The agreement would come a year and a half after a U.S.
national security panel ordered ByteDance to divest TikTok.
The agreement would come a year and a half after a U.S.
national security panel ordered ByteDance to divest TikTok.
TikTok is nearing a deal for Oracle
Corp to store its U.S. users’ information without its
Chinese parent ByteDance having access to it, hoping to address
U.S. regulatory concerns over data integrity on the popular
short video app, people familiar with the matter said.
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The agreement would come a year and a half after a U.S.
national security panel ordered ByteDance to divest TikTok
because of fears that U.S. user data could be passed on to
China’s communist government.
That order was not enforced after Joe Biden succeeded Donald
Trump as U.S. president last year. The panel, however, known as
the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States
(CFIUS), has continued to harbour concerns over data security at
TikTok that ByteDance is now hoping to address, the sources
said.
It is not clear whether CFIUS will find that TikTok’s
partnership with Oracle will resolve the national security
issues it has identified, the sources said. A spokesperson for
the U.S. Department of the Treasury, which chairs CFIUS, did not
immediately respond to a request for comment.
Oracle had discussed acquiring a minority stake in TikTok in
2020, when ByteDance was under U.S. pressure to sell the app.
The cloud computing giant will store all of TikTok’s U.S. user
data on Oracle data servers under the new proposed partnership,
the sources said. Some of TikTok’s data is currently stored on
Alphabet Inc’s Google Cloud.
A dedicated U.S. data management team of hundreds of people
acting as a gatekeeper for U.S. user information and ringfencing
it from ByteDance will be set up under the agreement, the
sources said. The team will be comprised of engineers and cyber
security personnel. The companies are discussing a structure
under which that team would operate autonomously and not be
under TikTok’s control or supervision, the sources added.
TikTok is also exploring partnerships with other technology
companies over firewalls and cyber security measures, the
sources added.
A TikTok spokesperson declined to comment on the
partnership with Oracle. “We continue to invest in data security
as part of our overall work to keep our users and their
information safe,” the spokesperson wrote in an email.
Oracle did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
TikTok is one of the world’s most popular social media apps,
with more than 1 billion active users globally. The information
of U.S. users is currently stored in TikTok data centres in
Virginia, with a backup in Singapore.
The United States has been increasingly scrutinizing app
developers over the personal data they handle, especially if
some of it involves U.S. military or intelligence personnel.
Chinese gaming company Beijing Kunlun Tech Co Ltd was forced
to sell its popular gay dating app Grindr in 2020 after CFIUS
approached it with national security concerns.
ByteDance is one of China’s fastest-growing startups. It
owns the country’s leading news aggregator, Jinri Toutiao, as
well as TikTok’s Chinese counterpart Douyin.
The U.S. Commerce Department is considering new rules to
address potential security risks from TikTok and other
foreign-owned apps, and potentially even ban some of them. The
rules, if adopted, could force TikTok to submit to third-party
auditing, source code examination and monitoring of user data
logs.
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