Sunrise host Natalie Barr takes on TikTok boss over Albanian government’s ban

Australia’s TikTok boss could not give a full guarantee that the popular app would not hand over users’ data to China, despite being pressed several times in a live TV interview.

Lee Hunter, TikTok’s general manager of operations in Australia, stood in front of Channel Seven’s Sunrise on Tuesday morning to answer questions from host Natalie Barr as the Albanian prepares to ban the Chinese app from all official devices.

The Australian ban follows in the footsteps of the US, UK and New Zealand governments, which have stated that the China-founded company poses a security risk as it could be forced by Beijing to share sensitive user data.

Barr asked Mr. Hunter if he could guarantee that this would not happen and Mr. Hunter started talking about other companies that have employees in China.

“We’re talking about you today,” Barr said sternly.

“The answer to that question is ‘No, you can’t guarantee that,’ right?” she said.

“Well the answer to that question is no, we would never give it to them,” Mr Hunter said.

Barr interjected, “But the question was, can you guarantee it, and the answer definitely has to be no.”

“The answer is no one is working harder to ensure that this would never be a possibility than we are,” Mr Hunter said.

Earlier in the exchange, Mr Hunter told Barr that ‘Australians are safe on TikTok’.

“The privacy and data security we have put in place is at the forefront of everything we do,” he said.

“We have absolutely no evidence that we pose a security risk in any form.”

He argued that the decision to ban the app on official devices was “based on politics,” not facts, and that TikTok only learned about the decision through the media after a meeting with the government was denied, despite saying that he had been asking for it for weeks.

While Barr persistently asked whether TikTok would share user data with China, Mr Hunter outlined reasons why it wouldn’t.

“For Australians, the data is held in the US and Singapore,” he said.

TikTok doesn’t work in China. We will never share information with the Chinese government.

“We are very clear on this stuff… we don’t have the data in China. We have very strict cyber security protocols.”

Mr Hunter said that if the Australian government were concerned about China’s national security laws forcing people to share sensitive information, it would apply to all companies that have employees in China.

“The same goes for banks, telecommunications companies, don’t single us out by country of origin,” he said.

Barr pointed out that TikTok is owned by Chinese company Bytedance, but Mr. Hunter insisted that’s not really the case.

“ByteDance is not a Chinese company,” he said.

“It has its origins in China, but it is 60 percent owned by institutional investors who buy some of the largest technology companies in the world.

“Twenty percent is owned by the founder and 20 percent by the staff, some of them here in Australia. We are very much set up as a global company.”

Home Secretary Clare O’Neil is expected to announce the TikTok ban on all government-issued devices on Tuesday after reviewing a security report she initiated last year.

The Victorian government will follow suit with other states and territories considering the move.

Ms O’Neil is likely to advise politicians to remove TikTok from their personal devices, although it is unclear whether this advice will apply more broadly to the ranks of government.

Australian online security company Internet 2.0 reported last July that it had cracked the source code of the app, which has been downloaded by more than 7.5 million Australians.

Internet 2.0 CEO Robert Potter accused ByteDance of hiding the unusually large number of trackers in the source code and how much of the captured data was sent back to China.

“Their source code is at odds with their public statements about how their app works,” he told the Nine network.

Potter said the Beijing-backed app uses smartphones’ calendars and contact lists and scans the device’s ID and hard drive to check all other apps installed.

TikTok also checks the device’s location at least once an hour and, according to the report, will continue to search contacts’ data even if permission is denied.

Potter said his team determined that the app on Apple smartphones was connecting to servers in China and they couldn’t say what information was being sent.

“There were significant amounts of traffic to servers in China,” he said.

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