• TikTok owner, China-based ByteDance, could be forced to turn over user data 
• This could include voter and campaign activity data ahead of the 2024 election

Joe Biden’s bizarre move to join TikTok just months after banning his staff from the social media app could allow China to spy on his presidential campaign. 

A cybersecurity expert told DailyMail.com that state-sponsored cyber attackers could potentially steal data from the president’s campaign through backdoor channels set up by its parent company. 

Biden’s campaign has not provided any details about how it plans to prevent TikTok’s parent company from exposing voter information to the Chinese government.

As of June 2023, Biden banned nearly 4 million federal government employees from installing the app on government-owned devices.

Citing data security concerns, politicians on both sides of the political aisle have supported banning the app altogether.

‘If the device used for content creation is connected to the campaign’s network, state-sponsored attackers could use the app to spy on other network traffic including private emails, online meetings, and other sensitive communications,’ John Wilson, senior threat research fellow at cybersecurity firm Fortra, told DailyMail.com.

‘The app could be recording audio, video, GPS locations, and a slew of other valuable intel,’ Wilson added.

TikTok is owned by Chinese company ByteDance, and Chinese law requires companies in the country to share user data with the government. 

US politicians have voiced fears that the Chinese government could force ByteDance to divulge loads of data that it has collected from US users. 

This was one of the main reasons the Biden administration banned the app in federal agencies, with some exceptions for law enforcement and national security purposes. It’s also the point that his political opponents are skewering him on following the Sunday announcement. 

In 2020 and 2022, the app was used to spread misinformation, a major concern in a presidential election year. 

The FBI and the Federal Communications Commission have warned that a huge range of app users’ data are vulnerable – biometric information, location data, and browsing history.

In 2022 the company admitted it had been spying on reporters through location data.

The app can also use invasive tracking measures, including harvesting users’ phone contacts; this feature seems to remain partly active even if the app is denied permission to access your contacts, as it continues to recommend users whose phone numbers are in your phone.

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Joe Biden ‘enabled’ family’s shady overseas business dealings: Hunter Biden former business associate to the House

“It is clear to me that Joe Biden was ‘the Brand’ being sold by the Biden family.”

Former Hunter Biden business associate Tony Bobulinski is set to testify behind closed doors as part of the Biden impeachment inquiry on Tuesday.

In his opening statement, Bobulinski said that he was “happy for Americans to finally hear the facts and evidence that I have been trying to outline for over four years, all backed up and supported by emails, texts, documents, records, pictures, and other evidence,” adding that these facts are “important for America’s national security.”

“I want to be crystal clear: from my direct personal experience and what I have subsequently come to learn, it is clear to me that Joe Biden was ‘the Brand’ being sold by the Biden family,” Bobulinski’s prepared opening statement read.

“His family’s foreign influence peddling operation — from China to Ukraine and elsewhere — sold out to foreign actors who were seeking to gain influence and access to Joe Biden and the United States government.”

Bobulinski wrote that Biden was “more than a participant in and beneficiary of his family’s business; he was an enabler, despite being buffered by a complex scheme to maintain plausible deniability.”

He stated that the reason the international business transactions took place was because Biden was vice president at the time.

“The Biden family business was Joe Biden, period. Other key players have made this point clear as well,” noting comments from Hunter Biden as well as Devon Archer’s testimony.

The Chinese Communist Party, through CCP-linked China Energy Company Limited (CEFC) “successfully sought to infiltrate and compromise Joe Biden and the Obama-Biden White House.”

This process, he wrote, began in the fourth quarter of 2015, and extended through when Biden left the White House in January 2017, when Trump took over the presidency.

Bobulinski said it wasn’t a “coincidence that CEFC used the Biden family’s weakest link, Hunter Biden, and the promise of large sums of money to the tune of tens of millions of dollars initially, and eventually the profits from investing billions of dollars in the United States and around the world.”

The former Hunter business associate said that Joe Biden “was aware of the CEFC transaction, enabled it and had a constitutional responsibility to the American people to shut it down before it began.”

He wrote that “alarm bells” should have been ringing in the Obama-Biden white house, and that Biden “should have been aware that his own administration had red-flagged CEFC as a tool of the Chinese Communist Party.”

Biden’s immediate family members “were enriched to the tune of tens of millions of dollars from some of our most dangerous adversaries, including the Chinese Communist Party and players from Russia, Ukraine, Romania, Kazakhstan and other foreign nations and entities.”

He wrote that in his experience, “political office holders can be held as responsible as the immediate family members who are receiving the money directly” under US corruption laws.

Joe Biden, he said, may have violated the Foreign Agents Registration Act, Anti-Corruption and Public Integrity statutes, the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, and the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act.

Bobulinski noted that agencies under Joe Biden have not contacted him regarding what he knows, including grand juries that have convened, as well as US Attorney Davis Weiss. 

He said he voluntarily walked into the Washington Field Office of the FBI on October 23, 2020, with several phones containing years of communications between himself and Biden family members and associates. While the conversation with the FBI “lasted many hours,” he was never followed up with.

Hunter Biden himself is set to submit to a closed-door deposition on February 28 in the impeachment inquiry.

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