According to a former senior data scientist for the social media giant TikTok, he alleges that numerous United States based TikTok executives were “complicit” in efforts to supply data to their parent company based in China despite the company claiming that they were not giving American data to the Chinese.
In March, the House of Representatives passed legislation that would require TikTok to be sold off from its parent company ByteDance which is based in China, if TikTok wanted to continue to operate within the United States. Congress claims that the social media app may be a potential national security threat with American information being supplied to China.
Fortune reported on Monday that a former senior data scientists for TikTok, Evan Turner, alleges that the TikTok hid the collection of American data sent to ByteDance while trying to solve the issue of American’s security at the same time.
“I literally worked on a project that gave U.S. data to China,” Turner described to Fortune. “They were completely complicit in that. There were Americans that were working in upper management that were completely complicit in this.”
During his tenure, Turner reported to a Beijing-based ByteDance executive at first but then was reassigned to an initiative called Project Texas which invested $1.5 billion to try and secure American data from leaking to the Chinese. During that time, Turner was told by a human resources representative that he would continue to collaborate with the Beijing-based ByteDance executive.
Fortune reported Turner would meet with the ByteDance executive weekly giving status updates on key assignments.
These routine updates allegedly required him to send spreadsheets with hundreds of thousands American TikTok users’ data such as names, emails, and locations. Despite the launch of Project Texas, these updates readily occurred with the intention of identifying trends to get as many Americans hooked on the app as possible.
TikTok has claimed they prohibited China from accessing any American’s data but Fortune interviewed 11 ex-employees who alleged TikTok was closed aligned with ByteDance before and after the launch of Project Texas.
The Wall Street Journal also reported that numerous managers directed employees to send American data to China circumventing authorized channels. The executives believed that ByteDance needed the data because they controlled the TikTok algorithm to get more people hooked on the app.
Currently, TikTok and ByteDance have not commented on the new allegations against them.