Seems to me it’s only guilty of the same data scraping for marketing purposes that Meta is… maybe even less so as I always found TikToks advertising less gross than Instagrams.
Both suck but TikTok is slightly less suck.
Is it really a security thing or is it a “We are getting pressure from US companies to remove competition” thing?
Actually yes. The know for sure that socials they control are definitely national security risk for other countries, as they used them many times to incite color revolutions and generally influence said countries; so they assume tiktok is the same risk for them. Every accusation is a projection, remember.