Image: Reuters Berita 24 English - According to a TikTok letter seen by Reuters on Friday, the Chinese-owned social media platform TikTok i...
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| Image: Reuters |
Berita 24 English - According to a TikTok letter seen by Reuters on Friday, the Chinese-owned social media platform TikTok informed American senators that it was working on a final agreement with the Biden Administration that would "completely preserve user data and U.S. national security concerns."
According to TikTok, the letter dated Thursday was written in response to concerns expressed in a letter sent on June 27 by a few senators, including Republicans Marsha Blackburn and Ted Cruz.
One of the most well-known social media apps in the world, TikTok is owned by Chinese technology giant ByteDance and has more than 1 billion active users worldwide. The major market for it is the United States.
In a letter to senators, TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew explained that his company was collaborating with Oracle Corp. on "new advanced data security safeguards that we intend to finish in the near future."
TikTok announced last month that it had finished moving user data from American users to Oracle servers, but that backup data was still being stored in American and Singaporean data centres.
In the letter from TikTok, it was recognised that personnel working in China "may have access to TikTok U.S. user data subject to a number of stringent cybersecurity controls and authorised approval mechanisms oversaw by our U.S.-based security team."
According to TikTok, it plans "to completely pivot to Oracle cloud servers located in the U.S. and remove U.S. users' protected data from our own systems."
A company spokeswoman told Reuters that TikTok had responded to the senators' letter. We are looking forward to speaking with members of Congress about the letter's main points.
To further decrease the requirement for data access between geographies, TikTok is trying to increase its engineering capacity in the United States, the spokesman noted.
TikTok "should have gone transparent from the start but instead tried to cloak their activities in secrecy," Tennessee Senator Blackburn stated. She remarked that TikTok must "return and testify before Congress."
The TikTok letter arrived almost two years after a U.S. national security council ordered ByteDance to sell its TikTok shares because to concerns that U.S. user data would be sent to China's communist government.
After Joe Biden succeeded Donald Trump as president of the United States last year, the order was not carried out. The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), however, is still investigating the company's national security, in accordance with the letter.
The letter stated: "We realise we are among the most closely examined platforms from a security standpoint, and we intend to dispel any question regarding the protection of U.S. user data.
TikTok has previously claimed that staff in China have access to user data from Americans. "Our goal is to reduce data access between geographies so that, for example, staff in the APAC area, including China, would have very low access to user data from the EU and US," stated Roland Cloutier, TikTok's chief information security officer, in a post dated 2020.
ByteDance engineers in China had access to American data between September 2021 and January 2022, according to a BuzzFeed report from June.
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Additionally, it was stated in the letter that "ByteDance developed the algorithms for both Douyin and TikTok, and as a result, both products use some of the same underlying core technology building blocks." In China, TikTok is referred to as Douyin.
However, the letter stated that the business logic, algorithm, system integration, and deployment of TikTok are unique to the TikTok application and distinct from Douyin.
As previously reported by Reuters, the server code was still used by several other ByteDance products even though the app code, which controls TikTok's appearance and feel, has been split from Douyin. Basic app functionality including data storage, algorithms for modifying and recommending content, and user profile management are all handled by the server code.
In 2021, the Chinese government acquired a shareholding and a board seat in a significant ByteDance organisation.
In its letter to the senators, TikTok outlined why buying 1% of Beijing Douyin Information Service Ltd was essential for the company to secure a news licence in China.
