But Ronald Deibert, Citizen Lab’s director, published a statement March 23, the day Chew testified, saying the CEO was misquoting the lab’s research in statements to governments as “somehow exculpatory.”
The Citizen Lab report found that TikTok was similar to social media apps, acting like a “vacuum cleaner of personal data,” but the researchers had no “visibility into what happened to user data once it was collected and transmitted to TikTok’s servers,” Deibert’s statement said.
“Although we had no way to determine whether or not it had happened, we even speculated about possible mechanisms through which the Chinese government might use unconventional techniques to obtain TikTok user data via pressure on ByteDance,” Deibert wrote.
The lab also found that TikTok contained dormant software code originally written for the Chinese version of TikTok, called Douyin and also owned by ByteDance.
“While Citizen Lab may have been afraid to say the obvious conclusion, Mr. Chew, I’m not,” Johnson said. “TikTok source code is riddled with backdoors and CCP censorship devices,” he said, referring to the Chinese Communist Party.
