TikTok defends its data regulation in letter to US senators, amid Chinese influence concerns
TikTok has admitted that employees breached US user data, but still defends its process.
TikTok has written to US Senators to reassure them about the steps it has taken to secure American users' data on the site, after concerns that Chinese TikTok engineers accessed US account data.
In the letter to nine senators, the Chinese-based social media giant admitted that some Chinese engineers had breached US users' information. The company also set out its steps for preventing such an incident from happening again.
TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew wrote in the 30th June letter: "Employees outside the US, including China-based employees, can have access to TikTok US user data subject to a series of robust cybersecurity controls and authorization approval protocols overseen by our US-based security team."
Foreign employees, the company says, will only be able to see American videos and comments, and other data it describes as non-sensitive.
Tennessee Senator Marsha Blackburn, who was the lead Senate author of an initial letter to TikTok about the data access allegations, said about the letter: "TikTok's response confirms our fears about the CCP's (Chinese Communist Party's) influence in the company were well founded.
"The Chinese-run company should have come clean from the start, but it attempted to shroud its work in secrecy. Americans need to know if they are on TikTok, Communist China has their information."
TikTok is owned by the Chinese company ByteDance, and fears exists in the US that it could compromise national security, if the Chinese authorities use it to get hold of US personal data. Tensions reached their climax in 2020 when President Donald Trump threatened to ban the site in the US.
The social media company said in the letter that it has never been asked to hand over data to the Chinese Government and never would.
They further added that all of its American data is held inside the US via Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, and that it is continually working with the software multinational to strengthen and secure its data.
Some US data is held additionally in backup storage facilities in Singapore, but TikTok told the Senators that it plans to delete this data to keep it solely in the US.
A 17 June Buzzfeed News report that leaked audio from 80 internal TikTok meetings in China revealed private American data was "repeatedly" viewed kicked off these fresh concerns about the company, prompting Senators to write to TikTok. TikTok denied the Buzzfeed allegations, calling them "false".