TikTok said it was moving all of the data produced by its American users through servers controlled by Oracle, a Silicon Valley company, in a bid to convince the U.S. government that it will not expose the personal information of Americans to the Chinese government. But TikTok added that it would still store its own backups of that information, potentially complicating those efforts.
The app, which is owned by Chinese company ByteDance, said in a blog post that it expected to eventually delete American users’ “private data from our own data centers and fully pivot to Oracle cloud servers located” in the United States. It did not say when that would take place.
The video app made its announcement before BuzzFeed News published an article detailing how TikTok employees felt it was difficult to successfully wall off its data from China. According to recordings the news outlet said it had obtained, TikTok employees said Chinese engineers had access to U.S. data as recently as this year.
“As we’ve publicly stated, we’ve brought in world-class internal and external security experts to help us strengthen our data security efforts,” TikTok said in a statement. The company added that it had created a unit in May, led from the United States, to “provide a greater level of focus and governance” on Americans’ data security.
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