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TikTok gave U.S. lawmakers extra particulars in a letter dated Thursday about the way it plans to maintain knowledge about its American customers separate from ByteDance, its Chinese language guardian firm, aiming to fight considerations that the video app poses a nationwide safety danger.
In a letter to 9 Republican senators, Shou Zi Chew, TikTok’s chief govt, defined how the corporate would function the app from servers managed by Oracle, the U.S. cloud computing big. TikTok can be run from the American firm’s machines and audited by a 3rd social gathering, Mr. Chew stated. He additionally reiterated a plan to retailer American customers’ private data with Oracle, relatively than on TikTok’s servers.
“We all know we’re among the many most scrutinized platforms from a safety standpoint, and we goal to take away any doubt in regards to the safety of U.S. person knowledge,” Mr. Chew wrote within the letter, which was obtained by The New York Instances.
TikTok, which is extremely fashionable for its brief and viral meme-making movies, has been working to rebut considerations that it’s a nationwide safety danger. For years, critics of the app have frightened that the Chinese language authorities would request knowledge belonging to People immediately from ByteDance and that TikTok was topic to the affect of the Chinese language Communist Social gathering.
In 2020, President Donald J. Trump cited these considerations and demanded that ByteDance promote TikTok if the app was to stay in American app shops. His administration later introduced a deal by which ByteDance would promote at the very least a part of TikTok to Oracle, although the transaction by no means got here to fruition.
TikTok stays beneath the scrutiny of the Committee on Overseas Funding in the US, a bunch of presidency companies that vets overseas purchases of American firms.
Final month, BuzzFeed Information reported that ByteDance workers had gained entry to the app’s knowledge as not too long ago as this yr and that workers have been struggling to cordon off data collected by the app.
After the report, 9 Republican senators — together with Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee and John Thune of South Dakota — wrote to TikTok with questions on its practices. Final month, a member of the Federal Communications Fee additionally stated Apple and Google ought to take away TikTok from their app shops.
In Mr. Chew’s letter responding to the Republican senators, he stated ByteDance workers in China might get entry to TikTok knowledge solely when “topic to a collection of strong cybersecurity controls and authorization approval protocols overseen by our U.S.-based safety workforce.”
He additionally reiterated the corporate’s hope that it could quickly be capable of delete U.S. knowledge from its servers and retailer the data totally with Oracle. (Some particulars of its plans have been first reported by BuzzFeed.)
“Now we have not spoken publicly about these plans out of respect for the confidentiality of the engagement with the U.S. authorities, however circumstances now require that we share a few of that data publicly to clear up the errors and misconceptions within the article and a few ongoing considerations associated to different points of our enterprise,” he stated.
However Mr. Chew additionally made it clear that ByteDance workers in China would nonetheless be engaged on TikTok. These workers can nonetheless develop the algorithm that feeds personalised video suggestions to TikTok’s customers, he stated, although Oracle would “be certain that coaching of the TikTok algorithm” occurs solely on its servers.
And sure data — like public movies and feedback — would stay obtainable to ByteDance workers beneath situations accepted by the U.S. authorities, he wrote, to “guarantee world interoperability so our U.S. customers, creators, manufacturers and retailers are afforded the identical wealthy and secure TikTok expertise as world customers.”
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Supply- nytimes