In my town they say that “if the river sounds, it is because it brings stones” and it seems that this is confirmed again. Just a few days ago, in the United States there was talk again of a possible veto of TikTok for spying on users. Today, TikTok confesses that its employees in China can see your dataso the controversy is more served than ever. Will the veto finally come? What is ByteDance doing to prevent TikTok from being kicked out of the US?
TikTok shares user data with China, but they say there are few
Since 2019 The United States is going through a tense relationship with TikTok, signaling it to be a danger to national security and to spy on users. The Donald Trump administration charged against the platform, to the point of signing a couple of executive orders to ban it from the country if ByteDance (TikTok’s parent company) did not sell its business in the United States to another company. The dispute even went to trial, but in the end nothing happened and TikTok continued to operate normally.
However, for a few days the panorama was once again filled with tension. One of the top brass at the Federal Communications Commission asked Google and Apple to remove TikTok from their app stores. Later, 9 senators again accused TikTok of espionage after a BuzzFeed report was published that claimed Chinese engineers could access US user data.
Now, Bloomberg published the company’s response to such accusations, and things are not looking good. Shou Zi Chew, CEO of TikTok, admitted in a letter that some employees at its Chinese headquarters can access information from American users. However, he explained that the data accessed is not confidentialare not shared with the Chinese government, serve to ensure the global interoperability of the platform, and are subject to strict security controls.
Specifically, Chew mentions that some of the things they have access to in China are videos and user comments, but that is public information. In addition, he noted that the links between TikTok in the US and ByteDance in China are quite limited, but this still sparked criticism from US lawmakers:
TikTok’s response confirms that our fears about the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) influence on the company were well founded. The Chinese-run company should have come clean from the start, but tried to hide its work secretly. Americans on TikTok need to know that Communist China has their information.” Republican Senator Marsha Blackburn (Tennessee).
TikTok’s ‘Texas Project’ could be its salvation in the United States
Now, you may be wondering if TikTok is doing anything to fix this issue and stop the accusations. According to ByteDance itself, it seems so. The company claims that they are working hand in hand with the United States government to strengthen the security of consumer data, especially that which the Committee on Foreign Investment (CFIUS) considers protected.
The initiative would be called ‘Project Texas’ and addresses measures to solve the concerns of legislators. Among them is the migration of stored data to US servers owned by Oracle, as well as a change in its cloud infrastructure.
This is an important step, as currently 100% of TikTok traffic in the US is routed through Oracle Corp. However, the information stored is divided between data centers in the USA (Oracle) and Singapore (TikTok). What does TikTok intend to do? Completely migrate their service in the United States to Oracle servers and remove the information from their own systems.
Will they really do it? Could it be that the novel between TikTok and the United States will come to fruition? We will have to wait to find out, although Anonymous herself has accused TikTok of espionage, and they are not a government.
