Notes

TikTok Transfers U.S. TikTok Moves to The U.S.

By Echo Wang, David Shepardson



NEW YORK/WASHINGTON, 17 June (Reuters) -- TikTok announced that it has completed the transfer of information about its U.S. users to servers at Oracle Corp, in a move that could help address U.S. regulatory concerns over security of data on the popular short-form video app.



The news was first reported by Reuters nearly two years ago. It came after an U.S. security panel ordered TikTok's parent company ByteDance divest TikTok because of fears that U.S. data could be given to China's communist regime.



TikTok is among the world's most popular social media apps, with more than 1 billion active users across the globe and counting the U.S. as its largest market.



The United States has been increasingly investigating app developers for the personal data they handle, especially if some of it involves U.S. military or intelligence personnel.



The order to sell off TikTok was not enforced until Joe Biden succeeded Donald Trump as U.S. president last year.



However the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) has not stopped harboring concerns over TikTok's security of data that ByteDance is now trying to address, Reuters previously reported.



The White House did not immediately respond to requests for comment and the U.S. Treasury declined comment.



In March, Reuters reported that TikTok was nearing a deal for Oracle Corp to store its U.S. users' information.



Oracle was discussing the acquisition of an interest in TikTok's minority in 2020. This was the time ByteDance was under U.S. attack to sell the app. The cloud computing giant now has TikTok's U.S. user data on Oracle data servers in the United States under the new partnership, TikTok said.



Oracle declined to comment.



DATA SECURITY TEAMS



TikTok had previously stored its U.S. user data at its own data centers in Virginia and also backups in Singapore. It will now delete private information about U.S. users from its own data centers and will rely completely on Oracle's U.S. servers, it declared.



The Virginia and Singapore centers are still being used to backup the data, the company said.



TikTok has also set up a dedicated U.S. data security team known as "USDS" as the gatekeeper for U.S. user information and ringfencing it from ByteDance, a company spokesperson said to Reuters.



Andrew Bonillo, an executive of TikTok's global security division, led the USDS according to a spokesperson.



The company is currently discussing plans for a structure where the team would operate autonomously and not be under TikTok's supervision or oversight, a source told Reuters.



Another senior executive at USDS is Will Farrell, who was previously under TikTok's Chief Security Officer Roland Cloutier. The USDS team includes content moderation personnel, engineers, and members of the product and user operations.



ByteDance is one the fastest-growing startups in China. It owns the country's leading news aggregator, Jinri Toutiao, as along with TikTok's Chinese counterpart, Douyin.
that's how to be me


In June 2021, Biden withdrew Trump-era executive orders that sought to prohibit new downloads of WeChat and TikTok. The Commerce Department is writing new guidelines on the security of app data that could potentially lead to restrictions on how apps based in other countries utilize U.S. user data, or even ban apps deemed as a security risk.



Gina Raimondo, Commerce Secretary has stated that the administration is "very serious" about protecting Americans with their personal data. However, she also criticized Trump's approach.



"Doing an executive order that's meaningless on TikTok is not the method to go about it," she said. (Reporting by Echo Wang, David Shepardson, Washington, editing by Deepababington.


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