TikTok confirms that user data from the US can be accessed in China

TikTok confirmed that China-based employees of its Chinese parent company ByteDance have access to US user data under certain circumstances in a letter obtained by The New York Times in response to inquiries from nine Republican senators on the matter.

“Non-U.S. employees, including employees based in China, may access TikTok user data in the U.S. subject to a series of robust cybersecurity controls and authorization approval protocols overseen by our U.S.-based security team,” TikTok CEO Shaw Zi Chu wrote in a letter.

“TikTok has an internal data classification system and approval process that sets access levels based on data classification and requires approvals to access user data in the US,” Chu added. “The level of approval required is based on the sensitivity of the data according to the classification system.”

Sal Rodriguez, now a reporter for The Wall Street Journal, first reported to CNBC last year that ByteDance had access to US data and was closely involved in TikTok’s decision-making.

New light has been shed on privacy and security concerns after BuzzFeed News recently reported, based on audio recordings of internal meetings it obtained, that ByteDance employees repeatedly accessed user data in the US over at least four months and that US-based employees were not authorized to access it.

In a statement to BuzzFeed News about its report, a TikTok spokesperson said in part, “We know we are among the most security-conscious platforms out there, and we strive to remove any doubt about the security of user data in the US.”

On the same day that BuzzFeed News published its story, TikTok announced that “100% of US user traffic is directed to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure” instead of being stored in its own data centers in the US and Singapore.

In the letter, Chu wrote that the BuzzFeed News report “contains allegations and insinuations that are false and not supported by facts.”

After BuzzFeed News published its report, FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr called on Apple and Google to remove TikTok from their app stores.