ByteDance, the parent company of popular social media app TikTok, has admitted that certain employees in China have access to US user data. The company made this known in a letter to nine US senators, the news agency said Bloomberg who saw the letter.
Employees in China may see certain information from US users. For example, it concerns public videos and reactions, CEO Shou Zi Chew says in the letter. But that happens under “robust cybersecurity protocols” and under no circumstances is data passed on to the Chinese government, according to ByteDance.
ByteDance is working to keep US users’ data all the way in the US, in order to comply with US law. For this purpose, American user data is stored in the US on servers of the American company Oracle. The platform will also be moved to Oracle’s servers, so that the app and associated algorithms for American users will be deployed from those servers.
