Legislators Want An Explanation From TikTok's CEO For 'Inaccurate' Claims Made About The Company's Handling Of User Data In The United States

After recent news stories raised issues about how the Chinese-owned social media platform manages some sensitive information, two U.S. senators are now requesting TikTok to explain what they called “misleading or inaccurate” statements about how it retains and offers access to data from U.S. users.

U.S. Senators Richard Blumenthal and Marsha Blackburn wrote to TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew on Tuesday, referencing a Forbes article that claimed the company had stored the Social Security numbers and tax IDs of U.S. content creators who are paid by the company on servers in China.

The senators cited a May 31 New York Times report that said TikTok employees routinely shared user information, including the driver’s license information of some American users, on an internal messaging app called Lark that was accessible to employees from TikTok’s Beijing-based parent company, ByteDance.

We are analyzing the letter,” Alex Haurek, a representative for TikTok, said. Our testimony and answers to Congress remain accurate, and for that we are grateful.

TikTok has confirmed that its servers housing information from American users are located in both Virginia and Singapore, where the company is headquartered. The question of who can obtain this information and from where remains open.

CEO Chew testified before Congress in March and indicated that worldwide engineering teams had “as-required” access to the data. He said that after the completion of Project Texas, the company’s plan to steal U.S. user data from China, some ByteDance personnel would no longer have access to any U.S. user data at all.

Western countries have been suspicious of the popular social media app due to its Chinese ownership and have banned it from government-issued devices. When the Chinese owners of the company didn’t agree to sell their shares earlier this year, the Biden administration threatened to prohibit the site countrywide.

TikTok has been promoting Project Texas, in which user data from the United States will be stored on servers owned and maintained by the software giant Oracle, in an effort to appease the fears of politicians in the United States. The company announced last year that it had begun routing all traffic from U.S. users to those servers, albeit it maintained its own servers for data backup.

Chew stated in March the company would begin purging all historical U.S. user data stored on servers other than Oracle.

The senators wrote that subsequent media stories seem to contradict testimony from another TikTok employee about the location of user data for American users.

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Indeed, many of them did.

Somebody said something like, “B**h, I’m gay and I can have kids if I want.”

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Legislators Want An Explanation From TikTok’s CEO For ‘Inaccurate’ Claims Made About The Company’s Handling Of User Data In The United States

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