Following heightened worries that U.S. customers’ knowledge had been accessed by TikTok engineers in China between September 2021 and January 2022, the corporate sought to assuage U.S. lawmakers that it is taking steps to “strengthen knowledge safety.”
The admission that some China-based staff can entry data from U.S. customers got here in a letter despatched to 9 senators, which additional famous that the process requires the people to clear quite a few inner safety protocols.
The contents of the letter, first reported by The New York Instances, shares extra particulars about TikTok’s plans to deal with knowledge safety issues by means of a multi-pronged initiative codenamed “Challenge Texas.”
“Staff outdoors the U.S., together with China-based staff, can have entry to TikTok U.S. consumer knowledge topic to a sequence of strong cybersecurity controls and authorization approval protocols overseen by our U.S.-based safety crew,” TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew wrote within the memo.
This contains what it calls a slim set of non-sensitive TikTok U.S. consumer knowledge, reminiscent of public movies and feedback, to fulfill interoperability necessities, whereas emphasizing that this entry will probably be “very restricted” in scope and pursuant to protocols developed in collaboration with the U.S. authorities.
TikTok, a well-liked social video-sharing service from Beijing-based ByteDance, has lengthy remained within the crosshairs of U.S. lawmakers over nationwide safety dangers that would come up from the Chinese language authorities requesting knowledge belonging to U.S. customers immediately from its mum or dad agency.
However within the letter, the corporate aimed to reassure that it has by no means been requested to supply knowledge to the Chinese language authorities and that it will not accede to such authorities inquiries.
TikTok additional reiterated that 100% of U.S. consumer knowledge is routed to Oracle cloud infrastructure situated within the U.S., and that it is working with the enterprise software program agency on extra superior knowledge safety controls that it hopes to finalize “within the close to future.”
On prime of that, the ByteDance-owned firm mentioned it is planning to delete U.S. knowledge from its personal backup servers in Singapore and the U.S. and absolutely change to Oracle cloud servers located within the U.S.
The newest wave of scrutiny into TikTok follows a report from BuzzFeed Information that alleged frequent entry by ByteDance workers, citing nameless staff, who mentioned “the whole lot is seen in China” and referenced a “Grasp Admin” who “has entry to the whole lot.”
The corporate known as the allegations and insinuations as “incorrect and should not supported by information,” noting that individuals who work on these tasks “wouldn’t have visibility into the total image.”
