Toggle US user data to Oracle servers, in the USA. It was a long-standing promise made by TikTok in the Trump era. The Chinese-owned social network ByteDance has announcement yesterday, Monday June 20, 2022, have completed data migration.
US data is now on Oracle servers
The objective of this migration is clear: to guarantee the separation of American information from that of the Chinese parent company. After numerous accusations about the possibility that TikTok be used as a surveillance tool by the Chinese government, the company has made every effort to erase these suspicions. As the social network explains, the data of its American users has until now been stored in data centers located in the United States and Singapore.
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A TikTok spokesperson said a few weeks ago that “Our data center in Virginia includes physical security controls, such as barrier-protected entry points and intrusion detection technologies. We also believe it is important to maintain backup data storage sites to guard against catastrophic scenarios where user data could be lost”. This justified the existence of the data center in Singapore.
Starting today, under an agreement with Oracle, U.S. user information will only stay in the United States. The social network explains that “For more than a year, we have been working with Oracle to better protect our systems and the security of US user data. We have now reached an important milestone in this work: 100% of US user traffic is routed to the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure”.
Doubt about the integrity of TikTok remains
An update announced while BuzzFeed News just published a report that suggests that TikTok potentially still shares US user data with the Chinese authorities. According BuzzFeed : “Audio leaks from more than 80 internal TikTok meetings show that China-based ByteDance employees managed to repeatedly access non-public data about US TikTok users.” This is exactly the type of behavior that prompted former President Donald Trump to threaten to ban the app in the United States.
According to the report, China-based ByteDance engineers repeatedly accessed US user data between September 2021 and January 2022. This potentially contradicts the sworn testimony of TikTok’s US public policy official Michael Beckerman, who said appeared before a congressional hearing in October of last year. At the time he said that TikTok did not share information with the Chinese government.
Perhaps not directly with the Chinese government, but always with its Chinese parent company, which is itself bound by Chinese cybersecurity laws, which would require him to share this information with Beijing upon request. There is no evidence that this happened, but the new findings suggest the US TikTok team was insincere. Perhaps fully merging TikTok user data to US-based data storage will help ease those concerns.