3 Ways the CCP Uses Your Phone

Your cell phone may be a spy in your pocket, sending personal information to the Chinese government which then feeds disinformation back to you through TikTok and other social media apps, according to retired Air Force Brig. Gen. Robert Spalding.

Spalding, former chief of the China, Mongolia, Taiwan Division at the Pentagon and Senior Defense Attaché to China, served as senior director of strategic planning for the National Security Council from 2017 to 2018. He is an expert in the Chinese military threat.

“The information that’s collected about you, particularly from apps like TikTok, is just about everything that every sensor on that device [collects],” Spalding spoke with Jan Jekielek (a senior editor at The Epoch Times, and host of “American Thought Leaders.”

Spalding says that although the data is used primarily to decide which ads to display, it can also be used for other purposes, especially if collected by Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

Individuals, businesses, as well as the country, are therefore vulnerable to data surveillance and productivity loss.

Data Surveillance

Spalding says that U.S. corporates and government officials could be especially vulnerable to data monitoring.

“Say you’re a J.P. Morgan executive,” Spalding said.

“Somebody can track you and who you’re talking to. All they need to do is provide that data to an intel analyst and they can present a fairly good picture of what that person is doing. So it’s a competitive intelligence problem for business.”

Spalding stated that the threat is amplified when data is collected about elected officials and government staff.

“Who’s going to the White House today? Who are they meeting? What are they talking about? These are the things that you can gather from this [data],” Spalding said. “It’s happening every single day because I see it in my business.”

The problem shows the difficulties that open societies face. Spalding explained that while we do enjoy many free services and applications for computers, there’s a catch.

“Well, it’s not free, and the cost to the country is in this ability to leverage your data for nearly anything.”

Jekielek stated in summary that data surveillance allows someone to know us better than ourselves through our cell phones’ data collection.

Productivity loss

Statista estimates that social media users spend on average 147 minutes per day.

According to Common Sense media, American teens spent more time using social apps than they did using them in 2021. Teenagers spent an average of 8.5 hours on screen entertainment. It was 5.5 hours for tweens.

All of that adds up to a significant loss of productivity for adults and a huge misdirection of attention for young people, according to Spalding, who said that result is intentional by the Chinese government, which owns a share of  TikTok’s parent company. The app allows adults and children to watch videos for hours. It uses algorithms to predict what content will be most popular.

Spalding stated that the CCP limits the use of the app Douyin (the Chinese equivalent to TikTok), to 40 minutes per day.

“So if you ask a kid in China, ‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’ They’ll say, ‘I want to be an astronaut,'” Spalding explained that Douyin content is geared towards education.

If you ask West-educated children the same question, they will say that they want social media influencers.

“So it’s not just about taking data,” Spalding commented on TikTok being used by the Chinese government. “It’s also about reducing productivity.”

Desinformation

Spalding stated that influence is the third strategy of CCP’s information warfare. The party’s official position is that liberal democracy was a fiction invented by the American people in order to eliminate the Communist Party.

“That’s what they say in Document No. 9,” He was referring to the party communiqué that warned against Western values such as freedom of press and judicial independence, in an attempt to strengthen one-party rule.

Spalding claims that the CCP uses social networks to communicate its message to Americans. “China is trying to convince the world that it has a better system.”

“It doesn’t stop at TikTok. They’re on Twitter, they’re on Facebook. They’re on all their platforms and all of ours.”

Spalding stated that China has grown to be a significant trading partner, and that it offers much to the rest of the world. But, the relationship between its government and the United States was not benign.

“Rather than having this debate in the United States about what we call China, why don’t we just look at what the Chinese Communist Party calls America?” He stated.

“They call us an enemy. So whatever we think, we have to respect the fact that that’s what they believe.”