India’s decision to ban China’s TikTok video application for security reasons and threats by former US President Donald Trump to do so could have been well-founded. Although TikTok’s Chinese father, ByteDance, denies sharing user data with the Chinese government, leaked audio from more than 80 internal TikTok employee meetings that was reviewed by Buzzfeed News suggests that the risk is that it happens continuous. While TikTok claims that the data of its U.S. users is secure because it is stored in the U.S., not China, leaked conversations indicate that ByteDance employees in China have “repeatedly accessed non-public data about TikTok users in the United States “. According to Buzzfeed News, in one of the audio clips a member of TikTok’s trust and security department is heard saying, “Everything is seen in China.” In another clip, a TikTok director refers to a Beijing-based engineer as a “master administrator” who “has access to everything.” While a TikTok executive told the U.S. Senate last year that access to his U.S. data was strictly governed by a security-based team, in fact “U.S. employees had to “I asked my colleagues in China to determine how US user data was flowing. U.S. staff had no permission or knowledge of how to access the data on their own.” The risk of US user data falling into the hands of the Chinese government has increased since China’s crackdown on technology companies began last year. The main risk is that “the government could force ByteDance to collect and deliver information (from TikTok) as a form of ‘data espionage'”. But China could also use TikTok to hurt the United States more insidiously, the Buzzfeed News report says. The app’s “For You” algorithm, which recommends what a user should see below, could be modified to show videos that “influence the business, cultural, or political behavior of Americans.” This is a very real possibility given that social media algorithms were suspected of influencing the 2016 Trump election.