US senators call for close look at TikTok

Jul 6, 2022

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SAN FRANCISCO: Leaders of the US Senate Intelligence Committee on Tuesday referred to as for an investigation into whether or not Chinese language officers are having access to information about US customers of video-snippet sharing sensation TikTok.
In a letter to Federal Commerce Fee (FTC) chairwoman Lina Khan, the senators urged her to scrutinize how effectively TikTok safeguards non-public information.
“We write in response to public experiences that people within the Individuals’s Republic of China have been accessing information on US customers, in contravention of a number of public representations,” the letter stated.
TikTok has constantly defended itself in opposition to such accusations, saying it offers no information about US customers to the Chinese language authorities regardless of its mum or dad firm, ByteDance, being primarily based in China.
“We have talked brazenly about our work to restrict entry to person information throughout areas, and in our letter to senators final week we had been clear about our progress in limiting entry even additional by our work with Oracle,” a TikTok spokesperson stated in response to an AFP inquiry.
“As we have stated repeatedly, TikTok has by no means shared US person information with the Chinese language authorities, nor would we if requested.”
In response to earlier inquiries from US authorities, TikTok had indicated in mid-June that each one of its information on US-based customers had been now saved on US-based servers operated by US firm Oracle.
TikTok final week responded by letter to questions from 9 Republican senators about its information storage and entry insurance policies.
In that letter, TikTok confirmed claims made in a BuzzFeed article that workers primarily based in China had entry to US customers’ information, however solely inside “strong cybersecurity controls and authorization approval protocols” overseen by the corporate’s “US-based safety crew.”
TikTok officers additionally stated that whereas ByteDance engineers may work on the platform’s algorithms, the brand new protocol ensures that they’ll solely accomplish that in Oracle’s computing atmosphere, with out extracting information from it.
The favored social media platform is presently being evaluated by the Committee on Overseas Funding in america, an inter-agency authorities evaluate board that assesses dangers of overseas investments on US nationwide safety.
Throughout his White Home tenure, former president Donald Trump was involved concerning the safety of the platform’s information and tried to pressure ByteDance to promote its subsidiary to Oracle.
He additionally issued govt orders to outright ban the service in america, however these by no means got here into pressure and had been later revoked by his successor, Joe Biden.
President Biden has nonetheless tasked his administration with measuring the potential dangers related to overseas possession of social media web sites and apps.



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