Here’s what TikTok executives told Congress and all of America:
In January of this year [2024] and March 2023, TikTok CEO Chew reiterated before Congress that the company is independent. He emphasized that three of ByteDance’s five board members are American (the other two are Chinese), and that the service has spent the last two years building a “firewall” that seals “protected U.S. user data from unauthorized foreign access,” referring to Project Texas. “The bottom line is this American data is stored on American soil by an American company overseen by American personnel,” he said during last year’s testimony.
Here’s one of the things that TikTok executives did to show that the company was acting in good faith to ensure that data on American users would be cordoned off behind a 12-foot-thick titanium shield and never sent to ByteDance in China (“Some ex-TikTok employees say the social media service worked closely with its China-based parent despite claims of independence,” Fortune, April 15, 2024):
Evan Turner, who worked at TikTok as a senior data scientist from April to September in 2022, said TikTok concealed the involvement of its Chinese owner during his employment. When hired, Turner initially reported to a ByteDance executive in Beijing. But later that year, after the company announced a major initiative to store TikTok’s U.S. user data only in the U.S., Turner was reassigned—on paper, at least—to an American manager in Seattle, he says.
Here is the reality of the alleged Seattle-based manager:
Turner says he never met with the Seattle-based manager. Instead, Turner had weekly check-ins lasting less than seven minutes with the Beijing-based ByteDance executive. In these meetings, Turner says he merely told the executive how far along he was in completing assigned tasks—and nothing else.
Meanwhile:
Nearly every 14 days, as part of Turner’s job throughout 2022, he emailed spreadsheets filled with data for hundreds of thousands of U.S. users to ByteDance workers in Beijing. That data included names, email addresses, IP addresses, and geographic and demographic information of TikTok U.S. users, he says…. It all took place after the company had started its initiative to keep sensitive U.S. user data in the U.S., and only available to U.S. workers.
“I literally worked on a project that gave U.S. data to China,” Turner says….
TikTok’s project to stop sharing user data with ByteDance was part of an effort to fend off regulators…. As part of the $1.5 billion Project Texas, TikTok’s U.S. operation moved its U.S. user data to U.S.-based data centers, according to TikTok’s Project Texas website.
What difference does it make if TikTok has “a project to stop sharing user data with ByteDance” and has made greater use of U.S. servers if TikTok and its U.S. employees are regularly sending floods of U.S. user data to ByteDance anyway?
Clearly, in addition to all the other things TikTok has lied about, TikTok has lied about how it either has been or soon would be cordoning off data on U.S. users of TikTok. All the evidence continues to confirm that TikTok continues to cooperate with the Chinese state’s agenda of propaganda, censorship, and surveillance.
“Cybersecurity experts differ,” though, on what what the metronomically regular porting of U.S. user data to ByteDance in Beijing means.
Anton Dahbura, executive director of Johns Hopkins Information Security Institute, says: “Even though a spreadsheet is probably a very tiny percentage of all of the information that TikTok collects, it can be extremely targeted and very damaging to certain people. Everyone should be really concerned.” (Not that tiny: every 14 days, data on hundreds of thousands of U.S. users.)
But Georgia Tech cybersecurity and privacy professor Jon Lindsay, who supposedly knows something about his field, says not to worry, “Companies are companies, and big bureaucracies are big bureaucracies; they’re stupid and silly and do all kinds of crazy things….”
And Chinese Communist Parties will be Chinese Communist Parties. It’s just the way of the world. What can you do? Aside from recognizing what’s happening and taking necessary defensive action, that is?
