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Social media giant TikTok is in the process of reaching an agreement with the Biden administration to fully secure the app in the United States and ease concerns about the Chinese government’s acquisition of US data, according to the letter released Friday that TikTok dispatched to nine Republican senators.
CEO Shou Zi Chew wrote that the company is close to its final agreement with the US government to ensure that data-sharing exercises won’t fuel national security concerns.
According to TikTok, all US user traffic will currently be shifted to Oracle-managed servers based in California, rather than TikTok’s infrastructure, as part of the deal.
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Later, he stated, TikTok looks forward to erasing all US data from the firm’s servers and depending entirely on Oracle’s storage “with access limited only to authorized personnel, under protocols being developed with the US Government,” Chew said.
Employees of ByteDance in Beijing, which owns TikTok, can obtain data through the app, Chew said in the letter. The company has previously acknowledged that some employees have access to US user data; However, the letter contained more details.
For instance, the foreign data workers can view a “narrow set of non-sensitive TikTok user data,” such as public videos and comments on videos, Chew further wrote.
He added that none of the data is shared with Chinese government officials and that ByteDance employees can only view Americans’ TikTok data after an approval process overseen by the US security team.
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