Despite the repeated assurances that TikTok’s parent company, the China-based ByteDance, isn’t checking out data collected about users in the U.S., it looks like the company did.
According to recordings reviewed by BuzzFeed News, over a dozen separate statements from nine different TikTok employees showed that engineers in China had access to U.S. data from at least September 2021 through January 2022. One member of TikTok’s Trust and Safety department said, in September 2021, that “everything is seen in China,” according to BuzzFeed News. Apparently, there’s even one Beijing-based engineer who “has access to everything” — they call them a “Master Admin.”
That means some signs are now pointing to former President Donald Trump potentially being correct in his assessment of the app when he said in an August 2020 executive order that TikTok’s “data collection threatens to allow” China to “access to Americans’ personal and proprietary information.” TikTok repeatedly said it has never and would never share U.S. user data with the Chinese government.
In response to BuzzFeed News’ investigation, a TikTok spokesperson said the app is “among the most scrutinized platforms from a security standpoint” and that it plans to “remove any doubt about the security of U.S. user data.”
TikTok has already come under fire for its data collection, and this is just another step in yet another app collecting information on its users and doing whatever it pleases with it. It seems being online in 2022 is becoming more and more difficult to do while maintaining some semblance of privacy and data autonomy.
