National security experts are warning American companies about the risk of using Chinese servers.
Intelligence officials have warned lawmakers that the Chinese-owned app TikTok is a threat to national security, because of its ability to collect personal data. Now experts are worried about American tech companies like IBM, Dell, and HP who use servers in China to store individual or company-related data.
“To me, once you do business inside China, it’s always the threat of the insider,” Morgan Wright, a cybersecurity strategist, explained. “Because of the way they control their population…means that anything that you do over there, I would expect the government to know.”
Wright says simply having servers in China opens the door to espionage. The White House has shifted the U.S. away from buying semiconductor computer chips from China. However, there's been less attention on how businesses can or should store users’ data.