TikTok has confirmed that employees outside the United States could access U.S. user data, a revelation that appears to validate many concerns regarding China’s access to the app’s data.
The confirmation was offered in a response letter sent by TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew to nine Republican senators, including Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Marsha Blackburn (R-TN). The letter addressed a series of economic and security concerns after a Buzzfeed News report revealed that the company’s Chinese employees were able to access U.S. user data.
“Employees outside the U.S., including China-based employees, can have access to TikTok U.S. user data subject to a series of robust cybersecurity controls and authorization approval protocols overseen by our U.S.-based security team,” Chew confirmed in a Thursday letter acquired by the New York Times. This data reportedly goes through an “internal data classification system and approval process in place that assigns levels of access based on the data’s classification and requires approvals for access to U.S. user data.” The classification in question is determined based on “sensitivity of the data.”
DEMOCRATIC PARTY EMBRACES CHINESE-OWNED TIKTOK
Chew reiterated that all U.S. user data would be transferred to servers run by the U.S. cloud hosting service Oracle, a change announced on the same day as the Buzzfeed report. He also said that the Chinese Communist Party had never asked for U.S. user data and that TikTok has never provided said data to the CCP nor would it do so if the party asked for it. While Tiktok’s parent company, ByteDance, has maintained that it would never hand over U.S. user data to China, security experts have expressed concerns about China’s national intelligence law, which would require all Chinese companies to comply with their demands.
The TikTok CEO also confirmed that the company is negotiating with the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States on what data should be “protected.” The current agreement with CFIUS would keep private details such as birthdays and phone numbers protected, according to Buzzfeed News. It would not include user profiles, comments, or posts, possibly allowing China-based employees insights into TikTok users’ habits.
Federal Communications Commission Commissioner Brendan Carr expressed concerns about TikTok’s relationship with China in a June 24 letter in which he demanded that Apple and Google remove TikTok from their app stores due to the security concerns.
Then-President Donald Trump issued an August 2020 executive order prohibiting transactions with ByteDance, alleging that TikTok’s vast data collection “threatens to allow the Chinese Communist Party access to Americans’ personal and proprietary information — potentially allowing China to track the locations of federal employees and contractors, build dossiers of personal information for blackmail, and conduct corporate espionage.”
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The Trump Commerce Department backed off the ban in November 2020, citing a federal court order. The Biden Justice Department asked a federal appeals court to dismiss the TikTok case in July 2021.
