A former risk manager at TikTok has met with congressional investigators to share his concerns that the company’s plan for protecting U.S. user data is deeply flawed, pointing to evidence that could inflame lawmakers’ suspicion of the app at a moment when many are considering a nationwide ban.
The former employee, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of fear of retaliation, has told congressional investigators that Project Texas does not go far enough and that a truly leakproof arrangement for Americans’ data would require a “complete re-engineering” of how TikTok is run.As one piece of evidence, he shared with The Post a snippet of code he said showed TikTok could connect with systems linked to Toutiao, a popular Chinese news app run by ByteDance.
His Toutiao allegation was “unfounded,” they said, and the code snippet he shared did not indicate any correlation or connectivity between the two apps. The Toutiao code, they said, does not link back to China and is “nothing more than a naming convention and technical relic” harking back to ByteDance’s first successful app.Officials also said they have already adopted one key pledge of Project Texas by moving U.S.
Isn’t Facebook just as or more dangerous? And Twitter is now partly owned by Saudi Arabia, so? I’m not disagreeing with banking TikTok, just asking the question.
Nice to see both sides on this well-run committee working together to investigate this potential threat to our security. In contrast to the clown show being chaired by Jordan.