On Friday, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously upheld a federal law banning TikTok unless its China-based parent company, ByteDance, sells it to a U.S. entity by January 19. The law in question is the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act (PAFACA), signed into law in April 2024. This legislation identifies countries such as China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea as "foreign adversaries" and bans apps controlled by these nations.

TikTok argued that the ban is unconstitutional and warned of its impact on free speech just before a presidential inauguration.

Northwestern University has made available two experts for commentary on this decision: Monica Haymond, an assistant professor of law at Northwestern Pritzker School of Law; and V.S. Subrahmanian, the Walter P. Murphy Professor of Computer Science at McCormick School of Engineering.

Professor Subrahmanian expressed concerns about data privacy related to apps like TikTok: “Any app on a person’s phone or tablet can potentially access a tremendous amount of data... Once an app has access to this information, it can exfiltrate this information to one or more command-and-control servers...”

He further elaborated on potential national security risks: “Any data exfiltrated by TikTok to a command-and-control server is an intelligence goldmine... These kinds of inferences can post a host of unacceptable national security risks...”

Subrahmanian also highlighted China's National Intelligence Law: “Article 7 of China’s National Intelligence Law requires ‘All organizations and citizens shall support, assist and cooperate with national intelligence efforts...’ Simply put, this suggests that ByteDance...can be forced to hand over data to ‘assist’ national intelligence efforts..."