Report reveals that Tik Tok employees residing in China access user data inside America

A recent report revealed that employees of the Chinese video application “Tik Tok” residing in China were able to frequently access user data in America.
Buzzfeed’s report was based on an audio leak of more than 80 internal TikTok meetings.
The recordings, which were monitored from September 2021 through January 2022, include 14 statements from 9 TikTok employees, who met to discuss the “Texas Project”, a secret effort to prevent engineers in China from retrieving the data.
One of the audio clips shows a manager at TikTok, referred to as an engineer at ByteDance – which owns TikTok – saying he has “access to everything”.
The leaked audio recordings contained in the Buzzfeed report reflect the concerns of former US President Donald Trump, while in office, that the Chinese Communist Party is accessing the personal and proprietary information of Americans.
In August 2020, Trump signed an executive order banning both Tik Tok and WeChat in the United States.
Commenting on the report, a TikTok spokesperson told the British newspaper, the Daily Mail: “As we have stated publicly, we have brought in world-class internal and external security experts to help us strengthen our data security efforts, and in the month of May We created a new internal department, US Data Security, under the US supervision, to provide a greater level of focus and governance on data security in the US.
A TikTok spokesperson confirmed, “The establishment of this institution forms part of our ongoing efforts and commitment to strengthening our data protection policies and protocols, increasing the protection of our users, and building trust in our systems and controls.”
TikTok has previously admitted that accessing its user data is a problem.