TikTok management confirmed to US senators that a number of Chinese employees of the social network could access user data from the US.
"TikTok's response confirms that our concerns about the CCP's influence on the company were well founded," said Republican Senator Marsha Blackburn.
The social network said that Chinese employees of the company can access certain information about TikTok users from the United States, but for this they must pass a series of internal security protocols, and the information itself is subject to "strict control of the cybersecurity department" and cannot be transferred to third parties, including including the Chinese government.
The social network said it is working with the US government to increase data security, especially anything that is defined as "protected" by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, or CFIUS. This new initiative, called "The Texas Project," involves the physical storage of US information in data centers on US servers owned by Oracle. TikTok is also migrating its platform to Oracle's cloud infrastructure so that access to the app and algorithm can be rolled out to US users from internal data centers.
In June, BuzzFeed published an investigation alleging that TikTok employees in China had access to the personal data of US users. Then the social network has already announced that it is taking measures to transfer data to the United States.
Meanwhile, FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr has written to Apple CEO Tim Cook and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai to remove TikTok from their companies' app stores. According to Carr, the Chinese application does not comply with the rules of the App Store and Google Play because it collects a lot of sensitive data.
Michael Zippo
2022/07/02
https://linkedin.com/in/michael-zippo-9136441b1
[email protected]
Sources: Python.Engineering, Bloomberg.com
