According to sources, TikTok is close to reaching an agreement with Oracle Corp. to keep its U.S. customers' data without giving it to its Chinese parent ByteDance, in order to resolve U.S. regulatory concerns over data integrity on the popular short video app.
The agreement would come a year and a half after a U.S. national security council ordered ByteDance to withdraw from TikTok.
Concerns have been raised that user data from the U.S. may be passed on to China's communist government.
After Joe Biden was elected president of the United States last year, the order was not carried out.
The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), on the other hand, has continued to have worries about TikTok's data security, which ByteDance is now aiming to remedy.
Sources said it's unclear whether CFIUS will find that TikTok's partnership with Oracle will address the national security concerns it's raised.
CFIUS is chaired by the U.S. Treasury Department, which did not respond to a request for comment right away.
When ByteDance was under pressure from the U.S. to sell TikTok, Oracle considered buying a minority stake in the app in 2020.
TikTok's data is presently hosted on Google Cloud, which is owned by Alphabet Inc.
The arrangement will establish a dedicated U.S. data management team of hundreds of workers who will function as a gatekeeper for U.S. user data, ring fencing it from ByteDance.
Engineers and cyber security experts will form the core of the team.
The firms are exploring a framework in which that team would operate independently and not be supervised or controlled by TikTok.
TikTok is also looking at forming agreements with other tech firms to work on firewalls and cyber security.
The connection with Oracle was not mentioned by a TikTok spokesperson.
"As part of our overall work to keep our users and their information safe, we continue to invest in data security," the spokesperson added in an email.
With more than 1 billion active users worldwide, TikTok is one of the most popular social networking apps on the market.
Users' personal information is now held at TikTok data centers in Virginia, with a backup in Singapore.
After CFIUS approached them with national security concerns in 2020, Chinese game business Beijing Kunlun Tech was forced to sell its popular gay dating app, Grindr.
