“I have no illusions, we are not going to reveal everything, but the commission allows us to get a foot in the door,” reacted Senator Claude Malhuret to the announcement of the opening of a commission of inquiry on TikTok, February 9. In fact, this commission, whose work begins on March 13, will not be able to shed all the light on TikTok’s practices.
To carry out the work of this commission, 19 senators have been appointed. The president of the group Les Indépendants, Claude Malhuret will be the speaker and the socialist Mickaël Vallet, the president. The commission will open with the hearing of Marc Faddoul, an artificial intelligence researcher and algorithm specialist.
This work aims to “determine if the content that TikTok promotes changes from one country to another, if these differences in operation have the purpose or effect of serving a strategy to harm foreign TikTok users, cohesion or security of foreign states”. And finally to see “if TikTok has breached its obligations regarding the protection of personal data,” he said. the proposition opening an investigation.
But the work of the senators will run into several obstacles: the commission “has no coercive power,” the rapporteur acknowledged on February 9. Inside an interview given to JDD March 5thClaude Malhuret warned: “As senators, we do not have the means to analyze pages and pages of code that, moreover, change every day (…) I have no illusions about our ability to pierce the opacity of the algorithms.” .
set recommendations
To help senators direct their questions, they will surround themselves with researchers specializing in algorithms. And Claude Malhuret anticipates TikTok’s strategy: “it is in the answer to the questions that there is a risk of circumvention. The devil is in the details”, he specifies in the JDD.
The commission will only be able to question French people who work for the French subsidiary of TikTok. And it intends to build on recent decisions by the European Commission asking them to pass on the information that led it to ban its officials from using TikTok, suspecting the platform of data spying.
However, a commission of inquiry has several advantages: the people interviewed are required to comply with the subpoena and give their testimony under oath. In case the condition is not respected, sanctions are foreseen. It also allows controls over pieces. “Therefore, we will have the means for our objectives”, advances Claude Malhuret despite everything to the JDD.
After six months of work, the commission will make recommendations. In addition, the Delegate Minister of Digital Jean-Noël Barrot will receive Erich Andersen, general counsel of ByteDance, parent company of TikTok, on March 10. He will require “the company’s roadmap and commitments” as well as a “precise operational program” of the measures taken to protect its users’ data, the ministry said.
Source: BFM TV
