Last week TikTok announced to its employees that its Chief Security Officer (CSO) Roland Cloutier is stepping down. The move, which apparently had been planned for months, follows a BuzzFeed News report in June that TikTok employees in China repeatedly accessed American users’ data at least from September 2021-January 2022. In June TikTok also announced they are moving data storage to Oracle (i.e., U.S.-based) servers and that the outgoing CSO was not in charge of that effort.
TikTok shared the main news with employees by sending:
A memo from the outgoing CSO
A memo co-signed by the TikTok CEO and ByteDance VP of Technology (ByteDance owns TikTok)
I’m sharing these two memos (below) as a way to show you how a major multibillion-dollar firm with outsized global influence and ties to mainland China reports to employees a major move in the C-Suite.
Here’s what sticks out:
