Ms. Mathyssen, I wrote a book on this called Intelligence as Democratic Statecraft. It's a great question.
There are considerable differences here. I had for years warned Canadians, when they were very concerned about surveillance by the Canadian state, that they might want to be more concerned about surveillance by private sector companies than the Canadian state. There are considerable safeguards, accountability and transparency processes in place for state surveillance that are not in place for the private sector.
In the case of TikTok, of course, we are talking about a country that not only has no safeguards for either state surveillance or private sector surveillance, but has actively, even just very recently, reinforced its laws requiring private sector companies to share data without any sort of legal or judicial authorization, simply at the behest of the government. Moreover, it has reinforced the presence of the Communist Party of China in all Chinese enterprises.
You cannot, in China, distinguish between the private sector and the public sector the way you would, for instance, in North America. To say that the risk is the same across the private sector would be a fundamental misunderstanding of the ecosystem in which private sector companies operate in China and their relationship with the Chinese regime.