TikTok Employees have access to users personal data

The social media service TikTok has made headlines in the past due to several data protection scandals. Now it has become known that Chinese employees had access to personal user data. Even a US data center shouldn’t solve the problem.

More than 80 recordings of internal meetings show that Chinese employees of TikTok parent company ByteDance accessed the private data of US users multiple times between September 2021 and January 2022. This should include birthdays and phone numbers. As buzz feed writes are referred to in the leaked audio files as master admins, who are said to have “access to everything”.

To address privacy concerns, TikTok launched Project Texas. In the future, the company will use a data center in the US state of Texas. The servers are managed by the American company Oracle. The data of US users are managed on the systems so that the information does not have to be stored abroad. While the data won’t reach countries like China initially, it’s unlikely to completely resolve the issue.

US data center itself does not prevent Chinese access

Of course, it is still possible to access the data from China. Because Oracle only supplies the servers itself and the virtual machines are controlled by TikTok itself, the service can continue to determine who can access the data in the future. This allows the information to continue to fall into the hands of Chinese secret services. Also, TikTok employees use many tools with poorly documented functions. This should make it even harder to plug any security holes.