To no one’s surprise. Sure, the data is not stored in servers outside the US, but that doesn’t mean employees are not sharing them with the mothership, which the article is claiming.

Honestly, the offshore data and micro targeting are less interesting than the flex they just made. They showed that they can just blast the entire user base with a single message that can mobilize people and freak out law makers. That wasn’t sophisticated at all.

In my experience, most things about TikTok are purely cosmetic. (Except when that kid broke into the water park during the pandemic and skated down the water slide.)

That being said, the best way to have a company create real data silos is to just wait. Maybe the CIA can recruit the world’s most incompetent middle managers and have them apply to ByteDance jobs but it’ll happen eventually anyway. Probably not worth the effort.

And there seems to be a decent number of Chinese citizens on tiktok. Selling stuff and so on and so forth. And on live. That’s what it seems like anyway. Didn’t the CEO testify to Congress under oath that tiktok was banned in China? Is that just cosmetic also or easily bypassed? Limitless peace