The Rundown: Twitter’s whistleblower highlights concerns with Chinese ad revenue, security concerns in Senate hearing

By Marty Swant

During a hearing held today by the Senate Judiciary Committee, Peiter Zatko — a cyber security expert, well-known hacker and recent Twitter executive whistleblower — quoted the writer Upton Sinclair in his opening remarks to members of Congress.

“It difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it,” Zatko quoting Sinclair.

During several hours of testimony to members of Congress, Zatko said the company has put profits ahead of user safety while failing to address key concerns that put user data and national security at risk. Zatko — who joined Twitter in November 2020, but was fired from his role as head of security in January 2022 — said Twitter has even misled the public and government while exposing sensitive user data and falling behind on security standards.

The hearing comes the same day as a majority of Twitter shareholders voted to approve a sale of the company to Elon Musk, which is still hung up in court in a contentious legal battle. When asked for comment about Zatko’s claims, a Twitter spokesperson said the company’s hiring process is independent of foreign influence and that access to data is managed through a variety of checks, controls and monitoring systems.

“Today’s hearing only confirms that Mr. Zatko’s allegations are riddled with inconsistencies and inaccuracies,” the Twitter spokesperson told Digiday in an emailed statement.

Here are a few of the ad-related themes that he discussed with lawmakers:

Chinese ad revenue, security concerns

Since coming forward as a whistleblower last month, Zatko — who is also known for his hacker name “Mudge” — has raised a number of severe accusations about various policies and practices at Twitter. He’s accused the company of putting foreign agents on its payroll, misleading U.S. and foreign regulators, allowing foreign governments to potentially access sensitive data and failing to keep up with security standards used by other tech companies.

Other social platforms such as TikTok have come under increased scrutiny for potentially allowing the Chinese government to access user data. However, Zatko said it’s a “very valid concern” that the Chinese officials collect U.S. consumers’ data from Twitter allowing Chinese companies to advertise on the platform via click-through ads that lead users off-platform to Chinese websites.

Twitter employees raised related concerns when he was still at the company, according to Zatko, who recalled a sales executive telling him soon after he joined that there was a “big internal conundrum” over Twitter making too much money from sales to stop the Chinese advertisers despite employee concerns. “In a nutshell,” Zatko said, “It was, ‘We’re already in bed, it would be problematic if we lost that revenue stream, so figure out a way to make people comfortable with it.’”

“They didn’t know what people they were putting at risk or what information they were even giving to the government,” Zatko said. “Which made me concerned that they hadn’t thought through the problem in the first place and that they were putting their users at risk. And that was …read more

Source:: Digiday