Employees of the video app TikTok who are based in China and tied to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) can access the personal data of the app's users in the United States, the company admitted.
The company’s admission came in a letter to nine U.S. senators who accused TikTok and its parent company, ByteDance Ltd., of monitoring American citizens, Bloomberg reported.
“TikTok’s response confirms our fears about the CCP’s influence in the company were well founded,” Tennessee Republican Sen. Marsha Blackburn told Bloomberg on Friday. “The Chinese-run company should have come clean from the start, but it attempted to shroud its work in secrecy. Americans need to know if they are on TikTok, Communist China has their information.”
Team Biden revoked an executive order from President Donald Trump which banned Chinese apps TikTok and WeChat in the U.S.
TikTok is used by about 80 million Americans every month.
In their letter, 27 Republican senators cited a BuzzFeed News report last month which said TikTok’s engineers had accessed U.S. consumer data. The letter said such access allowed TikTok and ByteDance to “surveil Americans.”
TikTok stated that it intends on putting more of the app’s hardware infrastructure stateside in order to strengthen security around Americans’ data.
It’s a joint effort with the U.S. government called “Project Texas,” Bloomberg reported, and involves storing information in domestic data centers and shifting its platform to Oracle Corp.’s cloud.
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