Earlier this week, an FCC commissioner in the United States called on Apple and Google to remove TikTok from their respective app stores. Now, TikTok’s parent company ByteDance has responded to the situation and confirmed that some China-based employees have access to data of TikTok users in the United States.
TikTok promises changes to avoid US ban.
The commissioner called TikTok a “sophisticated surveillance tool,” saying the app serves as a data-gathering tool for Chinese authorities.
“It is clear that TikTok poses an unacceptable national security risk due to its extensive data collection, combined with Beijing’s apparently unchecked access to this sensitive data,” FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr wrote in the letter addressed to Apple and Google.
In its response today, ByteDance confirmed that some employees do need “access to US TikTok user data.” However, it goes on to clarify that these employees are “subject to a series of robust cybersecurity controls and authorization approval protocols overseen by our US-based security team.”
As Reuters notes, however, ByteDance has also committed to making changes that will “fully protect user data and US national security interests.” The company said it is in the process of finalizing “new advanced data security controls” in partnership with Oracle.
ByteDance migrated user data from the US to Oracle servers last month, but the company is still suing data centers in the US and Singapore over backups. Once that agreement is finalized, TikTok says it will “delete the protected data of US users from our own systems and move entirely to Oracle cloud servers located in the US.”
“We look forward to contacting members of Congress to discuss the substance of our letter,” TikTok wrote in today’s response.
In a statement to Bloomberg, Republican Sen. Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee said TikTok’s response “confirms our fears about the CCP’s influence.”
“The Chinese-run company should have been clean from the start but tried to shroud its operations in secrecy. Americans should know if they are on TikTok, Communist China has their information.”
Apple and Google have yet to respond to requests to pull TikTok from the App Store and Play Store.
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