TikTok ordered employees to send US user data to its Beijing-based parent company, according to a report in Fortune. It included spreadsheets full of names, emails, demographic data and location data, the report further said, attributing the information to former employees. According to the investigation, Tiktok followed a stealth chain of command and concealed the close contact with ByteDance starting in 2022, claiming that it had cut most ties with its parent company. TikTok has reacted strongly to the report, calling it "fabrications from disgruntled former employees".
The Fortune report is based on interviews of 11 former TikTok employees between August 2022 and April 2023.
One of the employees said in the interview that TikTok's distance from ByteDance was just for appearances, and that there remained a secret chain of command where US employees continued reporting to Chinese executives.
"I literally worked on a project that gave US data to China. They were completely complicit in that. There were Americans that were working in upper management that were completely complicit in this," Evan Turner, who worked as a senior data scientist from April to September in 2022, told Fortune.
Mr Turner said that after his hiring, he reported to a ByteDance executive in Beijing but was reassigned to a US-based executive soon after. The shift came after TikTok kicked off an initiative to keep US user data in the US. But the shift was only on paper and Mr Turner claimed her was told by the human resource team that he would continue to report to the ByteDance executive.
He was tasked with sending data to ByteDance workers in Beijing every 14 days.
It is not clear whether the Chinese government had access to the data, though any Chinese company by law must provide data to the government if requested.
Nnete Matima, who worked in business development at both TikTok and ByteDance in the US, sold Lark to corporate customers from July 2022 to August 2023. It is a Slack-like internal messaging system that ByteDance and TikTok share.
Mr Matima said Lark was monitored by Chinese-based ByteDance employees, including conversations about US user data.
"You could never really get any straight answers that could be solid enough to bring back to your client to basically let them know that this is a trustworthy platform, and that their American data is safe. They are not transparent to the point where I had to lose a deal because I couldn't answer basic security questions that people are entitled to," she told Fortune.
Matima was fired from the company in August 2023.
Last year, the New York Times too reported about Lark storing critical data in China.
Reacting to the Fortune report, TikTok Policy posted a strong statement on X in which it called the article "factually incorrect".
The company shared details about the establishment of a new division called US Data Security (USDS) in 2023 and other "facts" about how it is monitored. "If this reporter had done any research into what actually occurs at TikTok, she would know that the scenarios laid out are not only forbidden by policy, but are also subject to controls in place that prevent data sharing," the response said.
However, the response does not deny that TikTok sent US user data to ByteDance before 2023.
