Chinese government can access Tiktok data
TIKTOK is a wildly popular social media platform for sharing viral videos, with an estimated seven million Australian users.
It is particularly popular with young Australians.
For some time there have been privacy and cyber security concerns about the app because its Chinese owner, Bytedance, has a close relationship with the Chinese government and is subject to China’s all-encompassing national security laws.
But two years ago, Tiktok Australia assured the parliament and Australians that our data would be safe because it would be stored in the United States and Singapore, not China. It gave similar assurances in other Western democracies, including the United States.
All that changed last month in an explosive report in BuzzFeed when a Tiktok US whistleblower leaked hours of recordings of internal meetings that revealed that, although US user data was stored on shore, it was accessible and had been repeatedly accessed in mainland China. One company engineer in China was even described as a “Master Admin” who “has access to everything”.
In response, nine US senators wrote to Tiktok in the United States to demand answers and the company admitted US user data was in fact accessible in China and had been repeatedly accessed by its Chinese employees.
As shadow cyber security minister, I wrote to Tiktok Australia to seek the same information. This week, the company reluctantly admitted Australian user data is in the same boat: it is accessible and has been accessed in China.
In its reply, Tiktok Australia assured me – just as it did two years ago – that the company would never hand over Australians’ data to the Chinese government.
Every Australian, particularly parents with young children who use the app, has the right to be concerned.
China’s national security legislation, including its 2017 National Intelligence Law, requires Chinese citizens and companies to co-operate with Chinese intelligence agencies when asked, putting our data within reach of the Chinese Communist Party.
What’s more, they are required to keep that co-operation secret. Even if we believed the company’s assurances that it would not co-operate with Chinese intelligence agencies, its employees are required to do so and are compelled to conceal this from their employer.
Sadly, based on the public comments of Bytedance’s chairman and founder, Zhang Yiming, we have every reason to expect the company would in fact enthusiastically co-operate with the Chinese government.
In 2018, Zhang publicly apologised for failing to sufficiently promote the CCP’S socialist ideology on the company’s platforms and promised to educate his staff about the importance of working closely with the party to achieve its objectives. Zhang specifically noted his concerns that Tiktok had “deficiencies in education on the socialist core values and deviation from public opinion guidance”.
This reinforces other concerns that Tiktok is a permissive platform for authoritarian state-backed disinformation campaigns and also censors content critical of the Chinese human rights record.
Anthony Albanese appointed a Cyber Security Minister, Clare O’neil, to his cabinet in June, to much fanfare. But so far there is no evidence the Albanese government has taken any action to address these new revelations, despite the calls from many cyber security experts.
In an age of strategic competition, where information is power, we must investigate all possible regulatory responses to protect Australians’ privacy and cyber security.