TikTok’s claim that it was walling off U.S. user data from its parent company, Chinese tech giant ByteDance, only applied to the “front door” while the app left the back door wide open, according to former employees.
TikTok failed to cut ties from ByteDance because of its complex computer network structure, the company’s former head of security engineering said, according to a report by Fortune.
“There’s a front door that everyone is looking at, but the way to access the network is through employees,” said Patrick Spaulding Ryan, who worked as the lead technical program manager for security engineering at TikTok from March 2020 to June 2022.
TikTok Ban (Anadolu /Getty)
He explained that ByteDance maintained control over some of the internal computer systems where TikTok employees routinely shared user data, including U.S. user data.
Ryan’s comments were reportedly corroborated by another ex-TikTok employee who left the company in early 2023.
TikTok, meanwhile, insists its former’s employees are giving “inaccurate” information, claiming they are “clearly driven by anonymous sources with a preconceived agenda.”
The Chinese company further claims its user data was stored in Virginia and Singapore in 2022, and kept away from the Chinese Communist Party. TikTok declined to respond to assertions that some of its enterprise systems were hosted in China though at least 2022.
But Ryan also noted that TikTok’s effort to separate its U.S. data from China put the team in an unusual position, explaining that employees would have to oftentimes move data from its isolated environment in order to communicate with and cooperate coworkers.
The other former TikTok employee who corroborated Ryan’s comments — who spoke with Fortune on the condition of anonymity due to fear of TikTok retaliating by seizing their restricted stock units — explained that when the company’s U.S. Data Security team (USDS) made any decisions, they had to be on a Chinese server, “run by the Chinese.”
Other former TikTok employees have made similar claims about the app, owned by a hostile foreign country.
As Breitbart News reported, ex-TikTok employees recently said the app continued working closely ByteDance, despite claiming otherwise, with one former employee even saying that he was told to continue working with a Beijing-based executive, even after he was assigned to a Seattle-based executive, who, as far as he knows, only existed on paper.
Last week, President Joe Biden signed legislation that will force ByteDance to sell TikTok within nine months or else face a ban in the United States.
TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew reacted to the new U.S. law saying its Chinese parent company plans to use America’s laws against the United States to fight the sell-or-ban legislation in court, declaring, “The Constitution is on our side.”
ByteDance, meanwhile, said it prefers that TikTok just shuts down in the United States if its legal challenge fails in court.
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