According to information provided by US lawmakers, citing data from The New York Times , TikTok user data in the US, including driver's license information as well as information related to child sexual abuse, is shared between the platform and ByteDance (parent company based in China) through an internal messaging app called Lark.
Previously, in March 2023, TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew testified before members of the Energy and Commerce Committee (of the US House of Representatives) regarding the issue of storing user data on the short-form video sharing platform in the US. Mr. Chew affirmed that the information was stored in the US, operated by an American company, and supervised and managed by Americans. However, the congressmen did not completely believe that.
TikTok CEO Shou Chew had an unconvincing hearing in March 2023
Senators Richard Blumenthal (D-Calif.) and Marsha Blackburn (R-Calif.) recently accused TikTok's CEO of giving "misleading and inaccurate answers" to the Senate, and asked the company's leadership to respond to dozens of questions by the end of this week.
In a letter to the CEO, the two US senators wrote: "We are troubled by TikTok's misleading or inaccurate responses to serious issues related to user safety and national security, and request that TikTok correct and explain its previous inaccurate statements."
The NYT report revealed that "a huge amount of user data on Lark can be easily accessed by ByteDance employees in China and other regions." In addition, Lark is also a messaging platform with servers in China. Last month, the prestigious magazine Forbes published an article revealing that much of the financial information of content creators on TikTok, including tax data, social security numbers... are stored by this platform in China.
Both lawmakers said they had heard multiple times from both TikTok employees and CEOs about storing US user data in Virginia and Singapore. "Not once did you mention that TikTok stores user data in China, or that information about Americans, including sensitive content such as photos, driver's licenses, reports containing legal documents... could be shared on Lark and easily accessible to ByteDance employees," the US lawmakers said in a letter to CEO Chew.
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