China’s global data security initiative is “wholly aspirational”

CORNELL UNIVERSITY MEDIA RELATIONS OFFICE

Sept. 8, 2020

 

China’s global data security initiative is “wholly aspirational”

On Tuesday, China announced a global data security initiative that aims to safeguard global data and promote more cooperation between countries in the way digital data is handled.

Sarah Kreps is a professor of government at Cornell and an expert in the intersection of international politics, technology, and national security. She says that the move is unlikely to offer a viable alternative for global data security.

Bio: https://government.cornell.edu/sarah-kreps

Kreps says:  

“China is clearly trying to allay concerns about its digital hygiene. The initiative follows a series of steps the U.S. has taken to cajole allies into disavowing Huawei, force the sale of Tiktok, and demand that a Chinese tech company sell the popular dating app Grindr, all in the name of national security. It is also implicitly an alternative to the U.S. Clean Network initiative that has assembled a coalition of countries and companies to guard against ‘authoritarian malign actors’ online. 

“The Chinese initiative purports to conduct data security in ‘an evidence-based manner,’ and maintain transparency about its information technology protocols. It sounds good in principle but is problematic and potentially evasive in practice. What evidence could they provide that would be dispositive, or confirm without a shadow of a doubt that they are not installing backdoors in their products to obtain user data? Or that they would not transfer user data to the government? The absence of evidence that they are doing just that would certainly not be evidence of its absence. It could just be evidence of their tech savvy.

“So, while trying to signal the right tone for digital governance, the initiative is wholly aspirational. It is unlikely to offer a convincing alternative to the U.S. Clean Network nor suddenly align U.S. national security interests with a Chinese-owned TikTok.”

 

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