SCOOP: A TikTok data scientist says he was assigned a Seattle-based manager on paper, while actually reporting to a Beijing-based ByteDance executive, who ordered him to regularly email U.S. data in spreadsheets to ByteDance workers in China during 2022. fortune.com/2024/04/15/tik…
This occurred after TikTok launched Project Texas to Separate U.S. user data from ByteDance.
@iamsternlicht @stucchio I'm in favor of reining in TikTok, but he can't have been sending them that much data if it was in spreadsheets.
@iamsternlicht Raise your hand if you’re actually surprised
@iamsternlicht Haha data in spreadsheets, i.e. user base, growth, time spent, etc. (many listed company would report this to retail investors, let alone to its parent company) - not those sensitive privacy data that media/reporter trying to mislead you to believe.
@iamsternlicht You had me at "regularly email U.S. data in spreadsheets to ByteDance workers in China;" and here we thought it was some sort of a genius impossible-to-detect top secret grand scheme behind surveilling us unsuspecting Americans.
@iamsternlicht Reporting on China often only scratches the surface of the true scope of wrongdoing. I cannot say if or how this principle will apply to TikTok/Bytedance, but it is worth keeping in mind.