TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew told US lawmakers that employees in China at parent company ByteDance may still have access to some US data from the app.
This will not be the case once the risk mitigation plan, called Project Texas, is completed, he said.
US officials fear that user data accessed by ByteDance will eventually reach the Chinese government, based on a Chinese law that allows the government to obtain inside information from companies located there for alleged national security purposes.
TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew told US lawmakers that employees in China at parent company ByteDance may still have access to some US data from the app, but added that this will not be the case once the risk mitigation plan, called Project Texas, is completed. .
The exchange is important because it goes to the heart of US officials ' concerns about TikTok's ownership and also shows how difficult and time-consuming it is to untangle the app from the Chinese parent company.
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Lawmakers and intelligence officials fear that US user data could end up in the hands of the Chinese government via ByteDance. That's because Chinese law allows the government to obtain inside information from companies located there for alleged national security purposes, CNBC reported .
During Qiu's long-awaited testimony before the House Energy and Commerce Committee, Rep. Bob Latta, R-Ohio, asked Qiu whether any Bytedance employee in China currently has access to U.S. data.
”After the completion of the Texas project, the answer is no,”Chiu said. "Today, there are still some data that we need to delete.”
Later in the hearing, in an exchange with Representative Tim Walberg, Republican of Michigan, Chew denied sharing US data with the Chinese Communist Party, saying that TikTok is a ”private company” that, like many others, relies on a ” global workforce ”.
Responding to a request for comment last week about a remark in a Wall Street Journal article that TikTok represented a Chinese espionage operation, a TikTok spokesperson said in a statement that there was ”no validity” to this claim.
”Since October 2022, all new user data in the United States has been stored exclusively in Oracle, " the spokesperson added at the time
A cloud environment, with protected data out of the reach of any foreign government. This data is managed exclusively by US Data Security - a TikTok subsidiary made up of Americans, led and headquartered in America - whose sole focus is to protect the national security interests of the United States by securing US user data and preventing external manipulation of our systems. ”
TikTok said on Thursday that Project Texas is already working but there are many steps to reach its completion. This includes deleting data from TikTok servers in Singapore and Virginia, a process that began last week. The data on these servers is of the kind that could theoretically be accessed by Bytedance employees in China at the moment.
Once this data is deleted, according to TikTok, these employees will no longer be able to access US user data from the app.
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