TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew got his start in tech at Facebook—now his app is its biggest competitor

Prior to moving the astir fashionable societal media app successful the world, TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew was an intern for 1 of his largest competitors.

Chew, 40, has led TikTok since 2021 — overseeing its ascent to go the world's astir downloaded app past year, with 672 cardinal downloads, according to a Statista analysis of iOS and Google Play data. 

The occurrence of the app, which is owned by Beijing-based tech elephantine ByteDance, has sounded alarms for U.S. officials who judge it could beryllium a imaginable information breach. On Thursday, Chew sat earlier Congress to support TikTok against spying claims arsenic Congress and President Biden measurement a potential U.S. ban.

"We are committed to [being] precise transparent with our users astir what we collect," Chew told the House Energy and Commerce Committee. "I don't judge what we cod is much than astir players successful the industry."

As of March 2023, TikTok collects user-provided relationship accusation including idiosyncratic generated content, messages, acquisition accusation and connection preferences, according to the company's privacy policy.

The level besides automatically collects determination data, metadata and cookies for advertizing purposes, which is accordant with the privateness policies of companies similar Meta and Snapchat.

Chew has immoderate acquisition successful this arena. Born successful Singapore, helium graduated from the University College London successful 2006 with a bachelor's grade successful economics. He past got an MBA from Harvard University — and portion there, helium interned astatine Facebook, helium told Harvard Business School's alumni website successful 2020.

At the time, successful the summertime of 2009, Facebook was connected the rise. It overtook Google arsenic the country's astir fashionable website the pursuing year, garnering 8.9% of each U.S. visits betwixt January and November 2010, Reuters reported.

Today, Facebook has 2.9 cardinal progressive users, according to Meta's 2022 Q4 earnings presentation. TikTok whitethorn not beryllium acold behind: It announced reaching a cardinal monthly users successful 2021, conscionable 5 years aft it was founded, and has apt grown since.

The video platform's meteoric maturation has seemingly thrown a wrench into Facebook's plans. Zuckerberg admitted that helium "sort of missed" the caller mode radical "interact with discovered content," helium told Stratechery past year.

Facebook adjacent reportedly changed its algorithms to vie much straight with TikTok past year, emphasizing much short-form video contented and altering the mode it recommends caller posts to users, according to a leaked interior memo obtained by The Verge.

On Thursday, Chew appeared to notation Facebook and different societal media competitors portion telling Congress that TikTok has "tried to larn the lessons of companies that person travel earlier us," and that lawmakers' information concerns should beryllium industry-wide.

"The imaginable security, privacy, contented manipulation concerns raised astir TikTok are truly not unsocial to us. The aforesaid issues use to different companies," helium said. "We judge what's needed are wide transparent rules that use broadly to each tech companies. Ownership is not astatine the halfway of addressing these concerns."

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