Due to "repeated misrepresentations" about how social media app TikTok handles U.S. data, the chair of the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee and its top Republican have requested that the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) look into the Chinese parent company ByteDance.
Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va), the committee's chairman, and Sen. Marco Rubio, (R-Fla), its vice-chairman, cited the latest news reports that TikTok's parent company, China-based ByteDance, has been accessing data on U.S. users, in violation of several public representations.
The senators stated in a letter, "We request that your agency promptly launch [an] investigation based on TikTok's apparent dishonesty, and coordinate this work with any national security or counterintelligence investigation that may be launched by the U.S. Department of Justice."
According to leaked audio from more than 80 internal meetings about TikTok's efforts to lessen the flow of data from the U.S. to China through a deal with cloud provider Oracle, it references a shocking BuzzFeed News report that ByteDance employees based in China routinely accessed sensitive U.S. user data up until early 2022. Since then, TikTok has verified that ByteDance personnel in China have access to private user information.
Despite TikTok's recent assurances to the Senate Intelligence Committee that "all corporate governance decisions are wholly firewalled from their PRC-based parent, ByteDance," the letter also draws attention to BuzzFeed News reporting that employees who work with sensitive U.S. user data resume report to ByteDance leaders in Beijing.
TikTok told U.S. senators last week that it was working on a final agreement with the Biden Administration to "fully safeguard user data and U.S. national security interests."
In its letter to Congress on Thursday, TikTok claimed that the company had not lied to Congress about its data and security procedures.
TikTok announced last month that it had finished moving user data from U.S. users to Oracle servers, but that backup copies were still being stored in U.S. and Singapore data centers.
Since TikTok's data security has been a problem for years, the Trump administration demanded ByteDance to divest TikTok in 2020, yet this policy was never changed after the election.
A U.S. national security tribunal ordered parent company ByteDance to sell TikTok almost two years ago because of concern that U.S. user data would be given to China's communist government.
With more than 1 billion active users worldwide, TikTok is one of the most widely used social media platforms, and the U.S. is its biggest market.
