The American House of Representatives has passed a bill ordering Bytedance, a Chinese company, to divest from TikTok or stop operating in the USA. Their involvement in the app risks national security, the critics say. But what about other apps owned by Chinese companies? Should they be banned too?
The most insidious part about Gauth? Look at the reviews. Apparently it gets the homework wrong.
Gauth, or Gauthmath as it is known in the UK and elsewhere in the world, is a tutoring app designed to help children complete their homework in maths and science. It’s currently the #2 educational app in the Apple app store, and is targeted at primary school children. Only the very youngest need parental approval to use the app. Gauth describes itself, innocently enough, as a ‘Study Companion’. Kids take a photo of a difficult problem, and Gauth solves it for them. So what?
Gauth is listed in the app store as Singapore-based, but is in fact owned by Bytedance. And like TikTok, the kids using the app are turning over far more information than they think to servers in China, where operators are subject to China’s 2017 national security laws. These rules require all companies to comply with requests to share information that may be of importance to China’s national security.
What harm could there be to a kid using an app to determine the integral of an equation? The answer has less to do with the potential harm of aiding and abetting a generation of cheaters and quitters (though that shouldn’t be underestimated – we’re in a race against China to dominate technology). A quick review of the app’s permissions reveals an entirely different vector for China’s compromising of a geopolitical rival.
The ‘data collected’ list on the app’s opening page includes innocuous items like ‘app activity’ and ‘email address’, but that list looks a lot more sinister when clicking through to the never-clicked-through-to ‘privacy policy’. This page shows that far more information is collected and, presumably, available to anyone in the Chinese Ministry of State Security who claims authority under Chinese law.
For example, the app makes use of their phone’s camera to allow users to snap pictures of tech problems and feed the image directly into Gauth’s AI engine. Harmless enough, and reasonable that the app requires access to that picture. But why the access to the entire photo library of the user? Any basic AI system can scour directories to find faces of interest, buildings of note, and details and activities that tell a tale, establishing, as it’s called in the spy biz, ‘patterns of life’. The pictures may belong to kids, but kids have parents, and parents have jobs, some of which are interesting to foreign governments.
The app also gains access to location information. The kid may not know much about algebra, but if he spends a few minutes after school each day cribbing answers for his homework while waiting for mom to wrap up her work at the Ministry of Whatever, this again flags a user as interesting. Not long ago, the UK banned TikTok from the phones of government officials for just these reasons, and the company was found to have been tracking journalists’ movements without their consent.
For someone who has not spent time working in intelligence areas, the idea that this information is of any use may seem absurd. But in the world of spooks, this data – or this metadata, as it’s called – is a prime source of insight on a rival’s activities. From a massive sea of seemingly trivial, dull and unrelated information, an AI engine can begin to link certain people to others. It can infer jobs and relationships, life developments. It can identify new players in discreet roles that may not be public.
Don’t think this kind of activity is only used by kids doing homework. The Pentagon recently discovered that one of the official apps paid for by Uncle Sam, and used for studying by members of the US military and their families, Tutor.com, is owned by the same Chinese private equity company who invested in… Bytedance. Chinese servers have data on military personnel: their families, their movements, images from their daily lives. Now this activity starts to look a lot more like spying.
The most insidious part about Gauth? Look at the reviews. Apparently it gets the homework wrong. Either way, China is getting one over us.
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