India’s decision to ban China’s TikTok short video application for security reasons and threats from former US President Donald Trump to do so may have been well-founded. Although TikTok’s Chinese parent ByteDance denies sharing user data with the Chinese government, the leaked audio from more than 80 internal meetings of TikTok employees, which was reviewed by Buzzfeed News, suggests that the risk remains. While TikTok claims that the data of its American users is safe because it is stored in the United States and not in China, past conversations show that ByteDance employees in China have “repeatedly accessed non-public data about American users of TikTok.” According to Buzzfeed News, in one of the audio clips, a member of TikTok’s trust and security department was heard saying: “Everything is visible in China. In another video, the director of TikTok called the Beijing-based engineer a “chief administrator” who “has access to everything.” While the executive director of TikTok told the U.S. Senate last year that access to his data in the U.S. is strictly controlled by a U.S.-based security team, in fact, “U.S. officials had to turn to their counterparts in China to determine how consumer data moves in the United States. U.S. officials did not have permission or knowledge of how to gain access to the data themselves. that the government could force ByteDance to collect and transmit information (from TikTok) as a form of “data espionage.” But China could also use TikTok to harm America in a more insidious way, Buzzfeed News: The app’s “For You” algorithm, which recommends what the user should watch, can be set to show videos that “influence Americans’ commercial, cultural or political behavior.” given that social media algorithms are suspected to have influenced Trump’s election in 2016.
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