We may be having a crisis on our hands. Literally. And it is called TikTok, a video app keeping a billion or so people glued to clips from the silly to the serious.
It began as a startup in 2017 and it is now startling the world. Why worry? Well, two reasons.
One, it is a product of China, where oversight, as the rest of the world knows it, is considered to be absent. Or if there is one, it comes with Chinese characteristics, which bother some in the West and the East to no end.
Beijing, they say, has ways to make TikTok talk. One way is to put pressure on ByteDance, the app's owner.
TikTok chief executive officer Shou Zi Chew, a Malaysia-born and Singapore-based electrical engineer, spent five hours on March 23 at an American congressional hearing in an attempt to answer accusations by the United States that his company was harvesting personal information and spying for China.
Not true, he argued, saying TikTok was not based in China and its database was in the US. The US lawmakers weren't convinced. One, Congresswoman Cathy Rodgers, didn't mince her words: "Your platform should be banned." Never was a beginning so clear about the end. The fact that by then Chew was already the CEO of ByteDance was of little help.
Two, computers, whether handheld, on the lap or the table, are about information, personal and national. Governments must consider TikTok and similar apps, whether made in the Silicon Valley or Zhongguancun, as potential excavators of data for a dirty purpose, corporate or national.
There is an argument being hawked by some analysts, especially from the West, that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has no access to apps like WhatsApp or Instagram, unlike the spy agency in Beijing. Go tell it to the mountains, we say.
Reputable scholars like John Mearsheimer will tell you how the CIA , the spy agency, turns into a regime changer from Ukraine to Uruguay, all with the help of American tech giants.
The only difference is in the US they can refuse. In China, the tech companies are not in a position to spurn Beijing's demands. It is a your-data-or-else world.
There is another significant difference. In the US, government secrets do get declassified after 10 years, with a few exceptions. There, brave media expose them regularly. This will never happen in China. Malaysia is somewhere in between.
There are two ways of handling the dangers of the clumsily-named Internet of Things, not just TikTok. One way is to go the India way: ban the apps as it did TikTok.
This is drastic. India, which has gone to war and near-wars with China many times, wants us to think that national security was uppermost in New Delhi's mind. We don't doubt that. We think geopolitics was there, too.
The second way is to manage the apps. Here, the governments need to put in place a robust oversight regime supported by well-drafted data-privacy laws.
Malaysia has a distance to go here. The app companies, too, have a role in getting rid of the trust deficit. As creative and innovative as TikTok is, it still hasn't found a way to convince the world that it is not up to some dirty byte dance. So haven't Silicon Valley darlings either.