Inside The Tech Cold War - BBC Click

[Music] the us's biggest rival is moving in on social media and communications and the us is pushing back hard this week we ask what is going on in china [Music] hey welcome this week we're going to bring you up to date with one of the most important parts of the technology world it's a place that is a long way away from silicon valley both geographically and culturally and it's a place that is now challenging the west's tech dominance i am of course talking about china now in chinese there is a common phrase roughly translated it means a contradiction like an unstoppable force meeting an immovable object and over the last few years we've seen this in world politics china the unstoppable force meeting the usa the immovable object this is tiananmen square in beijing when i first went to china nearly 15 years ago it was already clear that the mighty dragon was awakening and the next technology superpower was rearing its head fast forward to 2020 and chinese companies have broken into the west in a big way probably the best known of these are tick tock and huawei and they've both drawn criticism to say the least later in the program we will be looking at tick-tock but the biggest fish here is huawei it's been in uk telecoms for 20 years or so now most recently beginning to be a part of the uk's 5g network but in july the government here banned it to understand what is going on now here's a quick refresher on huawei it may look like paris but this is huawei's brand new campus in shenzhen china a huge site where employees take a train between office buildings each of which is modeled on a different european city few journalists have visited this disney world-like project very much the brainchild of roon jung faye the company's founder he's been compared to the likes of steve jobs growing his company from a small workshop to a global tech giant now employing 180 000 people huawei is currently enjoying huge success with revenues last year in excess of a hundred billion dollars but this is also a company facing some serious issues the biggest is that the us is coming for huawei in a big way look we have met the enemy and it is huawei and it is china make no doubt about that you know right now huawei through access to unlimited capital from the chinese government the communist government all of this technology guess what it's built in for cyber spying for cyber espionage because that's what the chinese do the problem is mr run was once a member of china's people's liberation army and that's raised suspicions about his links to the chinese state and whether it and huawei may have each other's backs america is adamant that huawei is a pawn of the chinese authorities in 2017 china passed the national intelligence law which says that if asked all chinese companies and citizens must help the government to assist national intelligence efforts china claims this is part of an effort to safeguard its security but the fear is that if huawei supplies any country's 5g network the chinese could exploit it in a future where our entire infrastructure our economy and our lives are run by computers talking to each other over a 5g network what would happen if someone shot that network down if you think about it the future of warfare is not necessarily going to be using traditional armies in the way that we think of like with the second world war the future of warfare is most likely going to be cyber so without firing a shot you could take a country out it's feared that the chinese state could order huawei to build secret backdoors in a 5g network these would leave the country vulnerable to a nationwide cyber attack and that could be catastrophic so what's new well in may the us government published one short piece of legislation which had a massive impact on global technology it may look quite dull but what this means is that if your company uses american tools and software to make stuff for huawei you will break us law the us will blacklist you so this stops most companies from supplying huawei for fear of angering the us for example the chips which huawei used to run its products were manufactured by companies like taiwan-based tsmc and tsmc uses some american software to help design and build the chips so under this new rule tsmc can't make chips for huawei and carry on trading with the us which means for many companies it's a choice between china and the us the way chips are produced is very reliant on some tools and techniques that are owned by a very small number of american companies and what the american government's done is basically say you can no longer use those these chinese companies can no longer use those so if they carry on using it it's going to be done illegally or they're going to have to look for alternative sources and if they find those alternative sources it starts to become much more like a black box to us because we have much less of an understanding from a security assurance point of view and that just tips you over into the point where you say well i can't be sure enough about this now so i'm going to have to not use it it's not just the uk that's facing the problem either germany france in fact almost every nation that was looking to develop 5g capacity have begun to use the cheaper more advanced huawei 5g infrastructure remember that chinese phrase america is becoming the immovable object trying to stop chinese companies in their tracks but before you start to think that this all sounds a bit unfair it is worth recalling that china has banned almost all western companies for years from the chinese market so what can be done now so the short term is the op the mobile operators as well as having the additional cost of taking huawei out of their networks they also have have no choice but to sign contracts with nokia and erickson just having two players in a major major market like that is not really a very desirable situation so the uh various governments around the world and the operators are keen to in to open in some way the opportunity for another player at least and several players potentially to become alternatives to nokia and ericsson hello and welcome to the week in tech this week the uk's court of appeal ruled that south wales police's use of facial recognition technology has been unlawful and in violation of human rights internet connection and cellular service was shut down in belarus amid protests following the contested re-election of five-term president alexander lukashenko and after 35 years in the laptop game toshiba sold its last share of dynabook and with it the company's last stake in the personal computer business google announced it plans to build the largest earthquake detection network using your phone the android earthquake alert system uses tiny accelerometers built into every smartphone and location data to act as a seismometer that can help detect quakes and tremors is this the future of photography google teams brain and research have developed an ai model to create 3d images of new and complete scenes using still photographs the model can even capture lighting changes without compromising the image and finally if you're in need of a cuddly friend without the long-term commitment maflin could be the closest thing to a real-life pet pal developed by vanguard industries mflin is a pet robot powered by ai it has sensors and uses an algorithm to map human emotions so it can learn and evolve over time china's influence on the world is truly global most major cities like here in london have a chinatown and the us is no different there are an estimated five million chinese people living in the states president trump's focus on banning tick tock has stolen most of the headlines but it's his targeting of wechat that could have an even bigger and more profound impact on u.s china relations that's because wechat that came onto the scene in 2011 has morphed into a colossus it's less of an app and more like an operating system here's chris a chinese student studying in london explaining what it is you can find out where have you we have hospitals where have the restaurant anything on it this one you can buy movie tickets this one you can book in restaurants this one you can book in hotel uh if you wanna find out the playstation i have account for business i'm selling the things on it so it's just it's kind of everything in your life is on this app yeah wechat has become so big so much a part of everyday life it's become totally essential to its more than one billion users this is winnie originally from malaysia who's lived in london for 10 years how would you describe it to you how important is it half of my life you know all people like my mom they only know how to send a message similar like what's that but which is more easy for them don't have a child i don't know my mom will cry or not your mom will cry and then it's the family connection like home feeling if i don't have this like i feel lonely tencent the owner of wechat won't say how many users it has outside of china but it's thoughts to run into the tens of millions it along with other chinese apps has caught the attention of the u.s authorities president trump has mentioned impending action on tick tock and for good reason with parent companies based in china apps like tick tock wechat and others are significant threats to personal data of american citizens tick tock is a very different beast to wechat to start with tick tock says that it doesn't actually hold any of its data inside china and it would never give that data to the chinese government many security experts though believe that it's wechat that holds a much greater security risk this is the former chief security officer for yahoo and facebook alex damos of all the chinese companies to worry about tick tock isn't even in my top ten probably right because i i find tick tock to be you know a little bit of just a symbol here uh standing in for the entire chinese industry like probably the chinese company i'd be most worried about is 10 cent because of wechat wechat is one of the most popular messaging apps in the world it is used by the entire chinese diaspora and people run companies on wechat they have incredibly sensitive communication they probably do things that could open them up to blackmail and so those are the kinds of apps i would start with before an app full of dancing teams wechat has long been criticized for censoring users in china then a canadian analytics company citizen lab looked into how wechat moderated its users outside of china so we find routinely that topics related to perennial taboo issues like tiananmen square hong kong uh falun gong anything to do with tibet or the download lima those are pretty routinely censored the people we spoke to though didn't seem to be too concerned about security issues the reason why he's uh saying that he doesn't want it in the u.s is because he thinks that some of the data from users goes to the chinese government no this is this is not the truth it's not really it is like very important to the country so maybe the country the government will control a little bit but that's i think that's a good this is a good part for us because the if there's no like government to control it you'll be something bad will happen researchers though not only found wechat censoring political content it was also censoring content related to cobit 19. we looked in particular at uh censorship around covid and found that discussions about the pandemic very early on were censored which is highly significant because of course physicians who were on the front lines who were warning about the pandemic even before it had a name uh had their communications uh censored tencent deny this and told bbc click that all content shared among international users of wechat is private data security isn't the only reason trump has decided to ban wechat it's far more political than that and to be honest it is hard to look past the fact that these tech companies have been sucked into a wider geopolitical battle between two superpowers the battle over social media and especially who owns our personal data is seen by many as the next big emerging rivalry between china and the us in march the chinese owners of internet hookup app grinder sold up for 600 million dollars they've been forced to sell by the u.s regulators over national security concerns relating to the data on the app in may chinese social media company kwai show launched an app in the us called zin which after becoming one of the most popular apps was removed from both the google play store and apple's app store after it was accused of plagiarizing videos but tick tock is now under pressure from us regulators and may be banned by the white house i set a date of around september 15th at which point it's going to be out of business in the united states but over in china social media has been evolving in a different way earlier this year before the pandemic took hold stephen beckett went to beijing to meet some of the major players in the chinese social media landscape [Music] when it comes to social media china is a world away from the west that's in part due to long-term government blocking of u.s tech giants like google and facebook and that's partially why the country has evolved its own completely distinct online ecosystem alibaba is a bit like ebay weibo was similar to twitter and wechat started live in much the same way as apps like whatsapp and facebook messenger perhaps not a surprise then that for a time china had the reputation of a copycat nation china with its huge population of over 1.3 billion people there's plenty of room for social ideas and the competition is intense so these are the head offices of kwai show they're one of the biggest social networks here they've got over 200 million active users but unless you're in china you probably haven't heard of them kwai show has made a name for itself by targeting china's relatively untapped rural population and that's a lot of people around 40 percent don't live in cities and that has led to a platform where the stars aren't necessarily what you'd expect kwai show's secret source is the options it gives streamers to make their streams pay i'm a professional musician i also give lectures via kwai show in my spare time which teach people how to play the chinese swanna i try to popularize chinese traditional music and knowledge between sales of recorded lessons and purchases of virtual gifts during live streams he says he makes around fifteen thousand pounds a month and that's after kwai show takes their 25 percent commission [Music] the kwai show's 200 million users isn't quite so impressive when you compare it to china's social titan tencent and their so-called mega app wechat and now wechat is becoming an even greater part of daily life thanks to something called mini programs wechat mini program is an app that doesn't require you to download and install there are sub-applications within the wechat ecosystem and a new tool developed by wechat mini programs allow third parties to add new features to wechat on demand it's a bit like having the entire app store already on your phone the idea is that you can pretty much do everything you could ever want on your phone without ever closing wechat so this convenience store is set up on the campus of wechat's head office and the idea is you can just walk around pick up whatever you like and then walk out the door it'll get automatically charged to your wechat [Music] account wechat relies on users handing over big chunks of their personal data and now that even includes your face [Music] these vending machines are set up to use wechat's new facial pay feature the idea is that you opt into it in the app and once you've done that you can use your face to buy anything from these machines it basically links your your face to your wechat account and your government id but is a convenience worth the possible cost to privacy in 2016 amnesty international awarded the parent company of wechat 10 cent 0 out of 100 for their privacy practices i think there's a common perception that people in china don't care about their privacy and that perception is completely false the government over the last few years has been trying to roll out its own cyber security regulations and trying to educate consumers about the dangers of data being lost or leaked wechat's privacy policy says it will provide the chinese government access to much of what you do in the app when legally required including the things you type and data like your location it's hard to deny that social apps in china have taken on a life of their own if not outpacing then going in new directions to competitors in the west the big question is whether more chinese apps can follow tiktok in going global despite the concerns around privacy and censorship or if not it could be the turn of tech companies in the west to play copycats themselves that was stephen beckett's view of china and since the explosion of tiktok in the west other apps have been springing up to try and compete and chris fox has been looking at some of the alternatives that are available [Music] if you can't get enough of short hyper-edited videos luckily there are plenty of apps that have cottoned onto the format this is trilla which i think is fair to say has taken a bit of inspiration from tiktok you can record clips with special effects and share them onto an endless scrolling feed of content trello seems to have done quite well out of all this uncertainty at the start of august it topped the app store charts on both ios and android and it's managed to attract some big-name tick-tock stars and celebrities over onto its platform including mike tyson and the magician dynamo another app offering a similar experience is byte which has also been popping in and out of the app store top download charts like tick tock it offers you creative effects for your videos although it is trailing behind trilla it's been downloaded more than a million times on google play whereas trillas had more than 10 million tick tock's biggest competition may come from instagram reels instagram's newly launched rival it has incorporated many of tick tock's core features including that endlessly scrolling feed of short videos just in the past few weeks mark zuckerberg has appeared a congressional hearing about big tech companies using their power to neutralize the competition isn't ripping off tick tock essentially doing that there is innovation everywhere and people are constantly inspired by what they see it's no longer a surprise to see a feed in a mobile social product that wasn't necessarily the case until facebook brought that to scale we brought stories to instagram in in 2016 and gave full credit to to snap for inventing that format but then evolved it from there so what is instagram bringing to the table with this format that makes it different to tick tock i think the ability to be discovered uh is is unique to reels i think on instagram historically if you had a large follower base it was easy to kind of get bigger this is now a product specifically designed to help creators find an audience now to be fair to tick-tock i think the idea that you never know what video is going to go viral or who gets discovered is exactly what draws creators to tick tock it's certainly not unique to instagram reels but i think companies are seeing that tick tock has refined a winning formula and they want a piece of the action and that's it for this week next week we're going to be looking at another hugely important topic the technology being used to fight climate change until then you can keep up with us on social media on youtube facebook instagram and twitter at bbclick thanks for watching and we'll see you soon [Music] you

Channel: BBC Click

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Keywords: click;, bbc, bbc click, news, bbc news, bbc world, wechat, tiktok, trump, xi, united nations, european union, tech, technology, science, phone, smart phone, huawei, china, usa, united states, pompeo

Id: Sk0rDsoz8mc

Length: 24min 6sec (1446 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 21 2020