A new report claims that the user data of TikTok users in the US have been repeatedly accessed in China.
The information came from leaked recordings of internal meetings in ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok, one of the biggest social media platforms today.
As per the recordings, ByteDance employees in China have apparently repeatedly accessed data of users based in the United States.
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BuzzFeed claims they could obtain recorded materials from more than 80 meetings. Of all those recordings, they were able to get 14 statements from 9 TikTok employees saying that ByteDance engineers based in China can access the private data of US users.
Apparently, the Chinese engineers have been able to access such information from at least the September of 2021 through January.
The leaked recordings reveal that ByteDance’s behavior is worse than previously thought. Back in September 2021, a TikTok executive stated that a company engineer in China was referred to as the “Master Admin” that “has access to everything.”
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A member of TikTok’s Trust and Safety department also said that “everything is seen in China.”
Despite the allegations, TikTok’s US arm continues to appease its users by saying that their privacy is kept intact and that they’ve hired different top experts to ensure it stays that way.
Source: BuzzFeed News
will take years to sift thru a truckload of videos