WASHINGTON - TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew will tell lawmakers that the Chinese-owned short video app with more than 150 million American users has never shared US user data with the Chinese government amid growing US national security concerns.
TikTok has never shared or received a request to share US user data with the Chinese government. Nor would TikTok honor such a request, but Chew will testify on Thursday, according to written testimony posted on Tuesday by the House of Representatives Energy and Commerce Committee.
He stated that TikTok's parent company ByteDance is not owned or controlled by any government or state entity. Let me state unambiguously: ByteDance is not an agent of China or any other country, Chew will say to the committee.
TikTok's critics fear that its US user data could be passed on to China's government by the app prompted growing calls to ban the app by US lawmakers. The Biden administration demanded that its Chinese owners divest their stake in the app, or it could face a US ban, according to TikTok last week.
Bans are only appropriate when there is no alternative. We have an alternative, according to Chew's testimony.
TikTok spent more than 1.5 billion dollars on data security efforts under the name of Project Texas, according to TikTok. When the process is complete, all US protected US data will be under the protection of the US law and under the control of the US-led security team. There is no way for the Chinese government to access it or compel access to it under this structure. The company said that it had started this month to delete US user protected data in data centers in Virginia and Singapore after it started routing new US data to the Oracle Cloud last year. Chew's testimony said it expects this process to be completed later this year.
According to Chew's testimony, 60 per cent of ByteDance is owned by global institutional investors including Blackrock, General Atlantic, and Sequoia, about 20 per cent owned by the company's founders and about 20 per cent of the company's employees, including thousands of Americans. The average user today is well past college age, according to Chew's testimony.
While users in the United States represent 10 per cent of the global community, their voice accounts for 25 per cent of the total views around the world, according to Chew's testimony.
Chew says current versions of the app don't collect precise or approximate GPS information from US users.