Whistleblower claims

A former TikTok employee turned whistleblower has reportedly met with multiple senators expressing concerns TikTok’s plan to secure US user data won’t go far enough to stop possible Chinese espionage.

The whistleblower told The Washington Post in an interview that the company’s policy plan, dubbed Project Texas, doesn’t go far enough and that properly ensuring US data is secured from Chinese employees requires nothing short of a “complete re-engineering” of the way the app works.

The employee claimed he worked at the company for around six months ending in early 2022 as a risk manager and head of a unit in TikTok’s Safety Operations team. Part of that job, he claims, put him in charge of knowing which employees had access to certain tools and user data. Apparently he was fired after speaking up about data privacy concerns, even if he left long before the outfit finalised its Project Texas policy.

He claimed he "saw enough" evidence to suggest the guardrails put in place to placate regulators fearful of Chinese employees viewing US user data were insufficient.

The whistleblower has reportedly already met with staffers from Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley and Virginia Sen. Mark Warner’s offices.

As part of the evidence, the whistleblower shared a snippet of code which shows TikTok’s code connecting with Toutiao, a Chinese news app also run by TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance. The whistleblower alleges that the connection could let Chinese employees intercept...

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