TikTok And Oracle Come Together To Keep U.S. User’s Data In The U.S.

TikTok is a popular social media service that allows millions of users to showcase their talent online. While the platform is more popular among the youth, older people have also hopped on it, making content for all age groups.

Like any social media site, there are serious concerns about the application’s security. The allegation that multiple countries, including China, use the app to steal the data of millions of American users isn’t new.

To address these growing concerns, TikTok announced that it has completely transferred American users’ information to Oracle’s US-based servers.

TikTok’s information migration is complete

This move has come two years after a U.S. national security panel ordered TikTok’s parent company ByteDance to ‘divest’ it out of fear that users’ data could be passed on to the Chinese government.

Before this move, TikTok stored data at its own data centers in Virginia, with a backup in Singapore. Now, it will remove US users’ data from its centers and shift completely to Oracle’s servers, but the previous two centers will be used as a backup.

According to news outlets, it has deployed a data security team called ‘USDS’ to protect the information of U.S. users, ringfencing it from ByteDance. The company is also planning to implement a system where the team can function separately and not be under TikTok’s supervision.

Ban on TikTok withdrawn

In June 2021, the current President of the US, Joe Biden, withdrew Donald Trump’s order to ban new downloads of TikTok and WeChat. U.S. Secretary of Commerce, Gina Raimondo, stated that they are focused on protecting Americans’ data but also criticized Trump’s approach.

The Commerce Department is coming up with new regulations that could lead to potential restrictions on how foreign-based applications use US user data or even ban apps that are serious security threats.

TikTok employees accessing U.S. users’ data?

Many news sources have reported that TikTok employees in China have ‘repeatedly’ accessed data of U.S.-based users in the last few months. It was reported that TikTok employees mentioned having to ask their colleagues in China to ingress US user data, as they could not do so themselves.

TikTok’s trust and safety department member also claimed that a China-based engineer had free access to everything.