New reports in the U.S. have raised serious questions about whether the Chinese government has access to American TikTok users’ personal data. Yet Apple and Google, which run the two largest app stores, seem unconcerned.
Leaked audio of TikTok’s internal meetings obtained by BuzzFeed contradicts the company’s sworn testimony to Congress last fall that U.S. user data is managed by a “world-renowned U.S.-based security team.” BuzzFeed reports that American staff couldn’t access the data on their own and had to ask Chinese colleagues where user information was going. The China-based engineers had access to nonpublic U.S. user data at least from September 2021 to January 2022, according to BuzzFeed.
