US TikTok User Data Sipped Into China, Revealed In Leaked Meeting Record

TikTok internal meeting sound recording. leaking. (photo: pixabay doc)

JAKARA - An audio leak from more than 80 internal TikTok meetings reveals that employees of the popular China-based video-sharing app have repeatedly accessed US user data. This report appeared on BuzzFeed News.

The footage, taken from September 2021 to January 2022, includes 14 statements from nine TikTok employees who met to discuss 'Project Texas', a covert attempt to stop engineers in China from taking data.

According to BuzzFeed News, one of the audio clips is of a director at TikTok referring to the ByteDance engineer as the 'Main Admin' who 'has access to everything',

TikTok made its own announcement, shortly after the shocking report was published, which stated: '100% of US user traffic is routed to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure,' rather than being stored in its own data centers in the US and Singapore.'

A TikTok spokesperson told DailyMail.com in an email: "As we have publicly stated, we have brought in world-class internal and external security experts to help us strengthen our data security efforts."

'This is standard industry practice given the complexity of data security challenges. In May, we formed a new internal department, US Data Security (USDS), with US-based leadership, to provide a greater level of focus and governance on US data security.”

“The creation of this organization is part of our ongoing efforts and commitment to strengthen our data protection policies and protocols, better protect our users, and build trust in our systems and controls.”

Footage obtained by BuzzFeed News, and reported by Emily Baker-White, focuses on concerns echoed by former US President Donald Trump while he was in office.

In August 2020, Trump signed an executive order that would ban TikTok and the Chinese chat app WeChat in the US.

The order states that "TikTok's collection of data threatens to allow the Chinese Communist Party to access private and proprietary information of Americans."

The current US president, Joe Biden, last year revoked an executive order from Trump and issued a new executive order removing a ban that was not enforced on TikTok and calling for "evidence-based analysis to address risks" from internet applications controlled by foreign entities.

TikTok has acknowledged access to its users' data has become a problem.

In 2020, TikTok's Chief Information Security Officer, Roland Cloutier, wrote in a blog post: “Our goal is to minimize cross-regional data access so that, for example, employees in the APAC region, including China, will have very minimal access to user data from across the globe. European Union and US.”

According to BuzzFeed News, Project Texas will eventually stop the flow of large amounts of user data into China, but the record track record finding this channel is proving difficult.

During one of the meetings at the recorder, employees discussed how data moves through internal TikTok and ByteDance tools, including those used for content moderation and monetization.

Several recorders revealed the employee in charge of the tool could not find a loophole through which data was passed to China.

However, TikTok's announcement to store data at Oracle notes that the app will continue to use its own data centers in Virginia and Singapore to back up information as it serves to 'pivot completely' to rely on Oracle in the United States," TikTok shared in a post.