Internal documents reveal that Chinese employees shared TikTok user's driver's license, address, photo, etc. with in-house tool ``Lark''
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The New York Times reported that TikTok employees shared users' personal information and child pornography on an internal messaging tool called 'Lark' developed by parent company ByteDance.
Inside How TikTok Shares User Data - The New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/24/technology/inside-how-tiktok-shares-user-data-lark.html
According to four current and former employees who provided information to The New York Times, thousands of TikTok and ByteDance employees, including those in China, belong to Lark groups (chat rooms). In addition to sharing the driver's license and passport of TikTok users, it was also possible to view addresses, IP addresses, user IDs, device information, etc.
Some employees expressed a sense of urgency about using Lark because of the amount of information they could easily access. A TikTok employee asked in a July 2022 internal report, “Can a Beijing-based employee own a group that contains sensitive user data?” increase.
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Lark is a Chinese-only tool called “Feishu” originally developed by ByteDance in 2017. Lark, which was introduced after that, has chat, video conferencing, task management, and document collaboration functions. It's the same as other instant messaging tools made for businesses, like Slack.'
Internal documents obtained by The New York Times state that Lark will have at least a period from 2019 to 2022 to handle issues with personal TikTok accounts or share materials containing personally identifiable information. It was noted that it had been used.
For example, in June 2019, a Massachusetts woman's driver's license sent to TikTok for identity verification was shared on Lark and posted to a group of more than 1,100 people to suspend and unsubscribe accounts. I know it was done. In addition to the driver's license, passports and identification cards were uploaded to Lark, and as of 2022, employees could access it.
Lark also handles materials that appear to be child sexual abuse content posted by users on TikTok, and in October 2019, TikTok employees shared content in which girls aged 3 and over were shirtless and they were discussing closing the account.
Due to concerns about personal information and confidential data leaking to China in this way, there is a growing movement to eliminate TikTok in the United States, and in May 2023, a law prohibiting TikTok was enacted in Montana. . In addition, the use of TikTok is prohibited by government agencies, universities, and the military.
``TikTok prohibition law'' enacted in Montana, scheduled to come into effect on January 1, 2024-GIGAZINE
In response to these movements, TikTok spent a large amount of money to appeal its safety , and submitted a plan called `` Project Texas '' to disclose TikTok's transparency to the Biden administration, continuing the service in the United States. I am aiming for
“If you look at Lark, you can see that all the backend processes are overseen by ByteDance,” said Rex Stamos, director of the Stanford University Internet Observatory. It's just a cover for me,' he commented.
On the other hand, TikTok spokesperson Alex Howrek said, ``The documents seen by The New York Times are outdated,'' and deleted the American user data that TikTok collected before June 2022. I emphasized that I am in the process of being in and sending data to a server in the United States managed by a third party.
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