TikTok reveals that Chinese based engineers have repeatedly accessed US data since September 2021

TikTok reveals that Chinese based engineers have repeatedly accessed US data since September 2021, as reported by dot.LA.

The audio from than 80 internal  meetings of the popular social media app TikTok has been leaked, exposing Chinese-based TikTok employees repeatedly accessing US user data, findings in a BuzzFeed News report show.

The recordings depict the nine TikTok employees discussing ‘Project Texas’, intended to prevent engineers in China from retrieving the data, as reported by DailyMail.com.

Shortly after the release of the report, TikTok announced that ‘100% of US user traffic is being routed to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure’, a platform mainly used by the computer software industry. It is not, as many users believed, stored in TikTok’s own data centres located in the US and Singapore.

A TikTok spokesperson has justified the leaked audio by stating in an email to DailyMail.com,  ‘we’ve brought in world class internal and external security experts to help us strengthen our data security efforts.’

The spokesperson also assured the online newspaper that ‘this is standard industry practice given the complexity of data security challenges.’ A U.S Data Security (USDS) in-house department, led by US-based management, was created in May to provide more focus and direction over US data security.

The intentions of this department is to protect TikTok users through the application of stronger data protection policies and protocols.

The concerns raised by this audio leak echo those expressed by President Trump in August 2020, which led him to sign an executive order in the same month that would ban TikTok and the Chinese chat app ‘WeChat’ in the US.