Despite not holding a senior role, Goziker said his main job at TikTok was to run Project Texas to ensure the social media app's plans to protect U.S. user data were effective. He claims that it was to “supervise” him. The goal is to create a set of safety standards that satisfy the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, an interagency agency tasked with assessing the national security risks associated with foreign companies acquiring or acquiring a significant stake in a U.S. company. measures were to be introduced. CFIUS has the power to force companies to terminate deals it deems risky, and since 2019 has been investigating ByteDance's 2017 acquisition of lip-syncing app Musical.ly, which was later integrated into TikTok. Ta.
In court filings, Goziker claims to have interviewed more than 30 people from TikTok and ByteDance about Project Texas. He said he identified flaws in the initiative and refused to “sign off” it, despite purported pressure from managers and other executives at the company. According to court records, Mr. Goziker tried to raise his concerns with TikTok's top executives, including the CEO and board of directors.
In a court filing, Goziker claims he found evidence that TikTok's software could send data to China in January 2022, weeks before he was fired. In the filing, he said that through “cooperative and intentional collaboration with ByteDance engineers in mainland China,” the software within the TikTok software connects the platform to Toutiao, a popular Chinese news aggregation app also owned by ByteDance. It claims to have obtained “verified deliverables.” Godziker said his findings show that U.S. data from TikTok can still flow to the People's Republic, despite TikTok's claims to the contrary. The filing does not include detailed documentary evidence of his claims.
in march last year Two weeks after Goziker's claims were reported, washington post, TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew appeared before Congress and was heavily criticized for the app's ties to China. Later, U.S. Reps. Jan Schakowsky (D) and Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R) each sent questions to TikTok about the claims aired on the TV show. post Story.
TikTok countered that many of the claims in the article were unsubstantiated. The statement said that references to Toutiao in TikTok's code “in no way imply any correlation, integration, or network connectivity between Toutiao and TikTok,” adding, “Once Project Texas is launched, the Toutiao news application cannot interfere with TikTok's data flow.” completion. “
In the lawsuit and email records reviewed by WIRED, Goziker also communicated with a Forbes journalist who has written a number of influential articles about TikTok's data security practices and its ties to ByteDance. revealed that it was. In June 2022, when the journalist was working at BuzzFeed News, BuzzFeed News published an article based on 80 internal meetings at TikTok in which nine different employees were asked to ” He reportedly made statements indicating that Chinese engineers had accessed U.S. data during January 2019. ”
Godziker claimed to WIRED that he was the source of the recording. Forbes told WIRED that he does not comment on procurement.
Sen. Warner and Republican Sen. Marco Rubio, vice chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, later cited the BuzzFeed article in a letter urging the Federal Trade Commission to open an investigation into TikTok. Politico reported this month that authorities heeded the call and launched an investigation into whether the app was “deceiving users by preventing individuals within China from accessing their data.”
While Mr. Goziker was filing his lawsuit, U.S. lawmakers were closer than ever to banning the app. The House of Representatives last month unanimously approved a bill that would force ByteDance to sell TikTok within six months, when it would be illegal to download the app from U.S. app stores. The bill is currently being considered in the Senate, and President Joe Biden has already said he will sign it into law.
