Former TikTok Employees Say Company Works Closely with China's ByteDance Despite Claiming Otherwise

Former TikTok employees reportedly say the app has worked closely with its parent company, Chinese technology giant ByteDance, despite claiming otherwise. While TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew told U.S. lawmakers in January that the app had severed most of its connections with ByteDance - which is beholden to the Chinese Communist Party - 11 former employees, four of whom were employed as recently as last year, told Fortune a different story. Evan Turner, who worked as a senior data scientist at TikTok from April to September 2022, said that he first reported to a ByteDance executive in Beijing, but at some point was told to start reporting to a Seattle-based executive. Twice a month, the Beijing-based executive had Turner email spreadsheets containing data for hundreds of thousands of U.S. TikTok users to ByteDance employees in China, he said. The former TikTok employee noted that the data included names, email addresses, and IP addresses, as well as geographic and demographic information of U.S. users on the Chinese app. Notably, the fake Seattle-based executive reassignment came after TikTok said it would start storing sensitive U.S. user data only in the United States and make it so that only U.S. employees had access to it. As Breitbart News reported, the U.S. Senate is reviewing legislation that could ban TikTok if ByteDance doesn't sell it within six months.