TikTok moves US user data to Oracle servers

Tuesday, 21 June 2022 01:46 - - {{hitsCtrl.values.hits}}

NEW YORK/WASHINGTON (Reuters) - TikTok said it has completed migrating information on its U.S. users to servers at Oracle Corp (ORCL.N), in a move that could address U.S. regulatory concerns over data integrity on the popular short video app.

The move, which was first reported by Reuters, comes nearly two years after a U.S. national security panel ordered parent company ByteDance to divest TikTok because of fears that U.S. user data could be passed on to China’s communist government.

TikTok is one of the world’s most popular social media apps, with more than 1 billion active users globally, and counts the U.S. as its largest market.

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.

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

The panel, known as the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), however, has continued to harbor concerns over data security at TikTok that ByteDance is now hoping to address, Reuters previously reported. The White House had no immediate comment while the U.S. Treasury declined to 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 now stores all of TikTok’s U.S. user data on Oracle data servers in the United States under the new partnership, TikTok said.

TikTok had previously been storing its U.S. user data at its own data centers in Virginia, with a backup in Singapore. It will now delete private data on U.S. users from its own data centers and rely fully on Oracle’s U.S. servers, it said.

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

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