According to Bloomberg , TikTok has now officially admitted that some of its staff members who are situated in China have access to US customer data.
Due to its data policies, TikTok is once again in the news. A few weeks ago, some US senators charged TikTok with exporting data from US users and granting access to Chinese staff members. First, the parent company ByteDance disputed the reports, claiming that no data was being sent abroad. However, the business has now formally acknowledged a backdoor to the user data from the US.
Senators from the US also sought to know whether any user data from the US was shared with the Chinese government in addition to the amount of access that these workers had. The FTC requested that Google and Apple remove TikTok from their app stores in response to the raised concerns.
Advertisement TIKTOK REVEALED THAT IT ALLOWED ITS EMPLOYEES BASED IN CHINA TO ACCESS US USER DATA. TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew issued a letter to concerned senators on June 30 to explain the company’s data-sharing policies. He acknowledged in that letter that some personnel working in China had access to specific data on US users of TikTok. There are also comments and videos from the general public.
Additionally, Chew stated that the corporation is subject to strict cybersecurity rules and does not share the data with the Chinese government.
In order to improve the data security around that information, the Chinese video-sharing app claimed to be working with the US authorities. The corporation also places a high premium on protecting the information that the Committee on Foreign Investment in the US (CFIUS) has designated as protected.
Advertisement Republican Senator Marsha Blackburn said, “TikTok’s statement proves our concerns about the CCP’s involvement in the corporation were well-founded. The Chinese-owned corporation should have been upfront from the beginning, but instead it tried to conceal its activities. Americans need to be aware that Communist China has their information if they use TikTok.
To answer the security worries of US officials, TikTok has introduced a new program named Project Texas. As part of this endeavor, TikTok teams up with Oracle to keep the data of US users domestically. This indicates that the algorithm and the app will be deployed using domestic data centers.
