stem in large part from a national security law that gives the Chinese government power to access broad swaths of business information if it claims to be for a national security purpose. U.S. intelligence officials and lawmakers fear that the Chinese government could effectively access any information that China-based app companies have collected from American users, from email addresses to user interests to driver’s licenses.

But that doesn’t seem to have swayed many consumers, as several China-based apps are still booming in the U.S.

For example, the shopping app Temu, owned by China-based PDD Holdings, has the number two spot on the Apple App Store among free apps as of late May. It also held the number 12 spot among digital retailers in the 2022 holiday season for unique visitors to its site, topping stores like Kohl’s, Wayfair and Nordstrom, according to Insider Intelligence, which also credits visibility on TikTok for its rise.

Meanwhile, ByteDance-owned apps CapCut and TikTok hold the fourth and fifth spots on the App Store rankings. Chinese fast fashion brand Shein holds fourteenth.

And between late March and early April, after the TikTok CEO hearing before Congress, ByteDance’s Lemon8, saw nearly 1 million downloads in the U.S., Insider Intelligence reported based on data from Apptopia. It’s an app with similarities to Pinterest and Meta’s Instagram.

These apps share some of the features that have worried the U.S. government about TikTok, including about whether some of these firms adequately protect U.S. user data when operating out of China (TikTok has stressed that U.S. user information is only stored on servers outside of China). Like TikTok, these apps collect user information, can analyze trends in their interests and use algorithms to target consumers with products or information that is likely to keep them engaged with the service.

But experts on China and social media say there are important differences between these apps and TikTok which might explain the relative lack of attention on them. Among the most important of those features is the scale of their presence in the U.S.

TikTok vs. other Chinese apps

In just 17 days after launch, Temu surpassed Instagram, WhatsApp, Snapchat and Shein on the Apple App Store in the U.S., according to Apptopia data shared with CNBC.

Stefani Reynolds | Afp | Getty Images

Even as they grow, the U.S. userbase of many popular Chinese apps is still dwarfed by TikTok’s massive U.S. audience of 150 million monthly active users.

TikTok sister app Lemon8, for instance, has an estimated 1.8 million monthly active users in the U.S., according to Apptopia.

While TikTok has had 415 million downloads in the U.S. since its launch here, CapCut has had 99 million, Temu 67 million and Lemon8 1.2 million, according to Apptopia.

Only Shein surpasses TikTok in downloads among this group of apps, though it launched far earlier in the U.S. in 2014. Shein’s app has 855 million downloads in the U.S. since its debut, though Apptopia estimates it has about 22 million monthly active users.

“An app with a thousand, or even a million users in the U.S. does not present the same widespread cybersecurity threat that an app with 100 million users has,” said Lindsay Gorman, senior fellow for emerging technologies at the German Marshall Fund’s Alliance for Securing Democracy.

Gorman said as the U.S. considers the threat posed by TikTok, it will also need to develop a framework for how to evaluate the relative risk of Chinese apps. The scale should be one factor, she said, and the type of app, including its ability to spread propaganda, should be another.

“The ability for a Chinese technology platform to represent critical information infrastructure in a democracy has to be part of that calculus when assessing risk,” Gorman said. “That’s where I think the analogies with power grids or energy infrastructure are applicable. We we would not allow the authoritarian regime to build significant components of our energy infrastructure and rely on an authoritarian regime for that.”

That means that an app like ByteDance’s CapCut may present a lower risk, both because of its smaller user base and because it’s meant to edit videos, rather than distribute them.

“We’re really at the beginning stages of even recognizing that a broader characterization and categorization is actually needed,” Gorman said, adding that rather than playing whack-a-mole with Chinese technology that poses a threat to U.S. national security, the country should develop a more systematic framework.

But in the meantime, U.S. consumers continue to turn to Chinese apps.

“Among the most downloaded apps consistently are Chinese-based ones like Temu and CapCut,” said Jasmine Enberg, principal analyst covering social media at Insider Intelligence. “And then of course, there’s the early growth of Lemon8, which suggests that the appetite for Chinese apps in the U.S. is still growing.”

For e-commerce apps, the risk of spreading harmful misinformation may not be as high as on a social media service. An e-commerce platform like Temu or Shein is likely a less viable platform to spread propaganda than a video app like TikTok.

“People just aren’t really spending the same amount of time on commerce apps and they’re not exposed necessarily to the same kind of content that could potentially have a negative impact on young people,” Enberg said. “I also don’t necessarily think that the connection to China for some of these apps is as clear to the average consumer and I also don’t think that consumers are really going around thinking about where the apps that they’re using originate from.”

Still, the U.S. could find a reason for concern. A recent CNN report that found Temu sister company Pinduoduo, a shopping app popular in China, contained malware. The parent company of both apps, PDD Holdings, did not respond to a request for comment. Research staff at the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission pointed to that report in assessing Temu’s data risks, though an analyst recently told CNBC that Temu has not been as “aggressive” in requesting access to consumers’ data as Pinduoduo.

At least one group has viewed the pressure on TikTok as an optimal time to raise concerns with another Chinese company popular in the U.S.: Shein. The group Shut Down Shein, which is a “coalition of individuals, American brands and human rights organizations,” according to executive director Chapin Fay, launched the day that TikTok’s CEO was hauled before Congress.

Customers hold shopping bags outside the Shein Tokyo showroom in Tokyo on Nov. 13, 2022. Reuters reports the fast fashion retailer is targeting a U.S. IPO in the second half of 2023.

Noriko Hayashi | Bloomberg | Getty Images

“We were sort of agnostic on the timing, but we wanted to make sure that while people are talking about TikTok, there’s this other nefarious actor, Shein, who’s also collecting data and doing it all under the radar and also doing these other even worse things like slave labor,” said Fay, managing director of Actum consulting firm.

The group specifically takes issue with Shein’s alleged use of forced labor, as Bloomberg reported last year that tests revealed that cotton in clothes shipped to the U.S. were linked to a region in China where the U.S. government has said forced labor is deployed. China has denied the use of forced labor.

Shut Down Shein also rails against the company’s alleged use of an import loophole to avoid tariffs. Through the de minimis trade tax exemption, the group says, individual customers become the importer of their fast fashion goods, a practice that came up at a recent hearing by the House Select Committee on Strategic Competition between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party.

A Shein spokesperson said in a statement that it “complies with the domestic tax legislations of the countries in which it operates.” The spokesperson also said that Shein has “zero tolerance for forced labor,” takes seriously visibility across its supply chain and requires suppliers to follow a “strict code of conduct.”

Fay said it’s important to recognize that the way Shein has been able to grow its brand and gain new customers, in large part via so-called influencer hauls, is through TikTok.

Fear of a ‘slippery slope’ ban

Faced with national security worries over TikTok, lawmakers have considered several proposals that could lead to a ban. But critics fear some proposed solutions could create a slippery slope of unintended consequences. And some say the most effective long-term solution for curbing the use of Chinese apps may be fostering an environment for robust alternatives to grow.

Perhaps the most prominent of the bills that could lead to TikTok’s ban in the U.S., the RESTRICT Act, would give the Commerce Secretary the power to recommend barring technology that comes from a select group of foreign adversary countries if they determine the risks cannot be sufficiently mitigated otherwise.

Though the proposal quickly garnered serious attention for its heavy-hitting group of sponsors, including Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Mark Warner, D-Va., and Commerce subcommittee on communications ranking member John Thune, R-S.D., it’s since appeared to lose the early momentum. That’s due in part to concerns raised by the tech industry and others that the bill could give the executive branch broad power to seek a ban on certain technology.

Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA)

Drew Angerer | Getty Images

“While I understand that Americans enjoy the convenience of Chinese e-commerce and the creative tools of many Chinese communications apps, we have to reckon with the fact that these companies ultimately are beholden to the demands of the Chinese government,” Warner said in a statement. “We’ve had an important and overdue conversation about the predatory and invasive practices of U.S. tech firms in recent years; those same concerns are valid with the growing sway of these foreign apps – and then exacerbated by the manner in which these PRC-based companies serve as instruments of PRC power.”

One of those critics of the bill’s current scope is Andy Yen, CEO of Proton, which makes an encrypted email service and VPN. While Yen believes that TikTok should be banned in the U.S., he fears the RESTRICT Act is currently too broad to effectively do so without additional consequences.

In a recent blog post, Yen argued that the bill would give the Commerce Secretary overly-broad power to designate additional governments as foreign adversaries and feared that ambiguous language in the bill could be used to penalize individuals who use VPNs to access apps that are banned in the U.S.

In the post, Yen suggested these issues could be resolved with changes to the bill’s language to make it more targeted and limited in scope.

Speaking on the “Pivot” podcast recently, Warner stressed the need for a rules-based approach that could be legally upheld to deal with tech from foreign adversaries. He said he believes criticism of the bill, including that it would target individual VPN users or that U.S. companies that do business in China could be swept up in enforcement action, is not valid, though he said he is open to amending the bill to make that more clear.

“There is a very legitimate national security concern here,” Yen said. “So I think it is something that regulators do need to tackle and this is why Congress is trying do something. But I think we need to do it in a way that doesn’t undermine the values of freedom and democracy that make America different from China.”

Still, a TikTok ban would have other effects in the U.S., like yielding more market share to existing tech giants in the U.S. like Meta’s Facebook and Instagram. Proton has been an active proponent of antitrust reform to create what some companies see as a more level playing field for tech developers in the U.S.

Yen said the solution to creating more competitive digital markets in the U.S. is not to allow risky Chinese companies to run rampant, but rather “to have a level playing field that can allow other American companies or European companies to compete in the U.S. fairly.”

That’s a goal shared by Jonathan Ward, an expert on China who founded the Atlas Organization consulting firm.

“The best way that we can do this is to create alternatives,” Ward said. “Because even if these companies don’t take root in our own market, even if we’re able to successfully deny them access here, as we did with Huawei, they can flourish in other parts of the world,” he added, referring to the Chinese telecom company that’s been placed on a U.S. entity list over national security concerns.

“We’re also going to have to stand up American and free world alternatives to these companies because you can’t let them take over industries that matter or create apps that become integral to the fabric of our societies,” Ward said. “And that’s going to require an effort that goes beyond the Congress and into the sort of entire system of democracies worldwide.”

Subscribe to CNBC on YouTube.

WATCH: Montana’s TikTok ban is a ‘clear violation’ of the First Amendment, says NetChoice VP Carl Szabo

Technology

Chinese medical devices are in health systems across U.S., and the government and hospitals are worried

Published

12 hours ago

February 23, 2025

admin

Chinese medical devices are in health systems across U.S., and the government and hospitals are worried

A popular medical monitor is the latest device produced in China to receive scrutiny for its potential cyber risks.  However, it is not the only health device we should be concerned about. Experts say the proliferation of Chinese health-care devices in the U.S. medical system is a cause for concern across the entire ecosystem.

The Contec CMS8000 is a popular medical monitor that tracks a patient’s vital signs.  The device tracks electrocardiograms, heart rate, blood oxygen saturation, non-invasive blood pressure, temperature, and respiration rate.  In recent months, the FDA and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) both warned about a “backdoor” in the device, an “easy-to-exploit vulnerability that could allow a bad actor to alter its configuration.”  

CISA’s research team described “anomalous network traffic” and the backdoor “allowing the device to download and execute unverified remote files” to an IP address not associated with a medical device manufacturer or medical facility but a third-party university — “highly unusual characteristics” that go against generally accepted practices, “especially for medical devices.”

“When the function is executed, files on the device are forcibly overwritten, preventing the end customer—such as a hospital—from maintaining awareness of what software is running on the device,” CISA wrote.

The warnings says such configuration alteration could lead to, for instance, the monitor saying that a patient’s kidneys are malfunctioning or breathing failing, and that could cause medical staff to administer unneeded remedies that could be harmful.

The Contec’s vulnerability doesn’t surprise medical and IT experts who have warned for years that medical device security is too lax.

Hospitals are worried about cyber risks

“This is a huge gap that is about to explode,” said Christopher Kaufman, a business professor at Westcliff University in Irvine, California, who specializes in IT and disruptive technologies, specifically referring to the security gap in many medical devices.

The American Hospital Association, which represents over 5,000 hospitals and clinics in the U.S., agrees. It views the proliferation of Chinese medical devices as a serious threat to the system.

As for the Contec monitors specifically, the AHA says the problem urgently needs to be addressed.

“We have to put this at the top of the list for the potential for patient harm; we have to patch before they hack,” said John Riggi, national advisor for cybersecurity and risk for the American Hospital Association.  Riggi also served in FBI counterterrorism roles before joining the AHA. 

CISA reports that no software patch is available to help mitigate this risk, but in its advisory said the government is currently working with Contec.

Contec, headquartered in Qinhuangdao, China,  did not return a request for comment.

One of the problems is that it is unknown how many monitors there are in the U.S.

“We don’t know because of the sheer volume of equipment in hospitals. We speculate there are, conservatively, thousands of these monitors; this is a very critical vulnerability,” Riggi said, adding that Chinese access to the devices can pose strategic, technical, and supply chain risks.

In the short-term, the FDA advised medical systems and patients to make sure the devices are only running locally or to disable any remote monitoring; or if remote monitoring is the only option, to stop using the device if an alternative is available. The FDA said that to date it is not aware of any cybersecurity incidents, injuries, or deaths related to the vulnerability.

The American Hospital Association has also told its members that until a patch is available, hospitals should make sure the monitor no longer has access to the internet, and is segmented from the rest of the network.

Riggi said the while the Contec monitors are a prime example of what we don’t often consider among health care risk, it extends to a range of medical equipment produced overseas. Cash-strapped U.S. hospitals, he explained, often buy medical devices from China, a country with a history of installing destructive malware inside critical infrastructure in the U.S.  Low-cost equipment buys the Chinese potential access to a trove of American medical information that can be repurposed and aggregated for all sorts of purposes. Riggs says data is often transmitted to China with the stated purpose of monitoring a device’s performance, but little else is known about what happens to the data beyond that.

Riggi says individuals aren’t at acute medical risk as much as the information being collected and aggregated for repurposing and putting the larger medical system at risk. Still, he points out that, at least theoretically, is can’t be ruled out that prominent Americans with medical devices could be targeted for disruption.

“When we talk to hospitals,  CEOS are surprised, they had no idea about the dangers of these devices, so we are helping them understand.  The question for government is how to incentivize domestic production, away from overseas,”  Riggi said.

Chinese data collection on Americans

The Contec warning is similar at a general level to TikTok, DeepSeek, TP-Link routers, and other devices and technology from China that the U.S. government says are collecting data on Americans. “And that is all I need to hear in deciding whether to buy medical devices from China,” Riggi said.

Aras Nazarovas, an information security researcher at Cybernews, agrees that the CISA threat raises serious issues that need to be addressed.

“We have a lot to fear,” Nazarovas said. Medical devices, like the Contec CMS8000, often have access to highly sensitive patient data and are directly connected to life-saving functions.  Nazarovas says that when the devices are poorly defended, they become easy prey for hackers who can manipulate the displayed data, alter vital settings, or disable the device completely.

“In some cases, these devices are so poorly protected that attackers can gain remote access and change how the device operates without the hospital or patients ever knowing,” Nazarovas said.

The consequences of the Contec vulnerability and vulnerabilities in an array of Chinese-made medical devices could easily be life-threatening.

“Imagine a patient monitor that stops alerting doctors to a drop in a patient’s heart rate or sends incorrect readings, leading to a delayed or wrong diagnosis,” Nazarovas said. In the case of the Contec CMS8000, and Epsimed MN-120 (a different brand name for the same tech), warning from the government, these devices were configured to allow remote code execution by the remote server.

“This functionality can be used as an entry point into the hospital’s network,” Nazarovas said, leading to patient danger.

More hospitals and clinics are paying attention. Bartlett Regional Hospital in Juneau, Alaska, does not use the Contec monitors but is always looking for risks. “Regular monitoring is critical as the risk of cybersecurity attacks on hospitals continues to increase,” says Erin Hardin, a spokeswoman for Bartlett.

However, regular monitoring may not be enough as long as devices are made with poor security.

Potentially making matters worse, Kaufman says, is that the Department of Government Efficiency is hollowing out departments in charge of safeguarding such devices. According to the Associated Press, many of the recent layoffs at the FDA are employees who review the safety of medical devices.

Kaufman laments the likely lack of government supervision on what is already, he says, a loosely regulated industry. A U.S. Government Accountability Office report as of January 2022, indicated that 53% of connected medical devices and other Internet of Things devices in hospitals had known critical vulnerabilities. He says the problem has only gotten worse since then. “I’m not sure what is going to be left running these agencies,” Kaufman said.

“Medical device issues are widespread and have been known for some time now,” said Silas Cutler, principal security researcher at medical data company Censys. “The reality is that the consequences can be dire – and even deadly. While high-profile individuals are at heightened risk, the most impacted are going to be the hospital systems themselves, with cascading effects on everyday patients.”

Technology

Substack boosts video capabilities amid potential TikTok ban

Published

14 hours ago

February 23, 2025

admin

Substack boosts video capabilities amid potential TikTok ban

Rafael Henrique | SOPA Images | AP

After posting almost 200 videos, amassing hundreds of thousands of followers and racking up millions of views, Carla Lalli Music is quitting YouTube. Substack is her new focus.

Music is a cookbook author and food content creator, and she is shifting her focus to Substack, a subscription platform that lets creators charge users subscriptions for access to their content. Music told CNBC she came to that decision after earning more in one year of using Substack, nearly $200,000 in revenue, than she did by posting videos on YouTube since 2021.

Music is the exact kind of content creator that Substack is trying to lure to its platform as TikTok’s future in the U.S. remains in limbo.

San Francisco-based Substack launched in 2017 as a tool for newsletter writers to charge readers a monthly fee to read their content. The platform allows creators to connect to their followers directly without having to navigate algorithmic models that control when their content is shown, as is the case on TikTok, Google’s YouTube and other social platforms. Substack has raised about $100 million, most recently at a post-money valuation of more than $650 million, the company told CNBC.

This year, Substack has broadened its focus beyond newsletters, and on Thursday, it announced that creators can now post video content directly through the Substack app and monetize these videos.

“There’s going to be a world of people who are much more focused on videos,” Substack Co-founder Hamish McKenzie told CNBC. “That is a huge world that Substack is only starting to penetrate.”

Substack began this push after the social media landscape was thrown into flux as a result of the effective ban of TikTok in January that caused the popular Chinese-owned service to go offline for a few hours. TikTok was also removed from Apple and Google’s app stores for nearly a month.

The disruption to TikTok in January happened as a result of a law signed by former President Joe Biden to force a sale of the Chinese-owned app or have it effectively banned in the U.S. On his first day in office, President Donald Trump signed an executive order extending TikTok’s ability to operate in the U.S., but that order expires on April 5.

Days after TikTok went offline, Substack launched a $20 million fund to court creators to its platform.

“If TikTok gets banned for political reasons, there’s nothing to do with the work you’ve done, but it really affects your life,” McKenzie said. “The only and surefire guard against that is if you don’t place your audience in the hands of some other volatile system who doesn’t care about what happens to your livelihood.”

Moving beyond newsletters

McKenzie says that they are going after creators on competing social media platforms to start sharing their video content on Substack.

“Video-first creators, people who are mobile oriented, there’s a whole lot of new possibility waiting to be unlocked once they meet this model in the right place,” McKenzie said.

Already, Substack has more than 4 million paid subscriptions with over 50,000 creators who make money on the platform, the company said. Substack says that 82% of its top 250 revenue-generating creators have already integrated audio or video into their content, reflecting a growing emphasis on multimedia content.

Prior to the video announcements, Substack allowed creators to post videos on the app to Notes, which is the platform’s front-facing feed format. But the feature did not allow creators to publish video content behind Substack’s paywalls.

The update enables creators to put video content behind a paywall and it provides data on estimated revenue impact. It also allows them to track viewership and new subscribers.

Carla Lalli Music is a cookbook writer and food creator.

Carla Lalli Music

The push by Substack into video is a welcomed development for creators like Music, who was losing money from making videos for YouTube.

Music said each video costs her $3,500 to produce despite filming at home. If she published four videos a month on YouTube, she’d earn about $4,000 in revenue. Music was losing about $10,000 a month, she said.

“It’s really depressing to operate at a loss,” said Music.

Even with brand deals, which is an agreement where brands pay creators to post content that promotes their products, the earnings were barely enough to recoup the costs of posting on YouTube, Music said.

More than half of the $290 billion creator economy comes from direct-to-fan value. That includes ticket sales, courses, livestreams and paid memberships, according to a survey conducted by Patreon, a Substack competitor.

With her shift to Substack, Music said she’s now focused on writing another book, posting recipes behind the platform’s paywall and sprinkling in occasional videos.

“I have a lot more to benefit from focused attention on a smaller group of people than I ever did on throwing stuff and seeing what was going to stick with billions of potential audience members,” Music said. “It’s more sustainable.”

WATCH: Our base case for TikTok is that it gets banned in the U.S.: Lead Edge Capital’s Mitchell Green

Technology

Anne Wojcicki has a new offer to take 23andMe private, this time for $74.7 million

Published

2 days ago

February 21, 2025

admin

Anne Wojcicki has a new offer to take 23andMe private, this time for .7 million

Anne Wojcicki attends the WSJ Magazine Style & Tech Dinner in Atherton, California, on March 15, 2023.

Kelly Sullivan | Getty Images Entertainment | Getty Images

23andMe CEO Anne Wojcicki and New Mountain Capital have submitted a proposal to take the embattled genetic testing company private, according to a Friday filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

Wojcicki and New Mountain have offered to acquire all of 23andMe’s outstanding shares in cash for $2.53 per share, or an equity value of approximately $74.7 million. The company’s stock closed at $2.42 on Friday with a market cap of about $65 million.

The offer comes after a turbulent year for 23andMe, with the stock losing more than 80% of its value in 2024. In January, the company announced plans to explore strategic alternatives, which could include a sale of the company or its assets, a restructuring or a business combination.