What was the intent behind China’s release of TikTok, an app that’s swept the world by storm and that most, if not almost all, young people are increasingly addicted to? To spy on you; they’re using it to harvest massive amounts of data from everyone who uses it,
Such is what has been known for a long while (it’s why Trump tried to ban TikTok during his presidency), but it’s come to the fore again thanks to audio tapes obtained and analyzed by Buzzfeed, which reported on them.
Buzzfeed, in reporting on the tapes, goes on to claim that, “according to leaked audio from more than 80 internal TikTok meetings, China-based employees of ByteDance have repeatedly accessed nonpublic data about US TikTok users“, noting that it was just those concerns that prompted Trump to try and ban TikTok.
As a reminder, Trump, in 2020, responded to rumors that he was considering banning TikTok by saying:
“We are looking at TikTok. We may be banning TikTok. We might be doing some other things. There are a couple of options, but a lot of things are happening, so we’ll see what happens, but we are looking at a lot of alternatives with respect to TikTok.”
Buzzfeed, describing the problem as the recordings show it in more detail, also notes that:
The recordings, which were reviewed by BuzzFeed News, contain 14 statements from nine different TikTok employees indicating that engineers in China had access to US data between September 2021 and January 2022, at the very least. Despite a TikTok executive’s sworn testimony in an October 2021 Senate hearing that a “world-renowned, US-based security team” decides who gets access to this data, nine statements by eight different employees describe situations where US employees had to turn to their colleagues in China to determine how US user data was flowing. US staff did not have permission or knowledge of how to access the data on their own, according to the tapes.
Exposing the problem further, it quotes certain Buzzfeed employees heard in the tapes, saying:
“Everything is seen in China,” said a member of TikTok’s Trust and Safety department in a September 2021 meeting. In another September meeting, a director referred to one Beijing-based engineer as a “Master Admin” who “has access to everything.”
So that’s what logging into TikTok leads to; a vast pipeline of data flowing to the unquenchable thirst for American data in China, which is likely using the data not just to design products, but to manipulate Americans and prepare for war against us.
TikTok, for its part, attempted to dodge concerns in a brief statement citing its use of “the experts”, saying:
“We know we’re among the most scrutinized platforms from a security standpoint, and we aim to remove any doubt about the security of US user data. That’s why we hire experts in their fields, continually work to validate our security standards, and bring in reputable, independent third parties to test our defenses.”
By: Gen Z Conservative, editor of GenZConservative.com. Follow me on Facebook and Subscribe to My Email List
This story syndicated with permission from Will, Author at Trending Politics