June 30, 2021
In the backdrop of the Biden Administration’s decision to allow TikTok to continue operations, a report released by CNBC reveals that TikTok’s Chinese parent company ByteDance can access American user data.
So much so that one of the employees alleged that, “the boundaries between TikTok and ByteDance were so blurry as to be almost non-existent.”
In the report, several employees claim that ByteDance can easily access US user data:
“This was highlighted in a situation where an American employee working on TikTok needed to get a list of global users, including Americans, who searched for or interacted with a specific type of content — that means users who searched for a specific term or hashtag or liked a particular category of videos. This employee had to reach out to a data team in China in order to access that information. The data the employee received included users’ specific IDs, and they could pull up whatever information TikTok had about those users. This type of situation was confirmed as a common occurrence by a second employee.”
As per the report, employees reveal that the parent company firmly controls TikTok's decision-making and strategy building.
What else does the report reveal?
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