TikTok Looks to Counter Report That US User Data Was Repeatedly Accessed in China

Albert Calamug, who works on U.S. security public policy for TikTok, emphasized in a blog post Friday that all U.S. user data has been stored in its data centers in the U.S. and Singapore, adding that 100% of U.S. user traffic is now being routed to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, with the data centers being used for backup. But is some of it making its way to China, anyway? Emily Baker-White of BuzzFeed News obtained access to leaked audio from more than 80 internal TikTok meetings, and that audio contained multiple references by multiple employees stating that employees of TikTok parent ByteDance who were based in China repeatedly accessed nonpublic data about U.S. TikTok users. A spokesperson for TikTok said in a statement, "We know we're among the most scrutinized platforms from a security standpoint, and we aim to remove any doubt about the security of U.S. user data. That's why we hire experts in their fields, continually work to validate our security standards and bring in reputable, independent third parties to test our defenses." Baker-White reported that the recordings contained 14 statements from nine different TikTok employees indicating that engineers in China had access to data from U.S.-based users of the video creation platform at least during the period of September 2021 through January 2022. She added that the leaded audio ran the gamut from small group meetings with company leaders and consultants to all-hands presentations from the company’s policy team, adding that the recordings were corroborated by screenshots and other documents. BuzzFeed News would not name any of the employees whose voices were heard in the leaked audio, but Baker-White said a member of the platform’s trust and safety team said during a meeting in September 2021, “Everything is seen in China,” and, that same month, a director referred to an engineer based at ByteDance’s headquarters in Beijing as a “master admin” who “has access to everything.” Then-President Donald Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One in July 2020 that he intended to ban TikTok in the U.S., accusing the platform of sharing user data with ByteDance and with government officials in Beijing. Trump threatened to invoke emergency economic powers to prohibit U.S. contractors from working with the company. TikTok fired back, asserting that no user data was shared in China, but the Trump administration kept applying pressure. No action was taken during the remainder of his term, however. Calamug stressed in his blog post that TikTok’s data center in Virginia “includes physical and logical safety controls such as gated entry points, firewalls and intrusion detection technologies,” adding that the Singapore data center served as a backup. On the Oracle news, he wrote, “For more than one year, we've been working with Oracle on several measures as part of our commercial relationship to better safeguard our application, systems and the security of U.S. user data. We've now reached a significant milestone in that work: We've changed the default storage location of U.S. user data. Today, 100% of U.S. user traffic is being routed to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. We still use our U.S. and Singapore data centers for backup, but, as we continue our work, we expect to delete U.S. users' private data from our own data centers and fully pivot to Oracle cloud servers located in the U.S.” Calamug said TikTok is working closely with Oracle to develop data management protocols that the latter will audit and manage, and it recently established a department with U.S.-based leadership tasked solely with managing U.S. user data. He concluded, “Together, these changes will enforce additional employee protections, provide more safeguards and further minimize data transfer outside of the U.S. This is an important direction from a systems and data security standpoint, and part of our focus on preserving an interconnected experience for our global community while building a security-first culture.”

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TikTok Looks to Counter Report That US User Data Was Repeatedly Accessed in China

The video creation platform said Oracle Cloud Infrastructure is now the default storage option, with backup from data centers in the US, Singapore

David Cohen

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David Cohen