In September, TikTok’s chief operating officer, Vanessa Pappas, testified in a Senate hearing that the app did not share data with the Chinese government. The company has tried to distance the app from ByteDance, saying TikTok has its own corporate structure, with offices in New York, Los Angeles, Singapore and Washington.
In the hopes of allaying national security fears, ByteDance has moved the data of U.S. users to a cloud storage system operated by Oracle, the Silicon Valley software company.
TikTok has been locked in negotiations with the Biden administration on that security plan to move all U.S. data and erect walls around the data to prevent access by the Chinese government. The negotiations, which began during the Trump administration, have stalled in recent weeks, prompting a cascade of state and federal actions to restrict the use of TikTok. Senator Mark Warner, Democrat of Virginia and chairman of the Intelligence Committee, called on the administration to conclude its talks with TikTok on national security fixes to the app.
“This new development reinforces serious concerns that the social media platform has permitted TikTok engineers and executives in the People’s Republic of China to repeatedly access private data of U.S. users despite repeated claims to lawmakers and users that this data was protected,” Mr. Warner said. “It’s time to come forward with that solution or Congress could soon be forced to step in.”
Congress is set to vote as early as this week on a proposal that would ban TikTok from any federal government-issued devices. Intelligence officials, including the F.B.I. director, Christopher Wrayhave warned that Chinese officials can siphon sensitive data about U.S. citizens to use for surveillance and to spread propaganda.