Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) is pressing the Treasury Department to conduct a thorough review of new whistleblower allegations regarding the Chinese-owned short video app TikTok that were recently brought to his attention.
Writing to Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen on March 8, Hawley said that a TikTok whistleblower has come to him with direct knowledge of the app’s operating practices. His allegations, Hawley said, are “deeply concerning” and appear to contradict with public statements from senior executives of TikTok and its Beijing-based parent company ByteDance over the handling of U.S. users’ data.
Revelations from leaked recordings that engineers in China had repeatedly accessed the platform’s U.S. data as of last January have raised bipartisan concerns in Congress….