This will cause upheaval: The Chinese company Bytedance, owner of the TikTok platform, has always claimed that data from US users is not transmitted to China.
Former US President Donald Trump had forced Bytedance to maintain TikTok data on US servers.
The leaked TikTok 80 internal meeting audio files, however, show that US user data could be accessed from China. Thus, the concerns of the US security authorities were probably not unfounded.
The video platform TikTok is very successful among young people. However, there have always been serious concerns about it privacy among Western governments, especially the US government. The US government under former President Donald Trump tried to ban the TikTok app in the US unless it was sold to an American company technology. There was an announcement by the US Department of Commerce, which, on the order of the US President, banned US citizens from downloading the TikTok app. The whole thing was then stopped again by US judges.
Subsequently, we heard that TikTop was bought by Oracle and Walmart. TikTok then announced that 100% of its US user traffic would be routed through Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. So TikTok started storing US user data in Oracle data centers in the US and Singapore. TikTok said its data center in Virginia has physical and logical security controls, such as secure points access, firewalls and intrusion detection technologies. The Singapore data center serves as backup data storage for our US users, the company said.
But Buzzfeed News gained access to audio files of 80 internal TikTok executive meetings. The recordings include 14 statements from nine different TikTok employees proving that engineers in China had access to U.S. data from at least September 2021 to January 2022.
"I feel like there is a backdoor in almost all of these tools that gives access to user data," said an external auditor of TikTok such as sensitive information, birthdays, phone numbers, etc.
According to leaked recordings of more than 80 TikTok internal meetings, employees of China-based ByteDance have repeatedly had access to non-public data of US TikTok users.
"Everything is visible in China," said a member of TikTok's security department, according to a Buzzfeed News article:
The files come from small group meetings with company executives and consultants but also from presentations to the entire workforce. There are screenshots along with other documents, providing a wealth of evidence that China-based officials had access to US user data.
Ultimately, all of this suggests that the company may have misled lawmakers, its users and its public.
So it seems that the former US President or his intelligence services were right in their distrust of TikTok.
The question is, when will politicians in Europe wake up?
