An ex-TikTok worker’s claims of sharing U.S. user data with counterparts in Beijing has rattled the company as it works feverishly to avoid a ban in America.
Details of an alleged stealth chain of command inside TikTok for the U.S.-based workforce to answer to Beijing-based counterparts emerged this week and sparked outrage from the China-founded app.
TikTok hid connections with its China-based parent company Bytedance from the public, according to Evan Turner, a former senior data scientist at TikTok from April to September 2022.
Mr. Turner told Fortune that he initially reported to a Beijing-based executive for ByteDance but was later reassigned to answer to an American manager in Seattle, as concerns spread that U.S. user data was vulnerable to the Chinese Communist Party. TikTok vehemently denied the allegations in the Fortune story.
But Mr. Turner said that his reassignment was a fiction, as he never met the Seattle manager and separately sent Americans’ data to his Beijing minder.
“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,” Fortune reported this week. “That data included names, email addresses, IP addresses, and geographic and demographic information of TikTok U.S. users, he says.”
The purpose of transferring the data was to help the company learn what videos were most watched in different locations and determine how to hook users to stay active on the app, according to Mr. Turner.
U.S. policymakers are concerned about Americans’ data being accessible to businesses in China because of the country’s military-civil fusion, which forces cooperation between businesses and government.
TikTok has long denied sharing data with the Chinese government and trashed the new report as old news intended to mislead people. In a statement on X, TikTok said the Fortune article relied on fabrications and cited past information, before TikTok implemented new strategies to safeguard data.
“The piece deliberately distorts timelines, omits basic facts, and relies on disgruntled former employees as its primary sourcing,” TikTok said via its @TikTokPolicy account on Monday. “If this reporter had done any research into what actually occurs at TikTok, she would know that the scenarios laid out are not only forbidden by policy, but are also subject to controls in place that prevent data sharing.”
Fortune said it spoke with 11 former employees for its report. Following TikTok’s statement, Fortune’s reporter said in the publication’s “Term Sheet” newsletter that the TikTok employees said progress had been made toward distancing the company from China.
TikTok, however, has a history of using social media to dismiss data security concerns and then later acknowledging the legitimacy of those concerns.
One month after Mr. Turner left the company, TikTok took to social media to trash a different news outlet and claim TikTok was not monitoring U.S. users.
“TikTok does not collect precise GPS location information from U.S. users,” TikTok said in October 2022 on X.
Six months later, TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew told Congress “yes” his app had collected precise GPS location information from Americans. He said in March 2023 an older version of the app available in 2020 did collect Americans’ GPS data and could still do so if people used the old version of the app.
Financial Times reporter Cristina Criddle reported that TikTok told her ByteDance employees surveilled her personally, particularly through a TikTok account she made for her cat named “Buffy.”
The data security problems disclosed by Mr. Turner match concerns from experts closely watching the CCP.
Foundation for Defense of Democracies China Program Director Craig Singleton warned in the Threat Status special video series that ByteDance was in a dangerous position to share information with China’s government.
• Ryan Lovelace can be reached at rlovelace@washingtontimes.com.
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