TikTok says it is storing US knowledge domestically amid renewed safety considerations

TikTok says it’s a “vital milestone” towards its guarantees to beef up the safety of its US customers’ knowledge. In a brand new replace, the corporate says it has “modified the default storage location of US consumer knowledge.”

As the corporate notes, it had already saved a lot of its consumer knowledge in the US, at a Virginia-based knowledge middle. However beneath a brand new partnership with Oracle, the corporate has migrated US consumer visitors to a brand new Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.

“Immediately, 100% of US consumer visitors is being routed to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure,” the corporate wrote in a weblog put up. “We nonetheless use our US and Singapore knowledge facilities for backup, however as we proceed our work we count on to delete US customers’ personal knowledge from our personal knowledge facilities and absolutely pivot to Oracle cloud servers positioned within the US.” Moreover, TikTok says it has made “operational modifications,” together with a brand new division “with US-based management, to solely handle US consumer knowledge for TikTok.”

The strikes are a part of a by TikTok to deal with US officers’ over how consumer knowledge is dealt with by TikTok and father or mother firm ByteDance. The corporate has been working to separate US consumer knowledge in order that it’s not accessible to China-based ByteDance as US lawmakers eye to curb the affect of Chinese language tech firms.

Nonetheless, the brand new safeguards are unlikely to completely sway critics of TikTok, who say the corporate nonetheless hasn’t addressed all potential considerations about how US consumer knowledge is dealt with. The truth is, simply after TikTok revealed its weblog put up, BuzzFeed Information a report that raises new questions on how the corporate handles the information of its US customers.

The report, which was primarily based on hours of inner conferences leaked to BuzzFeed, says that “China-based staff of ByteDance have repeatedly accessed nonpublic knowledge about US TikTok customers.” The recordings, which cowl a time interval between final September and January 2022, supply new particulars concerning the advanced effort to chop off Bytedance’s entry to US consumer knowledge.

The report quotes an outdoor marketing consultant employed by TikTok to supervise among the work saying that they believed there was “backdoor to entry consumer knowledge in nearly all” of the corporate’s inner instruments. It additionally quotes statements from a number of staff who say “that engineers in China had entry to US knowledge between September 2021 and January 2022, on the very least.”

It additionally notes that whereas knowledge deemed “delicate,” like customers’ beginning dates and cellphone numbers, might be saved within the Oracle servers, different details about US-based customers may stay accessible to ByteDance. “ByteDance’s China-based staff may proceed to have entry to insights about what American TikTok customers are concerned with, from cat movies to political views,” the report says.

That will not appear as severe as extra private info like birthdays and cellphone numbers, nevertheless it’s precisely the type of particulars that some lawmakers within the US have raised considerations about. US officers have questioned whether or not the app’s “For You” algorithm might be used as a method of .

“We all know we’re among the many most scrutinized platforms from a safety standpoint, and we purpose to take away any doubt concerning the safety of US consumer knowledge,” TikTok mentioned in a press release to BuzzFeed Information.