TikTok confirmed that China-based employees of its Chinese parent company, ByteDance, have access to U.S. user data under certain circumstances in a letter obtained by The New York Times in response to inquiries from nine Republican senators about the matter.
“Employees outside the U.S., including employees based in China, may have access to TikTok user data in the U.S. subject to a number of robust cybersecurity controls and authorization approval protocols overseen by our team. based in the United States, “wrote Shou Zi Chew, CEO of TikTok. letter.
“TikTok has an internal data classification system and an approval process that assigns access levels based on data classification and requires approvals to access data from U.S. users,” Chew added. “The level of approval required is based on the sensitivity of the data according to the classification system.”
Sal Rodriguez, who is currently a journalist for The Wall Street Journal, first reported to CNBC last year that ByteDance had access to U.S. data and was heavily involved in decision-making for TikTok.
A new light on privacy and security issues came to light after BuzzFeed News recently reported, based on the audio of internal meetings it obtained, that ByteDance employees had repeatedly accessed US user data. for at least a period of four months and that U.S. employees were not allowed to access it.
In a statement to BuzzFeed News for his report, a TikTok spokesman said, in part: “We know that we are among the most examined platforms from a security standpoint and we aim to remove any doubts about the security of data from US users “.
On the same day that BuzzFeed News published its story, TikTok announced that “100% of U.S. user traffic is going to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure,” rather than being stored in its own data centers. in the US and Singapore.
In the letter, Chew wrote that the BuzzFeed News report “contains allegations and insinuations that are incorrect and not supported by facts.”
After BuzzFeed News released its report, FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr asked Apple and Google to remove TikTok from their app stores.