The Chinese make about half the apps on the Apple app store. Probably more in the Android store. All of them are just as able to be spyware as TikTok is. In fact more so. The amount of Wireshark TikTok has been exposed to and will continue to be exposed to is far more than the various obscure apps you have. Half of which or known to be Chinese. A half of the remaining could be the Chinese using a straw developer in another country. Any of the for certain Chinese ones have the same obligation to share data with the government TikTok has.
If they ban TikTok and only TikTok the only differentiating factor it has verse a large number of allowed apps is the speech they've allowed. This would be congress singling out a single company for punishment over speech it has allowed others to do. IDK. Maybe TikTok would have a case in the courts.
Some say "yeah, but TikTok is a larger company more capable of doing shady processing of the data they receive on the back end." What with their algorithms! We don't know what these "smaller" companies back ends look like. If they are a state sponsored data collection their back end processing could be just as capable. Heck they could just raw dog the data sharing and give everything to the Chinese government and then their government could apply whatever sophistication is claimed TikTok has exclusive access to.
Banning TikTok because it's Chinese while China is the single largest app source in general makes no logical sense. Maybe we shouldn't have a bunch of Chinese apps on a device with a mic that's always on and always with us. Maybe there are exploits I'm not aware of that could make that dangerous. But if that's a problem let's fix that. Banning one single app that congress decided they don't like wouldn't fix that anyway.
It's like arresting someone exclusively for being at Walmart, no other details, which is not a crime, while at least half the other people at Walmart are also at Walmart.
Make it make sense!!!
Addendum: If you were to not single out a single company and actually address the fear at play you wouldn't even single out the app store. You would ban any chinese company from distributing any networked software in the US. That's what an actual law would look like instead of making a law blatantly making rules for one entity. That would be a pretty intense law, but at least it would address the fear that's being claimed, be logically consistent, and apply the same rules to everyone. The question would be if that juice is worth the squeeze. That's not something I'm trying to sell or not sell. Other people can think about that. But the absurd wackamole version is ruled out of making sense.
If anything it makes congress come off as stupid. We've got Rs and Ds on this issue. And maybe we can drop the tribalism for one second and have a cogent take away from this for once that correlates with observed reality. Maybe, congress by in large is stupid.