“We have not provided any US user data to the Chinese party, nor would we if requested to do so,” TikTok said.
New York:
TikTok this week tried to reassure US senators that it is taking all necessary steps to restrict access to user data from outside the United States, including by employees of its parent company, the Chinese group ByteDance.
The social media company responded by letter Thursday to questions from nine Republican U.S. senators about its data storage and access policies.
The letter was initially published by the DailyExpertNews, but TikTok has since confirmed its contents to AFP.
In response to previous questions from US authorities, TikTok had indicated in mid-June that all of its data on US-based users is now stored on US-based servers operated by US company Oracle.
In its letter on Thursday, TikTok confirmed claims in a BuzzFeed article that employees in China could access US users’ data, but only within “robust cybersecurity controls and authorization approval protocols” overseen by the “company’s US security team”. †
The company reiterated to the senators that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) had never asked for data on US users.
“We have not provided U.S. user data to the CCP, and we wouldn’t if we asked for it,” it said.
TikTok officials also said that while ByteDance engineers could work on the platform’s algorithms, the new protocol means they can only do so in Oracle’s computing environment, without extracting any data from it.
The popular social media platform is currently under evaluation by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), an inter-agency review board that assesses the risks of foreign investment to US national security.
During his White House tenure, former President Donald Trump was concerned about the security of the platform’s data and tried to force ByteDance to sell its subsidiary to Oracle.
He also issued executive orders to completely ban service in the United States, but those never went into effect and were later revoked by his successor, Joe Biden.
President Biden has nonetheless tasked his administration with measuring the potential risks associated with foreign ownership of social media websites and apps.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by DailyExpertNews staff and has been published from a syndicated feed.)
