Your Data is 'Seen in China,' According to Leaked Audio of TikTok Employees

What’s going on with TikTok? A recent batch of leaked audio shows that TikTok has repeatedly accessed nonpublic data belonging to Americans. There were over 80 recorded TikTok meetings as evidence. Additionally, a TikTok’s Trust and Safety department member was caught on this audio saying, “Everything is seen in China.”

How popular is TikTok? TikTok is a short-form video social media platform. It’s incredibly popular globally and in the United States, with over 80 million domestic users. Twenty-five percent of the users in America are 10-19, and twenty-two percent are 20-29. It is the single most influential social media app among those age groups globally and in America.

Now, the FCC wants it gone. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) wants Apple and Google to remove TikTok from their app stores. A commissioner cites the data concerns and claims that the app is non-compliant with app store policies.

Trump wanted it gone back in 2020. Trump wrote in his executive order that TikTok’s “data collection threatens to allow the Chinese Communist Party access to Americans’ personal and proprietary information.” It wasn’t an unprecedented move. India and many other countries banned TikTok in 2020, citing the same national security issues.

What is TikTok going to do about this? After the leaked audio was released, TikTok announced they would now be routing all U.S. users’ private data to cloud servers in the U.S., but this isn’t the first time they promised information about U.S. users would be stored here.