India’s decision to ban Chinese short-form video app TIC Toc on security concerns, and former US President Donald TrumpThe threats to do so may have been well-founded.
Although TikTok’s Chinese parent ByteDance Denied sharing user data with Chinese government, leaked audio from over 80 internal meetings of TikTok employees that were reviewed Buzzfeed News This shows that the risk of this happening remains.
While TikTok claims that its US users’ data is secure because it is stored in the US, not China, leaked conversations indicate that ByteDance employees in China have “distributed non-public data about US TikTok users”. repeatedly accessed”.
According to Buzzfeed News, in an audio clip a member of TikTok’s Trust and Security Department is heard saying: “Everything is seen in China.” In another clip, a TikTok director refers to a Beijing-based engineer as a “master admin” who “has access to everything”.
While a Tiktok executive told US Senate Last year access to her US data was strictly controlled by a US-based security team, in fact “US employees had to turn to their partners in China to determine how US user data was flowing through”. US employees did not have permission or information about how they could access the data themselves.
The risk of US users’ data falling into the hands of the Chinese government has increased since the Chinese crackdown on tech firms began last year. The primary risk is that “the government could coerce ByteDance to collect and deploy information (from TikTok) as ‘data espionage'”.
Buzzfeed News reports that China may use TikTok to harm America in an even more deadly way. The app’s “for you” algorithm, which recommends what users should watch next, can be tweaked to show videos that “influence the commercial, cultural or political behavior of Americans”. This is a very real possibility, given that social media algorithms were suspected of influencing Trump’s election in 2016.
Although TikTok’s Chinese parent ByteDance Denied sharing user data with Chinese government, leaked audio from over 80 internal meetings of TikTok employees that were reviewed Buzzfeed News This shows that the risk of this happening remains.
While TikTok claims that its US users’ data is secure because it is stored in the US, not China, leaked conversations indicate that ByteDance employees in China have “distributed non-public data about US TikTok users”. repeatedly accessed”.
According to Buzzfeed News, in an audio clip a member of TikTok’s Trust and Security Department is heard saying: “Everything is seen in China.” In another clip, a TikTok director refers to a Beijing-based engineer as a “master admin” who “has access to everything”.
While a Tiktok executive told US Senate Last year access to her US data was strictly controlled by a US-based security team, in fact “US employees had to turn to their partners in China to determine how US user data was flowing through”. US employees did not have permission or information about how they could access the data themselves.
The risk of US users’ data falling into the hands of the Chinese government has increased since the Chinese crackdown on tech firms began last year. The primary risk is that “the government could coerce ByteDance to collect and deploy information (from TikTok) as ‘data espionage'”.
Buzzfeed News reports that China may use TikTok to harm America in an even more deadly way. The app’s “for you” algorithm, which recommends what users should watch next, can be tweaked to show videos that “influence the commercial, cultural or political behavior of Americans”. This is a very real possibility, given that social media algorithms were suspected of influencing Trump’s election in 2016.