NEW YORK: TikTok said it has finished migrating information on its US users to Oracle Corp servers, a move that could address US regulatory concerns about the popular short video app’s data integrity.
The move comes nearly two years after a U.S. national security panel ordered parent company ByteDance to divest TikTok due to concerns 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 over 1 billion active users worldwide, and the United States is its largest market. The US has become increasingly concerned about app developers’ handling of personal data, particularly when it involves US military or intelligence personnel. The order to sell TikTok was not carried out after Joe Biden succeeded Donald Trump as President of the United States last year.
The panel, known as the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), has, however, continued to harbour concerns about TikTok’s data security, which ByteDance is now hoping to address, according to Reuters. The White House did not respond immediately, and the US Treasury declined to comment.
Reuters reported in March that TikTok was close to a deal with Oracle Corp. to store the data of its US users. When ByteDance was under US pressure to sell the app, Oracle discussed acquiring a minority stake in TikTok in 2020. According to TikTok, the cloud computing giant now stores all of TikTok’s U.S. user data on Oracle data servers in the United States as part of the new partnership.
