Following heightened worries that U.S. customers’ information 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 information safety.”
The admission that some China-based workers can entry info 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 inside safety protocols.
The contents of the letter, first reported by The New York Instances, shares extra particulars about TikTok’s plans to handle information safety issues by means of a multi-pronged initiative codenamed “Venture Texas.”
“Staff outdoors the U.S., together with China-based workers, can have entry to TikTok U.S. consumer information topic to a collection of sturdy cybersecurity controls and authorization approval protocols overseen by our U.S.-based safety workforce,” TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew wrote within the memo.
This consists of what it calls a slim set of non-sensitive TikTok U.S. consumer information, corresponding to public movies and feedback, to fulfill interoperability necessities, whereas emphasizing that this entry can be “very restricted” in scope and pursuant to protocols developed in collaboration with the U.S. authorities.
TikTok, a preferred 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 information belonging to U.S. customers straight from its dad or mum agency.
However within the letter, the corporate aimed to reassure that it has by no means been requested to offer information to the Chinese language authorities and that it could not accede to such authorities inquiries.
TikTok additional reiterated that 100% of U.S. consumer information is routed to Oracle cloud infrastructure positioned within the U.S., and that it is working with the enterprise software program agency on extra superior information safety controls that it hopes to finalize “within the close to future.”
On high of that, the ByteDance-owned firm mentioned it is planning to delete U.S. information from its personal backup servers in Singapore and the U.S. and totally 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 workers, 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 will not be supported by details,” noting that individuals who work on these tasks “wouldn’t have visibility into the total image.”
