In March, TikTok CEO Shou Chew testified on Capitol Hill that the Chinese company stores private information of Americans in Virginia and Singapore. However, Forbes obtained data that shows the platform actually stored it in China. Data held by China includes financial data such as Social Security numbers and tax IDs.
The creators and businesses gave their data to the company to receive payment from the platform and TikTok stored it on Chinese servers that employees can access, according to Forbes.
Forbes reported it had obtained internal communications, audio recordings, videos, screenshots and documents labeled “Privileged and Confidential” and spoke to multiple sources familiar with the matter.
“The American data has always been stored in Virginia and Singapore in the past,” Chew stated in his testimony in March. “And access of this is on an as-required basis by engineers globally.”
A TikTok spokesperson gave Forbes a very vague , and inaccurate response: “We remain confident in the accuracy of Shou’s testimony.” The Daily Caller News Foundation writes, “TikTok applies different tools and databases from ByteDance, its Beijing-based parent company, to process payments to creators and vendors who make money on the platform, according to Forbes. This includes many of TikTok’s top creators in the U.S. and Europe, according to Forbes.”
This is not the first time the Chinese government has stolen American financial information.” In 2017 the country’s military hacked credit reporting agency Equifax, according to The New York Times. Bad actors can use Social Security numbers for identity theft.”
“It could be just bad IT practice, it could be they felt like they had a legitimate business need,” former national security lawyer for the White House and CIA Bryan Cunningham told Forbes. “But whatever the nuance of that turns out to be … if you store information in [China], you better assume that the intelligence services can have it if they want it. They may not target you, but boy, on the face of it, it’s highly questionable.”
The Daily Caller adds:
ByteDance has employees in China that use a moderation system including word lists designed to identify or restrict content related to a wide array of topics such as the Chinese government, trade between China and the U.S., the persecuted ethnic minority group Uyghurs, former President Donald Trump and TikTok competitor YouTube, according to internal company records obtained by Forbes. Although more than 50 of these lists contain “TikTok” in their title, the company told Forbes they had never applied them on their platform.