Ex-TikTok employees claim they were ordered to routinely send US user data to Beijing – as the company fights a blanket ban in the US

TikTok has ordered employees to send US user data to its Beijing-based parent company, according to a new investigation.

This data includes spreadsheets full of names, emails, demographics and location data, former employees claim.

According to the investigation, TikTok concealed this close contact with ByteDance as of 2022, claiming it had severed most ties with its parent company.

Although the claims span the period 2022 to 2023, the revelation comes after Congress passed a bill forcing TikTok to disconnect its US presence from ByteDance over fears it could be used as a tool of the Chinese Communist Party to surveil Americans and exercise political or social power. influence.

TikTok aggressively refuted the study’s findings, calling them “fabrications” by “disgruntled former employees.”

In response to questions about what the ex-employees claimed, a TikTok representative referred DailyMail.com to an X-thread that strongly denied the claims in the new investigation.

That thread calls the article “factually incorrect” but does not deny that TikTok sent US user data to ByteDance before 2023.

“The piece deliberately distorts timelines, omits basic facts, and relies on disgruntled former employees as its primary source,” the statement reads. X message partially.

In interviews, eleven employees claimed that TikTok’s distance from ByteDance was just for appearances, and that a secret chain of command remained in place where American employees continued to report to Chinese executives.

“I literally worked on a project that gave US data to China,” said data scientist Evan Turner Fortune. ‘They were completely complicit in that. There were Americans who worked in upper management and were completely complicit in that.”

Turner reportedly worked as a senior data scientist for TikTok from April to September 2022.

When he was hired, he reported to a ByteDance executive in Beijing. Shortly afterwards he was transferred to a US-based executive.

The shift came after TikTok started an initiative to keep US user data in the US.

But Turner claimed he never met the US boss and was told by an HR employee he would continue to report to the ByteDance director.

He had short weekly telephone conversations with the Chinese boss, during which he provided updates on the progress of his work.

During the roughly six months he worked for TikTok, Turner alleged that his work included sharing large amounts of U.S. user data with ByteDance.

Every two weeks, he sent out spreadsheets with data on TikTok users, which the company used to figure out where people were watching what types of videos and how the company should spend its promotional resources to get users to watch more videos.

It is not clear whether the Chinese government had access to this data, although the law requires any Chinese company to provide data to the government upon request.

Interviews with other former employees in the US revealed that TikTok’s internal messaging system, called Lark, was monitored by China-based ByteDance employees, including conversations about US user data.

One of these ex-employees sold Lark to external customers, but described getting “the runaround” when she tried to figure out how secure customer data would be if they used the app.

TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew testified before Congress in January this year, along with other social media executives, about companies’ failure to protect young users.

Joe Biden’s campaign joined TikTok less than a year after his administration banned federal employees from downloading the app on government devices over concerns that the Chinese government could gain access to sensitive data through backdoors

“You can never really get clear answers that are solid enough to get back to your customer, to basically let them know that this is a trustworthy platform and that their US data is safe,” says Nnete Matima, a US established company. development employee at TikTok and ByteDance.

She sold Lark to corporate clients during her tenure from July 2022 to August 2023.

“They are not so transparent that I had to lose a deal because I couldn’t answer the basic security questions that people are entitled to,” she reported.

Matima was fired in 2023, reportedly because of her performance, but she believes it was because she raised concerns about data privacy.

Interviews with other ex-employees painted a similar picture: the separation between TikTok and ByteDance was for show, and the two companies shared U.S. user information.

In 2022, TikTok started ‘Project Texas’ to keep US user data in the US, an effort to fend off regulators. But data sharing in the study reportedly occurred after these efforts began.

In the Fortune survey, cybersecurity experts disagreed on the meaning of data sharing.

Some called it “very concerning” and said the private data could expose American users and harm them.

Others say the big company was probably just slow to fully implement its procedures, sticking to “stupid, silly and crazy” procedures for momentum.

Be that as it may, the US TikTok ban has its own momentum.

The US House of Representatives voted in March to force ByteDance to sell its majority stake in TikTok to an American company or face a ban on app stores.

President Biden has stated his intention to sign this bill into law if it passes the Senate. In the meantime, he’s using it for his presidential campaign.

The ‘ban’ is not actually a ban in the strict sense of the word.

Rather, it is the threat of a ban if TikTok’s parent company ByteDance refuses to sell its majority stake to an American company.

Some critics have pointed out that the attempt to ban TikTok is as much about actual data issues as it is about data silencing the voices of people critical of Israel’s war against Gaza.

US politicians spearheading the proposed ban have confirmed this suspicion in their statements calling for a ban.

“While data security issues are of paramount importance, less often talked about is TikTok’s power to radically distort the worldview that America’s youth face. Israel’s unfolding war with Hamas is a crucial test case, Representative Josh Hawley said in a letter to US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen in November, as calls for forcing the sale revived.