This past Friday, TikTok announced that it had started routing American users’ data to U.S. servers owned by Oracle. Hours later, a report from BuzzFeed News claims that TikTok employees in China had “repeatedly” accessed U.S. users’ data, based on over 80 hours of leaked calls it dubbed the “TikTok Tapes.” According to the report, engineers in China had access to U.S. user data between September 2021 and January 2022. Buzzfeed News claims that a member of TikTok’s Trust and Safety department said “Everything is seen in China,” in a September 2021 meeting, and that “U.S. employees had to turn to their colleagues in China to determine how U.S. user data was flowing.”
