TikTok comes clean and admits China-based employees can access data it talks about you

There could be something strange about Chinese ByteDance’s short video app TikTok’s data security practices, yet a new one suggests Bloomberg report.

Former US President Donald Trump viewed TikTok as a security risk and tried to ban it. He wanted parent company ByteDance to sell TikTok’s US operations. President Joe Biden repealed the ban in June 2021.

Recently, some US senators accused TikTok of monitoring US citizens Buzzfeed news released a report that said TikTok engineers in China had access to US consumer data and asked whether employees based in China could access US users’ data and whether that 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 have access to information from US users, including public videos and comments. He added that none of that 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 that the information that non-U.S. employees can access is non-sensitive in nature and that sharing helps 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 influence of the CCP in the company were well-founded. The China-run company should have been obvious from the start, but it tried to cover up its work in secret. Americans need to know if they are 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, especially the information the Committee on Foreign Investment (CFIUS) defines as protected.

Under an effort called “Project Texas,” the social media company is taking steps to address concerns raised by lawmakers. This includes physically storing information about US customers on US servers owned by Oracle. TikTok is also shifting its platform to the US software company’s cloud infrastructure.

Currently, 100 percent of US traffic is routed to Oracle Corp., but that data is backed up to the company’s own data centers in the US and Singapore. TikTok plans to fully migrate to Oracle’s US servers in the future and remove the information from its own systems.

According to app intelligence company SensorTower, TikTok has been downloaded 321.6 million times in the US.