Extract from Cassandre Coyer’s article “Time Could Soon Run Out to Preserve TikTok Data. But E-Discovery Experts Aren’t Worried”
In recent weeks, lawmakers on both ends of the political spectrum have been criticizing the platform’s ties to China, while the Biden administration has pushed for ByteDance, TikTok’s Chinese parent company, to sell ownership of the app or potentially face a countrywide ban.
If the U.S. were to move forward with a ban, it likely would be the first time an app was permanently banned from the country. But the threat doesn’t seem to have many e-discovery professionals worried about losing the data living inside the social media platform.
For now, the extent that a potential ban of the social media platform would have on e-discovery is hard to tell, mostly because the app is relatively new in the e-discovery timeline.
“One sort of a rule of thumb in e-discovery is it takes the industry a little bit of time to catch up … the technology grows faster than our ability to track it and collect it efficiently,” explained Phil Goodin, executive vice president of the Litigation Services business unit at Integreon.
While the landscape of where corporate communications take place has drastically evolved in the past couple of years, welcoming new platforms ranging from Slack to Zoom and Google Chat, e-discovery professionals expect the amount of relevant data residing on TikTok’s servers to be fairly limited.
