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| A US national security council ordered ByteDance to sell the short video app, and now TikTok is transferring data over two years later. |
In a step that could allay US regulatory worries about data integrity on the well-known short-video app, TikTok announced that it has finished transferring information on its US customers to servers at Oracle.
The decision, which was first made public by Reuters, was made almost two years after a US national security tribunal ordered parent company ByteDance to sell its stake in TikTok over concerns that US user data would be given to China's communist government.
With more than 1 billion active users worldwide and the US as its main market, TikTok is one of the most widely used social media applications.
The handling of personal data by app developers has come under increased scrutiny in the US, particularly if it includes US military or intelligence employees.
After Joe Biden succeeded Donald Trump as US president last year, the directive to sell over TikTok was not carried out.
However, the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) panel has persisted in harbouring worries about TikTok's data security, which ByteDance is now attempting to remedy.
The US Treasury declined to comment, and the White House did not immediately respond.
Reuters reported in March that TikTok was close to a deal with Oracle to keep the data of its US customers.
When ByteDance was being pressured by the US to sell the app in 2020, Oracle had contemplated taking a minority stake in TikTok. According to the new arrangement, the global leader in cloud computing now maintains all of TikTok's US user data on Oracle data servers in the US.
Oracle opted not to respond.
Data Security Team
Previously, TikTok stored the data of its US users in its own data centres in Virginia, with a backup in Singapore. It announced that it will now remove all private information about US users from its own data centres and completely rely on Oracle's US servers.
According to the firm, data backups are still being done in the Singapore and Virginia data centres.
According to a company spokesperson who spoke to Reuters, TikTok has also established a specialised US data security team known as "USDS" to act as a gatekeeper for US user information and ringfence it from ByteDance.
The USDS presently answers to TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew and is led by Andrew Bonillo, a former leader at the company's global security division, a representative said.
According to a source who spoke to Reuters, the business is debating a structure that would allow the team to work independently and without TikTok's oversight.
Will Farrell, another top employee at USDS, previously worked at TikTok under Roland Cloutier, chief security officer. Engineers, members of the user and product operations team, and content moderation staff make up the USDS team.
One of the startups with the quickest growth in China is ByteDance. It also owns the Chinese version of TikTok, Douyin, as well as the top news aggregator in the nation, Jinri Toutiao.
WeChat and TikTok new download ban executive orders from the Trump administration were rescinded by Biden in June 2021. New regulations on app data security being written by the Commerce Department may limit or even outright prohibit the use of US user data by apps headquartered outside the country if they are assessed to pose a major security risk.
Gina Raimondo, secretary of commerce, stated that the administration is "extremely concerned about protecting Americans' data" but criticised Trump's strategy in a previous statement.
It's not the right way to handle it, she argued, to issue some useless executive order on TikTok.
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