dChan
Anonymous ID: bbb598 June 17, 2022, 2:06 p.m. No.16463698   🗄️.is đź”—kun   >>3744

Leaked Audio From 80 Internal TikTok Meetings Shows That US User Data Has Been Repeatedly Accessed From China

“I feel like with these tools, there’s some backdoor to access user data in almost all of them,” said an external auditor hired to help TikTok close off Chinese access to sensitive information, like Americans’ birthdays and phone numbers.

By Emily Baker-White

Posted on June 17, 2022, at 12:31

For years, TikTok has responded to data privacy concerns by promising that information gathered about users in the United States is stored in the United States, rather than China, where ByteDance, the video platform's parent company, is located. But according to leaked audio from more than 80 internal TikTok meetings, China-based employees of ByteDance have repeatedly accessed nonpublic data about US TikTok users — exactly the type of behavior that inspired former president Donald Trump to threaten to ban the app in the United States.

The recordings, which were reviewed by BuzzFeed News, contain 14 statements from nine different TikTok employees indicating that engineers in China had access to US data between September 2021 and January 2022, at the very least. Despite a TikTok executive’s sworn testimony in an October 2021 Senate hearing that a “world-renowned, US-based security team” decides who gets access to this data, nine statements by eight different employees describe situations where US employees had to turn to their colleagues in China to determine how US user data was flowing. US staff did not have permission or knowledge of how to access the data on their own, according to the tapes.

“Everything is seen in China,” said a member of TikTok’s Trust and Safety department in a September 2021 meeting. In another September meeting, a director referred to one Beijing-based engineer as a “Master Admin” who “has access to everything.” (While many employees introduced themselves by name and title in the recordings, BuzzFeed News is not naming anyone to protect their privacy.)

The recordings range from small-group meetings with company leaders and consultants to policy all-hands presentations and are corroborated by screenshots and other documents, providing a vast amount of evidence to corroborate prior reports of China-based employees accessing US user data. Their contents show that data was accessed far more frequently and recently than previously reported, painting a rich picture of the challenges the world’s most popular social media app has faced in attempting to disentangle its US operations from those of its parent company in Beijing. Ultimately, the tapes suggest that the company may have misled lawmakers, its users, and the public by downplaying that data stored in the US could still be accessed by employees in China.

In response to an exhaustive list of examples and questions about data access, TikTok spokesperson Maureen Shanahan responded with a short 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 US 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." ByteDance did not provide additional comment.

"Everything is seen in China."

In 2019, the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States began investigating the national security implications of TikTok’s collection of American data. And in 2020, then-president Donald Trump threatened to ban the app entirely over concerns that the Chinese government could use ByteDance to amass dossiers of personal information about US TikTok users. TikTok’s “data collection threatens to allow the Chinese Communist Party access to Americans’ personal and proprietary information,” Trump wrote in his executive order. TikTok has said it has never shared user data with the Chinese government and would not do so if asked.

Most of the recorded meetings focus on TikTok’s response to these concerns. The company is currently attempting to redirect its pipes so that certain, “protected” data can no longer flow out of the United States and into China, an effort known internally as Project Texas. In the recordings, the vast majority of situations where China-based staff accessed US user data were in service of Project Texas's aim to halt this data access.

Project Texas is key to a contract that TikTok is currently negotiating with cloud services provider Oracle and CFIUS. Under the CFIUS agreement, TikTok would hold US users’ protected private information, like phone numbers and birthdays, exclusively at a data center managed by Oracle in Texas (hence the project name).Oracle did not respond to a request for comment. CFIUS declined to comment….

 

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/emilybakerwhite/tiktok-tapes-us-user-data-china-bytedance-access

Anonymous ID: bbb598 June 17, 2022, 2:23 p.m. No.16463741   🗄️.is đź”—kun

Let me tell you a story. Some of you may have heard this before. Others of you witnessed parts of it in real time.

 

It’s a cautionary tale. And it runs up against the push by 11 GOP Senators to imperil my natural right to defense, protected by the Constitution.

 

In 2006, an adjunct university professor entered the comments section of my blog, http://proteinwisdom.com

 

She began debating other commentators and quickly found herself out of her depth. I can’t recall the specifics of the post, but her argument was decidedly leftist.

 

I went out for a time, and by the time I came back, this leftwing professor of risk management had become so unglued that she was threatening my then 2-year-old son.

 

Fox News ran a piece on it after

@michellemalkin

highlighted it on her “Vent” for Hot Air.

 

The professo was asked to step down from her position. She has not held a job since, living off of severance and disability checks, along with support from a wealthy family.

 

Her public disgrace caused her some immediate introspection, but sadly that didn’t last.

 

As her career came apart and her relationships began to crumble, she picked my family — in particular, my son — to blame for her self-inflicted travails.

 

She began posting pornographic entries about a 2-year-old boy. She began making public accusations that my wife and I were molesting my son.

 

Pretending to be a reporter, she contacted my mother, asking for comment about my impending arrest for child molestation. She dug up my father’s obituary and went on an on about sexualized “tykes” and “dead kikes.”

 

We’d received an order of protection against her, but bc she lived out of state, the law couldn’t touch her. She’d begun attacking the lawyers who’d helped me or represented me. She attacked the judges.

 

All of this continued until right around 2014, when a detective in my small town found a legal means to being charges, citing an Online harassment law that has been passed in the intervening years.

 

To make a long story short, this woman was able to evade consequences for 12 years. She reported me to DHS as a terror threat, claiming I was making ricin (she also posted this on a community message board, …warning parents to keep their kids away from my house on Halloween.

 

She’d been able to find where we lived using voter records. She called the surrounding schools warning them that I was a pedophile and that my son was in danger. She contacted child services. She contacted my wife’s place of employment.

 

Ultimately, after years of effort, we were finally able to see her convicted on multiple felony charges. This happened after CO had her extradited twice. In August, she’ll likely be paroled after serving 2 years of a six year sentence.

 

— which means that for 14 years, prior to her felony convictions, had she phoned in an anonymous “tip” on me, she may have convinced a judge to file an ex parte order requiring me to surrender my weapons.

 

I took us 14 years to get her convicted of clear crimes. I’ve been through the legal system.

 

Red flag laws will almost certainly be abused by those who figure out how to work the system.

 

They will create victims where before none existed. They punish the law-abiding and benefit the vindictive, the cruel, the disinterested, and the bureaucratic …apparatus, further clogging up an already glacially-moving legal system and costing the accused time, money, worry, and liberty.

 

Reject them. And consider those who promote them your enemies.

 

Because trust me. They are.

 

https://twitter.com/banishedprotein/status/1537841227646869506?s=20&t=7dRfyutOF6rDbJZqdvVweg