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A growing number of public schools and colleges in the U.S. are moving to ban TikTok—the popular Chinese-owned social media app that allows users to share short videos.

They are following the lead of the and , that are banishing the social media app because to spy on Americans.

The app is created by ByteDance, which is based in China and has .

and have banned the app from campus Wi-Fi networks. the state's university system to ban it.

Some K-12 schools have also blocked the app. Public schools in Virginia's have banned TikTok on school-issued devices and schools' Wi-Fi networks. Louisiana's state superintendent of education recommended that and on school-issued devices.

As a who specializes in , I don't believe these schools are overreacting. TikTok captures user data in a way that is .

The version of TikTok that is raising all these concerns is not available in China itself. In an effort to protect Chinese students from the harmful effects of social media, the Chinese Communist Party has issued a rule that limits the time students can spend on TikTok to . And they can view only such as science experiments and museum exhibits.

Aggressive tactics to capture and harvest user data

All for users.

But TikTok does more than the rest. Its default privacy settings allow the app to collect much more information than the app needs to actually function.

Every hour, the app accesses users' . It also used to access the service and can scan hard drives attached to any of those devices.

If a user changes privacy settings to avoid that scrutiny, the app . Other social networking apps, like Facebook, don't ask users to revise their privacy settings if they lock down their information.

How TikTok handles the data it collects from users also raises concerns. Ireland's data protection regulator, for instance, is of European citizens' data to Chinese servers and potential violations of rules protecting children's privacy.

Cybersecurity vulnerabilities

As , researchers have found with TikTok.

In 2020, cybersecurity company Check Point found that it could send users messages that looked as if they came from TikTok but actually contained malicious links. When users clicked on those links, , get access to private information, delete existing content and even post new material under that user's account.

Hackers have also taken advantage of that creates additional cybersecurity problems. For instance, a trend called the "Invisible Challenge" encouraged users to use a TikTok filter called "Invisible Body" to film themselves naked—assuring users their followers would only see a blurry image, not anything revealing.

Cybercriminals created TikTok videos that claimed they had made software that would reveal users' nude bodies by reversing the body-masking filter. But the software they encouraged users to download actually just stole people's from elsewhere on their phones, as well as files from victims' computers.

National security concerns

Many U.S. lawmakers have objected to , saying it could allow the Chinese government to monitor —including members of the military or government officials.

If the Chinese government wants information about the , it does not need to hack anything.

That's because China's to .

Technology industry observers have also raised concerns that ByteDance, the company that makes TikTok, may be .

These problems take on even more importance in the context of the Chinese government's alleged efforts to build a . China has been linked to several large-scale cyberattacks targeting federal employees and U.S. consumers. These attacks include the , 2017 attacks on the and the 2018 attack on hotel group .

Negative effects outweighing positive ones?

in some interesting, and useful, ways—such as connecting with students, building relationships, teaching about the risks of social media and delivering small, quick lessons.

But it is not clear whether those positive effects counterbalance the potential and actual harm. In addition to general concerns about , some school officials say increased TikTok use has to teachers.

Also, the app's algorithm for recommending videos to watch next has increased students' risk of . The "One Chip Challenge," which asks TikTok users to eat a single chip containing , sent and made others sick.

TikTok videos have also led students to . In response to one viral challenge, some students from schools.

With all that potential for harm and damage, it's not surprising school officials are considering a ban on TikTok.

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