Chinese apps like ByteDance group’s CapCut and Lemon8, or e-commerce apps like Temu and Shein, continue to be hugely popular in the U.S. despite the U.S. government cracking down on TikTok over national security concerns, CNBC reports . on News.ro

While TikTok, owned by the ByteDance group, has been in the spotlight, other Chinese apps with similar problems are extremely popular in the US.

Concerns about ByteDance stem in large part from a national security law that gives the Chinese government the power to access a wide range of commercial information if it claims it is for national security purposes.

U.S. intelligence officials and lawmakers fear the Chinese government could effectively gain access to any information that Chinese app companies collect from U.S. users, from email addresses to user interests and driver’s licenses, News.ro reported.

But that doesn’t seem to have affected many consumers, as several Chinese apps are still thriving in the US.

For example, Temu, a shopping app owned by China’s PDD Holdings, ranked second in the Apple App Store among free apps at the end of May.

It also ranked 12th among digital retailers for the 2022 holiday season in unique visitors to its website, ahead of stores like Kohl’s, Wayfair and Nordstrom, according to Insider Intelligence.

At the same time, CapCut and TikTok, owned by ByteDance, occupy the fourth and fifth places in the App Store ranking.

Chinese fast fashion brand Shein ranks 14th.

And between late March and early April, after the TikTok CEO’s congressional hearing, ByteDance’s Lemon8 had nearly 1 million downloads in the U.S., according to Insider Intelligence, based on Apptopia data. It’s an app similar to Instagram and Pinterest.

These apps have some features that concern the US government about TikTok, including whether some of these firms adequately protect US users’ data when operating outside of China (TikTok has stressed that US users’ information is only stored on servers outside of China). .

Like TikTok, these apps collect information about users, may analyze trends in their interests, and use algorithms to target consumers with products or information that may interest them in the service.

But China and social media experts say there are important differences between these apps and TikTok that may explain their relative lack of attention.

Among the most important of these characteristics is the extent of their presence in the United States. While the number of popular Chinese apps in the U.S. is growing, the U.S. user base remains small compared to TikTok’s massive U.S. audience of 150 million monthly active users.

TikTok sister app Lemon8, for example, has about 1.8 million monthly active users in the US, according to Apptopia.

While TikTok has had 415 million downloads in the US since its launch here, CapCut has had 99 million, Temu 67 million and Lemon8 1.2 million, according to Apptopia.

Only Shein surpasses TikTok in terms of downloads from this group of apps, although it launched much earlier in the US in 2014.

Shein’s app has been downloaded 855 million in the US since its debut, although Apptopia estimates about 22 million monthly active users.

“A program with a thousand or even a million users in the US does not pose the same large-scale cybersecurity threat as a program with 100 million users,” said Lindsay Gorman, senior fellow for emerging technologies at the Alliance for Securing. Democracy of the German Marshall Fund.

Gorman said that as the US analyzes the threat posed by TikTok, it will also need to develop a framework to assess the relative risk of Chinese apps.

Scale should be one factor, she said, and the type of app, including its ability to spread propaganda, another.

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