The controversy erupted after BuzzFeed published an article in the middle of last month that confirmed that ByteDance employees in China had repeatedly seen non-public data from app users in the US.
Tik Tok confirmed this information and tried to allay the concerns of members of the US Congress, but it failed to allay their concerns.
Democrat Mark Warner, chairman of the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee, and his Republican vice president, Marco Rubio, sent a letter to the U.S. Consumer Protection Agency (FTC) requesting an investigation into “apparent fraud.”
“Employees in China have full access to user information, including their date of birth, phone numbers and other verification data,” the two men wrote, citing a Chinese law that requires of Chinese companies to share their data if Beijing requests.
In response to a question from Agence France-Presse, a spokesperson for the app commented, “As we have repeatedly said, TikTok does not share US user data with the Chinese government and will not do so even requested. ”
In mid-June, Tik Tok announced that data of American users of the platform is now stored on Oracle group servers in the United States.
On Friday, the social network sent a message to members of the U.S. Senate, assuring them that data access takes place under a “difficult” protocol for authorization and security control of transactions.
Group representatives confirmed that ByteDance engineers can only build platform algorithms in Oracle’s information environment, without capturing any data.
However, Tik Tok’s assurances did not deter U.S. officials from warning against network activity. U.S. Communications Agency Commissioner Brendan Carr, who was appointed to his position by former U.S. President Donald Trump, has asked Apple and Google groups to withdraw the app from their app stores.
“TikTok isn’t just a fun video-sharing app,” Carr wrote on the two networks, it’s “a wolf in sheep’s clothing” and “a sophisticated tracking tool.”
During his time in the White House, Donald Trump worried about the platform’s data security and tried to force ByteDance to sell its subsidiary to Oracle Group.
The former US president also issued ban orders, but his successor Joe Biden repealed them after he became president of the United States.
However, the current US president has asked his administration to examine the risks already posed by foreign ownership of websites and applications on the Internet.
Source: Al Akhbar
