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.
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.
Typo (Score:5, Insightful)
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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."
Fifty bucks says (Score:1, Insightful)
that comments on this thread critical of the CCP will be downmodded overnight, during Beijing business hours.
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Let's try: "ByteDance Insiders Say Social Media Parent Company Is Tightly Controlled By Chinese Government"
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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.
That would be Schumer. Law requires the president (Score:4)
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.
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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.
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> 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
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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.
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Re:No way this could be true (Score:4, Interesting)
Why should they?
That's not meant to be snark; but an actual question. I've never gotten all the hullabaloo over TikTok. A bunch of teenagers making videos where they pretend to be BTS, Blackpink, or other K-Pop stars is a great big nothingburger as far as I'm can tell. Why should Biden care? Why did trump? I know the latter tried to spin it as "national security". But TikTok's main demographic sure doesn't look old enough to hold a security clearance in the first place.
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Simple answer from my perspective:
1st point: While TikTok's user base might not have any individual strength, in a group they might, and if the group is strong enough maybe a leader might emerge.
2nd point: if the data collected can find correlation and causation ( real or perceived ), it's a point for them to use as leverage in a specific market. for example, the USA collects a ton load of business data on the EU and Asian consumer groups via programs that are run publicly ( government divisions of : farm,
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Simple answer from my perspective:
3rd point: privacy is part of the American idea. people love to know that others don't know anything about them.
LOL. U.S. population is somewhere around 330 million with about 210 million of them age 18 and over (according to 2019 U.S. Census)
There are:
- Over 195 million daily and over 260 million monthly active Facebook users in North America
- Over 112 million monthly active Instagram users in the U.S.
- Over 93 million daily active Snapchat users in North America
- Over 50 million daily and over 100 million monthly active TikTok users in the U.S.
- Over 38 million daily active Twitter users in the U.S.
With that many p
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I should have been slightly clearer...
"The perception of privacy is part the American idea"
Now the problem while debating on Slashdot is that most people refuse to step back and look at common people. We have the government interaction, which is consistently harping on privacy rights. Only 44% of the US population has an associate degree or higher. and most likely a Slashdot reader has a degree ( beating the 44% ) and spends more than the average American reading and learning ( big assumption I know, yet I
Re:No way this could be true (Score:4, Insightful)
Their app scrapes your phone and sends everything to the CCP. For Jane the plumber or Joe the dry cleaner, it's no big deal. When military, government, and infrastructure people had it installed I'm sure a lot of sensitive information was leaked.
That's the reason to give a shit.
Re:No way this could be true (Score:5, Informative)
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China is a dictatorship, an ideological and strategic enemy of the United States. They can use social media data to build up files on every American which can be used for spying purposes and blackmail.
Trade with China occurs because of a shaky and almost certainly faulty theory of capitalist peace, which unfortunately is almost irreversible at this point. Within the framework of globalism for which There Is No Alternative there is still some room to carve out some islands of sanity though.
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I've never gotten all the hullabaloo over TikTok. A bunch of teenagers [...] TikTok's main demographic sure doesn't look old enough to hold a security clearance in the first place.
The users are not themselves valuable at this stage in their lives. But they may inadvertently reveal valuable information about their parents, or their parents work. And never forget that they will grow up to be people who may be valuable to have access to one day.
It sounds like conspiracy theory... but it is how spy agencies think.
Disturbing, yes (Score:2)
But this is probably how the rest of the world looks at the US (I'm pretty sure we do this)
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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.
What We've Learned... (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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But the NSA doesn't operate in a dictatorship led by Pooh.
Better the devil you know, operating in a democracy.
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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]
social media is poison (Score:2)
China is just feeding us our own kind of poison, playing the long game.
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