TikTok acknowledges Chinese access to US data and defends itself against accusations

behind the entertainment With viral short videos, TikTok launches a battle Loud out of sight legislators we United State. This week, in the context of strong speculation about the possible Transfer From sensitive data from Americans to the government Chinesethe CEO of the company, Xu Qiu, answered a series of questions sent by a group of Senators Republicans. The focus of politicians like Jerry Moran, Ted Cruz and Marsha Blackburn is scratches With “national security”.

In response to the senators, on Thursday, 30, Xu Qiu said that US user data was never provided by the company or requested by the Communist Party of China (PPC). But he also wrote that Non-US employees, even those based in China, are subject to “a suite of cybersecurity controls and authorization approval protocols overseen by a US-based security team” and have hinted that US user data can be accessed by the company in Its headquarter is in China.

In 2020, the then president Donald Trump Even the Chinese demanded to sell the social network Byte Dance So you can continue to work in the country. agreement to buy part From TikTok by California-based tech company Oracle, which has not been developed.

However, according to the Chinese CEO, it is now 100% of user traffic United States of America They are transferred to the cloud storage system provided by Oracle. “We still use our data centers in the US and Singapore for backup, but as we continue our work to hand over data management to the US, we look forward to deleting US user data from our systems.” engineers Byte Dance It is still possible to collaborate to develop algorithms on TikTok, for example.

At the discretion of the lawyer Tatiana Coutinho, a privacy and data protection specialist at Lima Seigelson Advogados, is not conspiracy to believe that China could have interests in user data in the United States and/or worldwide. “There are two types of data. In addition to the data declared by the users themselves, there are recursive inference data. Depending on the clicks, Web beacons (traffic monitoring) and cookies, it is possible to track the profile of users and infer precious preferences,” he says.

According to the specialist, the monitoring stage is very high China They may have an interest in monitored social networks to increase this level of monitoring internally or externally. “Depending on the data extracted from the networks, it is also possible to make further inferences from another database and come very close to identifying and stratifying groups for commercial advantages, for example,” he assesses.

More pressure

Just this week, FCC member Brendan Carr argued that An apple And the The Google TikTok should be removed from their app stores. The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, which scrutinizes foreign purchases by US companies, continues to put pressure on TikTok executives.

He also announced in his communications issued on Thursday, 30th of this month, that official employees are residing in China or in any part of the world that has access to a set of public and non-confidential data authorized by TikTok users and necessary to ensure “global interoperability” in the social network, i.e. integrated and continuous operation to improve the performance of the network.