Obernolte, Johnson use tech backgrounds to query TikTok CEO
However Ronald Deibert, Citizen Lab’s director, revealed an announcement March 23, the day Chew testified, saying the CEO was misquoting the lab’s analysis in statements to governments as “someway exculpatory.”
The Citizen Lab report discovered that TikTok was much like social media apps, performing like a “vacuum cleaner of non-public knowledge,” however the researchers had no “visibility into what occurred to person knowledge as soon as it was collected and transmitted to TikTok’s servers,” Deibert’s assertion mentioned.
“Though we had no option to decide whether or not or not it had occurred, we even speculated about doable mechanisms by which the Chinese language authorities would possibly use unconventional methods to acquire TikTok person knowledge through strain on ByteDance,” Deibert wrote.
The lab additionally discovered that TikTok contained dormant software program code initially written for the Chinese language model of TikTok, known as Douyin and additionally owned by ByteDance.
“Whereas Citizen Lab could have been afraid to say the plain conclusion, Mr. Chew, I’m not,” Johnson mentioned. “TikTok supply code is riddled with backdoors and CCP censorship gadgets,” he mentioned, referring to the Chinese language Communist Occasion.
