TikTok employees say China tightly controls app amid data concerns

The company has previously come under fire for censoring videos critical of Beijing

Netherlands TikTok Claim (Copyright 2020 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.)

Former TikTok employees say the hugely popular video app is closely controlled by its Chinese parent company ByteDance, raising privacy concerns that the government in Beijing could leverage the app to collect personal information about Americans as part of its sprawling digital surveillance apparatus.

Former employees told CNBC in a new report that key decisions and meetings usually ran through China, and user data was stored inside the country as well. For some, this raises privacy concerns, since China’s National Intelligence Law requires Chinese companies to “support, assist and cooperate with the state intelligence work.”

“If the legal authorities in China or their parent company demands the data, users have already given them the legal right to turn it over,” Bryan Cunningham, executive director of the Cybersecurity Policy & Research Institute at the University of California, Irvine, told CNBC.

TikTok’s user agreement informs customers their data could be shared with “a parent, subsidiary, or other affiliate of our corporate group,” and the company defended its privacy practices. 

“We employ rigorous access controls and a strict approval process overseen by our US-based leadership team, including technologies like encryption and security monitoring to safeguard sensitive user data,” a TikTok spokeswoman said in a statement.

The app has only been around internationally since 2017, but already has 92 million users in the US, many of them teenagers and young adults. It is now the second most popular app among teens in America, only coming in behind Snapchat.

It’s not the first time the company has come under scrutiny. Previous reporting from CNBC, The Guardian, and others showed TikTok moderated videos about topics controversial or critical of the Chinese government, including Tiananmen Square, Tibetan independence, and the mass detention of Uyghur Muslim in concentration camps. It has since said it stopped moderating these topics.

The Trump administration also took aim at TikTok, with former secretary of state Mike Pompeo accusing it of “feeding data directly to the Chinese Communist Party.” The White House tried to force a merger between TikTok and a US company, before the Biden administration called off the attempt.

Intelligence officials in the US have also pushed for access to user data from tech companies, repeatedly calling for “backdoors” in popular apps and services.