Over the past week, House of Representatives lawmakers have taken a brief pause, for example, probe on potential Silicon Valley antitrust issues, and deciding How we should all feel about the FBI’s practice of wiretapping without a warrant, in the name of rallying around a common enemy: foreign tech companies.
In the past seven days, we have seen the Trump administration consider a full prohibition of any application owned by companies based in China. Tthe White House prepared a new round of sanctions set to close any trade deal with Huawei and other Chinese telecoms companies, and TikTok is under unprecedented scrutiny for its own Chinese origins. And now, the Congressional Oversight and Reform Committee has sent two formal letters to Apple and Of Google Respective CEOs asking them to use their power to investigate where third-party application developers are storing your data.
In both letters, Stephen Lynch, chairman of the Homeland Security Subcommittee, noted that his concerns about mobile apps that are owned or operated by foreign developers, or even those that simply store the data of any American abroad, could leave the door. open to some kind of spyware. to sneak into a citizen’s device.
“At a minimum,” he wrote, the two companies “should take steps to ensure that users are aware of the potential privacy and national security risks of sharing confidential information with applications that store data in countries adverse to the United States, or whose developers they are subsidiaries of foreign companies. ”
He is right. During the past year, in particular we have seen a good handful Hacking attempts, successful or unsuccessful, stemming from hacker groups in China, Russia, and the Middle East. If Apple and Google were mandated to require a certain app developer to reveal which countries could be storing Your app data could apparently help your average app downloader judge whether a particular app is worth downloading for note taking, or if can be data offshoring with the likes of a company like Israel’s vaguely terrifying NSO Group.
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In the letter, Lynch noted that since the last time he raised the idea Apple and Google re-enter In January, none of the companies could name any “legal or regulatory limitation” that would prevent any of them from requiring developers to name the countries where their data will be stored. He closed both letters asking if they would commit to this type of mandate for their developers. And if they would make this information available to people who browse and download from their respective platforms, and they gave each of them until the end of the month to respond. Gizmodo contacted both companies for comment, but did not receive An immediate response.
Considering all domestic surveillance has been largely demonstrated to be inescapable For any American with a decent connection to their cell phone, it may be a misdirection on the part of Congress to paint “adversary countries” as the problem, rather than data collection. industry written big. If Apple and Google take these new mandates into account, it might be worth asking them how we can get an idea of privacy invasions happening closer to home.
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