The data security practices of China’s ByteDance short-form video app TikTok may be a bit fishy after all, a new Bloomberg report suggests.
Former US President Donald Trump considered TikTok a security risk and tried to ban it. He wanted parent company ByteDance to sell TikTok’s US business. President Joe Biden lifted the ban in June 2021.
Recently, some US senators accused TikTok of keeping tabs on US citizens after Buzzfeed News published a report saying TikTok’s engineers in China could access US consumer data and asked if China-based employees had access to US user data would have and whether this information was shared with the Chinese government.
In response to those nine senators, TikTok Chief Executive Officer Shou Zi Chew admitted in a letter that some China-based employees can access information from US users, including public videos and comments. He added that none of this data is shared with the Chinese government and is subject to strict security controls.
Chew also said that TikTok has limited links to ByteDance and the information non-US based employees can access is non-confidential and these exchanges help ensure global interoperability.
This led to more criticism from US lawmakers of TikTok’s data-sharing protocols.
TikTok’s response confirms that our fears about the CCP’s influence on the company were justified. The Chinese-led company should have been clean from the start, but it has tried to keep its work secret. Americans need to know if they’re on TikTok, communist China has their information. — Republican Senator Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee
TikTok says it is working with the US government to strengthen the security of consumer data, particularly the information the Committee on Foreign Investment (CFIUS) defines as protected.
Going by the name “Project Texas,” the social media company is taking steps to address lawmakers’ concerns. This includes physically storing information about US customers on Oracle’s US servers. TikTok is also moving its platform to the American software company’s cloud infrastructure. Currently, 100 percent of US traffic is routed to Oracle Corp, but this data is backed up in the company’s own data centers in the US and Singapore -Migrate servers from Oracle and delete the information from their own systems.
According to app intelligence company SensorTower, TikTok has been downloaded 321.6 million times in the US.