Monday 4 July 2022 10:09 PM TikTok confirms its China-based employees CAN access US user data trends now
TikTok has confirmed its China-based employees can access US user data, according to a letter written by CEO Shou Zi Chew.
The letter is addressed to nine Republican Senators who raised concerns about privacy data following a recent BuzzFeed News investigation that found such issues.
Chew's note also confirmed TikTok's 'Project Texas' program, named in the BuzzFeed News report, saying it aims to safeguard US user data by running TikTok from servers in Texas owned by Oracle.
However, the CEO wrote that the 'allegations and insinuations' from the BuzzFeed News article are 'incorrect and are not supported by facts.'
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TikTok has confirmed its China-based employees can access US user data, according to a letter written by CEO Shou Zi Chew. The letter is addressed to nine Republican Senators who raised concerns about data privacy following a recent BuzzFeed News investigation
The letter from TikTok does not clearly state US user data has been or can be accessed by employees outside of the country, but it answers 11 questions that the senators requested answers to by July 18.
'[W]e are confident that when you review our responses, you will see that TikTok has not, at any point, misled Congress about our data and security controls and practices,' Chew wrote.
The BuzzFeed News report, published on June 17, claims to have listened to leaked audio of more than 80 internal TikTok meetings.
The recordings, which were captured from September 2021 through January 2022, include 14 statements from nine TikTok employees who met to discuss 'Project Texas' – the classified effort to stop engineers in China from retrieving the data.
