Technology

What is America to do about TikTok? Its quirky videos have attracted 150mn active US users. Yet US officials fear Beijing could subvert the Chinese-owned app to spy on Americans or spread propaganda. Many parents, meanwhile, worry about TikTok’s impact on teenage mental health. Talks with a US watchdog over the app’s plans to ringfence US data on American servers have foundered. CEO Shou Zi Chew’s recent appearance before lawmakers failed to assuage their concerns. The Biden Administration has issued an ultimatum to TikTok’s Chinese owners: sell the US unit — which Beijing has said it would oppose — or face a potential ban. But a ban would infuriate legions of young Americans.

The national security case against TikTok is that companies with a presence in China are obliged to hand over data if asked to assist state intelligence. TikTok’s Chinese parent ByteDance is 60 per cent owned by global investors; employees have 20 per cent. But its Chinese founder Zhang Yiming owns the rest and has control through supervoting shares, people close to ByteDance say.

Chew insists TikTok has never been asked to submit US data to Chinese officials, and never would. No evidence of mass surveillance has been presented. But cases have emerged in the past year of China-based ByteDance employees accessing American user data, including that of journalists. Security officials warn, too, that TikTok’s potent algorithm could be tweaked to sow misinformation on behalf of Beijing.

TikTok has failed to convince the Committee on Foreign Investment in the US (Cfius) that its $1.5bn “Project Texas” plan to secure US user data on Oracle servers is watertight. To resolve the ensuing US-China stand-off, a TikTok sale would be preferable to a ban. But China has added ByteDance’s algorithm to a list of restricted exports, and says it would oppose any forced TikTok spin-off.

Banning TikTok would amount to censorship of a service used by millions, and would most likely be subject to a First Amendment challenge. Beijing would see it as a further US attempt to crush its corporate success stories. And while it can be seen as mirroring China’s restrictions on Facebook, Google and Twitter, it would give cover for any foreign government to ban US tech companies on similar grounds.

The prospect of a ban might yet persuade TikTok to offer Cfius further safeguards. But the US should be seeking to resolve issues around not just the Chinese-owned app but all tech companies by putting in place a comprehensive federal framework on data privacy, for foreign and domestic businesses, in place of today’s patchwork of shifting laws. It should bar data transfer to foreign countries, and curb data brokers that harvest citizens’ personal information in industrial quantities and sell it to all comers

Though TikTok is today’s teen favourite, the other major priority of protecting teenagers from online harms would similarly be better achieved through federal safeguards applying to all social media companies. US controls fall short of those in the EU, and those set to be adopted by the UK.

Many states are already taking their own steps; Utah last month became the first to require social media firms to get parental consent for children to use apps, and to verify users are 18 or older. Similar age controls should be adopted at a federal level, along with tougher requirements on moderating and policing harmful content, and rules governing advertising to under-18s. America needs to protect its citizens, its children above all. But that means properly regulating its own companies, as well as China’s.

The makers of popular plagiarism detection software are launching a tool that also detects if essays are created using artificial intelligence chatbots, triggering a debate among universities over whether to use the new system to identify student cheating.

Turnitin, which is already used by more than 10,000 educational institutions worldwide, is launching a service on Tuesday that it said can identify AI-generated text with 98 per cent confidence. OpenAI, makers of popular ChatGPT services, has said its plagiarism detection system works only 26 per cent of the time.

“Educators told us that being able to accurately detect AI written text is their first priority right now,” said Turnitin chief executive Chris Caren. “They need to be able to detect AI with very high certainty to assess the authenticity of a student’s work and determine how to best engage with them.”

The launch has proved contentious. Some institutions, including Cambridge and other members of the Russell Group, the body that represents leading UK universities, have said they will opt-out of the new service, according to people familiar with the decision.

Universities are worried the tool may falsely accuse students of cheating, involves handing student data to a private company and prevents people from experimenting with new technologies such as generative AI.

“The concerns have been widely held,” one person familiar with its discussions said. The Russell Group declined to comment.

Those concerns have led the UCISA, the UK membership body supporting technology in education, to work with Turnitin to ensure universities had the option to opt-out of the feature temporarily.

C. Edward Watson, associate vice-president for curricular and pedagogical innovation at the American Association of Colleges and Universities, said there was also a “dubiousness” over the detection system given rapid developments in AI. “There’s a lot of disbelief that it can do the job well,” he said.

The popularity of ChatGPT, a system created by Microsoft-backed company OpenAI that can form arguments and write convincing swaths of text, has led to widespread concern that students will use the software to cheat on written assignments.

That has led to a debate among academics, higher education consultants and cognitive scientists across the world over how universities might develop new modes of assessment in response to the threat to academic integrity posed by AI.

Deborah Green, chief executive of UCISA, said she was concerned that Turnitin was launching its AI detection system with little warning to students as they prepared coursework and exams this summer.

While universities broadly welcomed the new tool they needed time to assess it, she added. “We’ve had no opportunity to test it, so we simply don’t know about what it does and doesn’t do.”

Charles Knight, assistant director at consultancy Advance HE, said lecturers were concerned that they would have no way to investigate why essays had been flagged as being written by AI.

In a single university an error rate of 1 per cent would mean hundreds of students wrongly accused of cheating, he added, with little recourse to appeal.

“It’s a black box,” he said. “We’ve got no idea what those results mean and we aren’t able to have a look at how the software came to those conclusions.”

Turnitin did not immediately respond to a request for comment to the concerns raised about the AI detection tool. But the company said in a statement about the tool’s launch that the technology had been “in development for years” and provided resources to “help the education community navigate and manage [it]”.

The top two executives at WANdisco have stepped down, as the troubled UK software company revealed an investigation into a potential fraud found the group had falsified almost $15mn in revenue last year.

WANdisco announced the departures of chief executive David Richards, who co-founded the tech company in 2005, and chief financial officer Erik Miller on Monday.

The company said these changes were “not connected to the findings to date of the independent investigation” into accounting discrepancies that began last month. But it added that appointing new leadership was “in the best interests of all stakeholders” as the company seeks to lift the suspension of its shares and achieve “long-term growth and success”.

Providing an update on the results of the probe so far, WANdisco said revenue in 2022 should have been $9.7mn, rather than the $24mn that it posted in January 2023, while bookings should have been $11.4mn rather than $127mn.

The findings by FRP Advisory, the body hired to lead the investigation, “continue to support” the view that a single senior sales employee is responsible for the “irregularities”, WANdisco said.

Richards said he was “sad to be leaving WANdisco after 18 extremely enjoyable years. I remain a passionate supporter and significant shareholder of the company.”

Ken Lever, who joined WANdisco’s board in March to chair the investigation committee supporting FRP Advisory, has been appointed executive chair, while the business will begin looking for a new chief executive.

Ijoma Maluza will replace Miller, having previously worked as chief financial officer at automation software business Blue Prism, where Lever was previously chair of an audit committee.

“[Richards and Miller] remain significant shareholders in the business and continue to believe in the long term, successful future for this company and its unique technology,” Lever said.

Richards did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Miller could not be reached for comment.

The company’s software enables large-scale migration of data to the cloud and it employs more than 180 people in Sheffield in the UK and San Ramon in California. Its customers include Google and Amazon.

WANdisco announced a string of lucrative deals with unidentified clients in 2022, causing its share price to rise 215 per cent from January 2022 until March, when shares were suspended.

In September 2016, Richards was briefly forced out of the business after a steep drop in its share price. He was reinstated a month later, causing the chair of WANdisco’s board and other directors to leave.

Earlier in March, WANdisco became the latest UK company to announce plans to list shares in the US, with plans to pursue a dual listing.

“There’s a strong message that they are not to blame [in the announcement] but this has happened in their tenure,” said George O’Connor, a technology analyst at Goodbody. “Investor confidence will have been shattered and they’ve left as part of that.”