TikTok’s US User Data Repeatedly Accessed In China: Report
Christian Hetrick is dot.LA's Entertainment Tech Reporter. He was formerly a business reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer and reported on New Jersey politics for the Observer and the Press of Atlantic City.
TikTok’s data on U.S. users was repeatedly accessed in China by employees of parent company ByteDance, according to a new report from BuzzFeed News that raises fresh privacy concerns about the Chinese-owned social media app.
The news outlet obtained audio recordings from more than 80 internal TikTok meetings, which revealed that engineers in China had access to U.S. data from September 2021 to at least January 2022. In some situations, U.S.-based TikTok workers had to rely on their Chinese colleagues to access American users’ data, BuzzFeed reported on Friday.
“Everything is seen in China,” a member of TikTok’s Trust and Safety department said in a September 2021 meeting, according to the report.
Culver City-based TikTok has faced scrutiny over its handling of U.S. user data due to concerns that information on Americans could fall into the hands of China’s government. Former President Donald Trump, whose administration took a particularly tough stance toward China, sought to force a sale of the hugely popular social media startup and even tried to ban TikTok from U.S. app stores.
“As we've publicly stated, we've brought in world-class internal and external security experts to help us strengthen our data security efforts,” a TikTok spokesperson said in a statement to dot.LA. “This is standard industry practice given the complexity of data security challenges.”
The spokesperson added that TikTok recently created a new department with U.S.-based leadership “to provide a greater level of focus and governance” on U.S. data security. “The creation of this organization is part of our ongoing effort and commitment to strengthen our data protection policies and protocols, further protect our users, and build confidence in our systems and controls.”
In the wake of the Buzzfeed article on Friday, TikTok announced that it had migrated all of its U.S. user traffic to servers operated by American software giant Oracle, which has long been floated as a TikTok data partner that could help assuage U.S. security concerns.
“We still use our U.S. and Singapore data centers for backup, but as we continue our work we expect to delete U.S. users' private data from our own data centers and fully pivot to Oracle cloud servers located in the U.S.,” Albert Calamug of TikTok’s U.S. Security Public Policy team wrote in a blog post.
Calamug added that TikTok would work with Oracle to develop data management protocols in an attempt to “give users even more peace of mind.”
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Christian Hetrick is dot.LA's Entertainment Tech Reporter. He was formerly a business reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer and reported on New Jersey politics for the Observer and the Press of Atlantic City.
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