More Concerns For TikTok As Whistleblower Says American Data Is Being Abused By Chinese Officials

The news about TikTok serving as an imminent threat to America’s national security and interest continues to grow as we speak. And now, a whistleblower is making more allegations of abuse of data belonging to US citizens.

It’s definitely not the type of news that any firm would wish to hear, especially when the Senate and Congress are racing ahead of time to give President Biden exclusive powers to ban the application as a whole in the nation.

The company was reported as mentioning how their command of data belonging to US users is so much weaker than that observed. This was sent out to the office of Senator Josh Hawley.

But a new whistleblower’s allegations are counteracting such claims. They stated how the firm is actually overstating its separation from China and instead, appears to be deeply involved with officials belonging to the Chinese government. Moreover, it further elaborated on how much emphasis is placed on the likes of Chinese software which may have backdoors and actually ends up using tools that enable employees to switch between user data in both the US and China.

Senators are now raising eyebrows at how serious of a situation this can turn out to be in the end and they’re also now contradicting all the statements made in the public eye by the company's top executives.

Last year in September, the whistleblower says the firm’s COO mentioned boldly how there was a strict checking system in place that held tight control over data getting accessed in places like the US. During that time, both Forbes and Reuters highlighted how employees were gaining the wrong types of access to user data in the US.

The whistleblower revealed how the access to data controls by TikTok is just superficial at its absolute best. One particular example is how so many officials from China’s communist party can alter between Chinese and American Data with nothing more than a simple button clicks through a tool called Dorado.

But if that news was not dramatic enough, the whistleblower explained to the Senator’s office how it has seen firsthand how engineers based in the country are flipping over to datasets that aren’t owned by China and using tasks that aren’t scheduled as a leading backup for data analysis and aggregation. So it would not be wrong to say that both TikTok and Bytedance are very similar in nature.

So many calls, as well as bans, are being announced for TikTok for leaking data to China but the app says it’s innocent in this regard and is doing everything to prove that all allegations made against it are indeed baseless.

TikTok says it is innocent and is not sharing user data of Americans and is committed to a strong deal of security and privacy for years.

They further fought back against the allegations by claiming that all the tools outlined were basically for the sole purpose of analysis and nothing else. And all data belonging to US citizens is protected and channeled by the American division of TikTok’s Data Security.

Is that convincing enough? Well, we’re not too sure about this.

H/T: Axios

Read next: TikTok Outlines New Data Policy To Convince EU Lawmakers That It’s Not A Security Threat
by Dr. Hura Anwar via Digital Information World