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Social Networks China

TikTok Insiders Say Social Media Company Is Tightly Controlled By Chinese Parent ByteDance (cnbc.com) 30

Former TikTok employees say ByteDance, the social media app's Chinese parent company, has access to TikTok's American user data and is closely involved in the Los Angeles company's decision-making and product development. CNBC reports: A former TikTok recruiter remembers that her hours were supposed to be from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m., but more often than not, she found herself working double shifts. That's because the company's Beijing-based ByteDance executives were heavily involved in TikTok's decision-making, she said, and expected the company's California employees to be available at all hours of the day. TikTok employees, she said, were expected to restart their day and work during Chinese business hours to answer their ByteDance counterparts' questions. This recruiter, along with four other former employees, told CNBC they're concerned about the popular social media app's Chinese parent company, which they say has access to American user data and is actively involved in the Los Angeles company's decision-making and product development. These people asked to remain anonymous for fear of retribution from the company. The former employees who spoke to CNBC said the boundaries between TikTok and ByteDance were so blurry as to be almost non-existent.

Most notably, one employee said that ByteDance employees are able to access U.S. user data. This was highlighted in a situation where an American employee working on TikTok needed to get a list of global users, including Americans, who searched for or interacted with a specific type of content -- that means users who searched for a specific term or hashtag or liked a particular category of videos. This employee had to reach out to a data team in China in order to access that information. The data the employee received included users' specific IDs, and they could pull up whatever information TikTok had about those users. This type of situation was confirmed as a common occurrence by a second employee. TikTok downplayed the importance of this access. But one cybersecurity expert said it could expose users to information requests by the Chinese government.

Direction and approvals for all kinds of decision-making, whether it be minor contracts or key strategies, come from ByteDance's leadership, which is based in China. This results in employees working late hours after long days so they can join meetings with their Beijing counterparts. TikTok's dependence on ByteDance extends to its technology. Former employees said that nearly 100% of TikTok's product development is led by Chinese ByteDance employees. The lines are so indistinct that multiple employees described having email addresses for both companies. One employee said that recruiters often find themselves looking for candidates for roles at both companies.

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TikTok Insiders Say Social Media Company Is Tightly Controlled By Chinese Parent ByteDance

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  • Typo (Score:5, Insightful)

    by NateFromMich ( 6359610 ) on Friday June 25, 2021 @07:09PM (#61521946)
    I think you meant to say it's from the "no shit Sherlock" dept.
    • Yes,
      and the American public needs to be reminded on the long game china plays.

      So while you might say " no shit Sherlock " the public will say " really? I never knew."

  • that comments on this thread critical of the CCP will be downmodded overnight, during Beijing business hours.

    • by NFN_NLN ( 633283 )

      Let's try: "ByteDance Insiders Say Social Media Parent Company Is Tightly Controlled By Chinese Government"

      • Let's try: "ByteDance Insiders Say Social Media Parent Company Is Tightly Controlled By Chinese Government"

        That all you got? C'mon man! Surely you could have thrown some "Trump was right all along about Tik Tok" in there for extra credit, given our goal here.

        • More like "Chuck Schumer was right". Then CFIUS, I suppose.. Trump's role came in only at the end, at which point he did what was legally required of the president.

          Schumer made noise about the breach of the terms of acquisition. Schumer demanded the CFIUS investigation. Schumer held a press conference about it.

          After the CFIUS process is complete, the president has 15 days to either sign the CFIUS order or refuse it. President Trump did only what he was legally required to do, accept or reject the CFIUS order.

          Presidents virtually aways approve whatever the committee says because the committee spent months checking into it. The president wouldn't have more than a few minutes to spend on it - presidents are kinda busy. Trump did partially buck the trend by giving Bytedance 90 days to become compliant.

          But really, if you want to put a single name to it, this is Chuck Schumer's baby.

          • More like "Chuck Schumer was right". Then CFIUS, I suppose.. Trump's role came in only at the end, at which point he did what was legally required of the president.

            Schumer made noise about the breach of the terms of acquisition. Schumer demanded the CFIUS investigation. Schumer held a press conference about it.

            After the CFIUS process is complete, the president has 15 days to either sign the CFIUS order or refuse it. President Trump did only what he was legally required to do, accept or reject the CFIUS order.

            Was President Trump also legally required to request/demand that a US company buy the company in order to be compliant?

            There was just a bit more at play here than you suggest. And this? This is what we call "compliant" after Schumer passed his baby around for hugs and kisses?

            No wonder the Donor Class is running shit.

            • > Was President Trump also legally required to request/demand that a US company buy the company in order to be compliant?

              Yes - ish. That's the CFIUS order he was legally required to sign, or veto. (He can't just sit on it, or do some other random thing instead).

              Presidents almost always sign because CFIUS knows 100 times as much about the situation than the president does. The president is dealing with a thousand different issues, international and domestic.

              In this case, rather than just signing what was

    • It generally doesn't even take that long. I presume that by now they not only have figured out they need fifty centers who stay up all night (maybe they pay 'em fifty-five cents as an incentive) but they also have 'em stationed in other countries.

  • But this is probably how the rest of the world looks at the US (I'm pretty sure we do this)

    • I trust the geriatric clowns (orange or otherwise) in the US and their AIPAC laden congress more than I trust Pooh to limit the extent to which they would abuse that kind of data.

  • by ytene ( 4376651 ) on Saturday June 26, 2021 @04:55AM (#61522912)
    In 1974, the CIA attempted to recover an entire Soviet submarine [wikipedia.org], the K-129, from where it sunk in the Pacific Ocean.

    In 2014, we learned that the NSA recorded every single phone conversation taking place in the Bahamas [theintercept.com].

    In 2013, we learned that the NSA set up a company to mass-produce USB cables that were capable of acting as broadcast transmitters [arstechnica.com], capable of giving an eavesdropper access to your computer.

    Given this abundance of evidence, most importantly showing the outrageous budgets and sheer diversity of initiatives that a government is willing to attempt to get "the upper hand", it should not come as any surprise to us that other governments around the world do similar things.

    We've also seen, thanks to leaks and hacks from celebrity iCloud/iPhone accounts, how easy it is for people to record compromising information on digital devices.

    So - with no evidence to support my theory one way or the other - if you were a Chinese Intelligences Services official and you had access to a good slice of budget, do you think you might be willing to invest it in a smartphone application that could be used to record short video clips, maybe one designed to allow the user to send them "securely" to another party? Obviously via a secure server someone inside your borders.

    I mean, an application with features like that wouldn't ever be used for sexting, would it?

    And there's no way, even if it was, that you'd want to run all the images through facial recognition and see if you can't spot a government official or two, would you?

    And even if you were to somehow, accidentally, miraculously catch an official from a foreign government doing something they would later come to regret, I mean, you wouldn't use that to attempt to blackmail or bribe that official, would you?

    Because, obviously, that wouldn't be very nice.
    • But the NSA doesn't operate in a dictatorship led by Pooh.

      Better the devil you know, operating in a democracy.

      • by ytene ( 4376651 )
        "Better the devil you know, operating in a democracy."

        This is an excellent suggestion. I am all in favor of that.

        Of course, we'd have to make quite a few changes around here before we could consider the US to be a full democracy.

        You know, like abolishing the Electoral College, so that in an election every single entitled voter in the country has an equal say over the selection of their President. Unlike the present, massively-skewed system [theconversation.com].

        And, maybe, enacting a law to reverse all the gerrymande [thefulcrum.us]
  • China is just feeding us our own kind of poison, playing the long game.

"...a most excellent barbarian ... Genghis Kahn!" -- _Bill And Ted's Excellent Adventure_

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