According to a report by BuzzFeed News, leaked audio from more than 80 internal TikTok meetings reveals that Chinese-based workers of the popular video-sharing app routinely accessed the US customer data.
The tapes, which were taken between September 2021 and January 2022, contain 14 statements from nine TikTok personnel who gathered to discuss ‘Project Texas,’ the classified effort to prevent Chinese engineers from obtaining the data.
According to BuzzFeed News, one of the audio tapes features a TikTok director referring to a ByteDance programmer as a “Master Admin” who “has access to everything.”
Shortly after the bombshell story was published, TikTok issued its statement stating that “100% of US user traffic is being routed to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure” rather than being kept in its data centers in the United States and Singapore.
A representative for TikTok wrote in an email to DailyMail.com: ‘As we’ve openly announced, we’ve recruited world-class internal and external security experts to assist us in bolstering our data security measures.
Given the complexity of data security concerns, this is a common industry practice. In May, we established a new internal department, U.S. Data Security (USDS), whose leadership is based in the United States, to give a higher degree of attention and oversight to U.S. data security.
“The establishment of this organization is part of our continued effort and dedication to reinforce our data protection policies and practices, further secure our users, and instill trust in our systems and controls.”
The tapes obtained by BuzzFeed News and reported by Emily Baker-White center on concerns expressed by former President Donald Trump during his time in office.
Trump signed an executive order in August of 2020 that would ban TikTok and the Chinese messaging app WeChat in the United States.
The order noted that TikTok’s “data collecting threatens to give the Chinese Communist Party access to the private and confidential information of American citizens.”
The previous year, President Joe Biden rescinded Trump’s executive orders and issued a new order that rescinded the unimplemented ban on TikTok and demanded ‘an evidence-based review to address the vulnerabilities posed by internet services controlled by foreign corporations.
TikTok has acknowledged that user data access has been an issue.
In a blog post published in 2020, TikTok’s Chief Information Security Officer Roland Cloutier stated: ‘Our goal is to minimize data access between geographies so that, for instance, staff in the APAC region, including China, have extremely limited access to user data from the EU and US.’
According to BuzzFeed News, Project Texas will eventually prevent substantial volumes of user data from traveling to China, but the recordings indicate it has been difficult to identify these conduits.
During one of the sessions captured on tape, personnel discuss the flow of data between TikTok and ByteDance’s internal tools, including those used for content control and monetization.
Moreover, a number of the audio snippets demonstrate that the workers in charge of these technologies are unable to identify the gaps through which data is transmitted to China.
TikTok’s move to store data on Oracle does note that the app will continue to use its datacenters in Virginia and Singapore to back up information as it works to ‘completely pivot’ to depending on Oracle in the United States, according to a TikTok blog post.
