Former Twitter Security Chief: Twitter Sells Personal Information to the CCP Government, Putting Chinese Users at Risk

On August 23rd Twitter’s former head of cybersecurity, Peiter Zatko, made public a complaint alleging that Twitter is putting Chinese users at risk by selling personal data to the organizations under control by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) government.

According to United Press, Zatko recently disclosed whistleblower documents showing that Twitter had received money from unidentified CCP agencies so that these agencies could obtain the identities of Chinese people who used Twitter to circumvent the CCP government’s heavy-handed speech censorship. The document states that Twitter executives were well aware that receiving funds from the Chinese Communist Party would put Chinese users at risk.

The document states that Twitter’s user privacy protection system is extremely insecure. Twitter allows employees to access personal data about users that they don’t need for their jobs, such as phone numbers, email addresses, etc. This render foreign spies to have easy access to this sensitive information.

In response, the U.S. Congress decided to hold a hearing on September 13 to discuss the issue, and Zatko will also attend the meeting.

Zatko has served in senior positions at Google, payment platform Stripe, and the U.S. Department of Defense. He has extensive experience in cybersecurity management. He has been trying to bring the security vulnerability of the system to the attention to Twitter internally, but no one has paid attention to it for many months, so he could only file a complaint with the authorities.