TikTok gave U.S. lawmakers extra particulars in a letter dated Thursday about the way it plans to maintain information about its American customers separate from ByteDance, its Chinese language dad or mum firm, aiming to fight issues that the video app poses a nationwide safety danger.
In a letter to nine Republican senators, Shou Zi Chew, TikTok’s chief govt, defined how the corporate would function the app from servers managed by Oracle, the U.S. cloud computing big. TikTok could be run from the American firm’s machines and audited by a 3rd social gathering, Mr. Chew mentioned. He additionally reiterated a plan to retailer American customers’ private data with Oracle, fairly than on TikTok’s servers.
“We all know we’re among the many most scrutinized platforms from a safety standpoint, and we purpose to take away any doubt concerning the safety of U.S. consumer information,” Mr. Chew wrote within the letter, which was obtained by The New York Occasions.
TikTok, which is very well-liked for its quick and viral meme-making movies, has been working to rebut issues that it’s a nationwide safety danger. For years, critics of the app have fearful that the Chinese language authorities would request information belonging to People straight from ByteDance and that TikTok was topic to the affect of the Chinese language Communist Celebration.
In 2020, President Donald J. Trump cited these issues and demanded that ByteDance promote TikTok if the app was to stay in American app shops. His administration later introduced a deal during which ByteDance would promote a minimum of a part of TikTok to Oracle, although the transaction by no means got here to fruition.
TikTok stays underneath the scrutiny of the Committee on Overseas Funding in the USA, a bunch of presidency businesses that vets overseas purchases of American corporations.
Final month, BuzzFeed Information reported that ByteDance workers had gained entry to the app’s information as not too long ago as this 12 months and that workers had been struggling to cordon off data collected by the app.
After the report, 9 Republican senators — together with Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee and John Thune of South Dakota — wrote to TikTok with questions on its practices. Final month, a member of the Federal Communications Fee additionally mentioned Apple and Google ought to take away TikTok from their app shops.
In Mr. Chew’s letter responding to the Republican senators, he mentioned ByteDance workers in China may get entry to TikTok information solely when “topic to a collection of strong cybersecurity controls and authorization approval protocols overseen by our U.S.-based safety group.”
He additionally reiterated the corporate’s hope that it will quickly have the ability to delete U.S. information from its servers and retailer the knowledge completely with Oracle. (Some particulars of its plans had been first reported by BuzzFeed.)
“Now we have not spoken publicly about these plans out of respect for the confidentiality of the engagement with the U.S. authorities, however circumstances now require that we share a few of that data publicly to clear up the errors and misconceptions within the article and a few ongoing issues associated to different elements of our enterprise,” he mentioned.
However Mr. Chew additionally made it clear that ByteDance workers in China would nonetheless be engaged on TikTok. These workers can nonetheless develop the algorithm that feeds personalised video suggestions to TikTok’s customers, he mentioned, although Oracle would “be certain that coaching of the TikTok algorithm” occurs solely on its servers.
And sure data — like public movies and feedback — would stay accessible to ByteDance workers underneath situations accepted by the U.S. authorities, he wrote, to “guarantee world interoperability so our U.S. customers, creators, manufacturers and retailers are afforded the identical wealthy and protected TikTok expertise as world customers.”
Ms. Blackburn mentioned in a press release on Friday that Mr. Chew’s letter proved that fears concerning the Chinese language Communist Celebration’s affect on the corporate “had been effectively based.”
“The Chinese language-run firm ought to have come clear from the beginning, nevertheless it tried to shroud its work in secrecy,” she mentioned, including that TikTok wanted to testify earlier than Congress once more.
