Monitoring Desk
Video-sharing app TikTok has stopped hiring consultants who would aid it in implementing a prospective security agreement with the United States as opposition to such a deal among US authorities mounts.
TikTok Assurance to Washington
The short-video app, owned by the technology company of China ByteDance, has spent the last three years trying to reassure Washington that the personal information of American individuals cannot be accessible by Beijing or any other body under its control and that its content cannot be altered.
In 2021, President Donald Trump issued an executive order that banned TikTok in the country. President Joe Biden overturned that decision in 2022, but negotiations between his administration and the social media platform have continued.
The programme involves hiring a third-party monitor, a source-code inspector, and three auditors, one responsible for cyber security and another to ensure that US user data on current TikTok servers will be erased following migration to Oracle Corp (ORCL.N).
TikTok would pay for these posts, but they would still report to US government officials.
The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, the security panel that has been investigating ByteDance’s ownership of the well-known app, received requests for proposals from TikTok for some of these positions in early December.
After admitting in December that some of its workers had improperly accessed the TikTok user data of two journalists to track down the source of information leaks to the media, TikTok decided to halt all recruiting.
This alarmed some U.S. officials who favored a security agreement with TikTok and gave China hawks in the U.S. government more leverage to demand that Biden order ByteDance divest the app.
It remains unclear when the US government will decide TikTok’s future.
BLOW TO TRUST
To please the American government, TikTok has already disclosed several initiatives. These include a deal with Oracle to store user data and a U.S. security division (USDS) in charge of data security and content control. It has invested $1.5 billion in hiring and restructuring to create that entity.
Shou Zi Chew, the CEO of TikTok, will meet Margrethe Vestager, the head of the European Union’s antitrust office, in Brussels the next week to talk about problems like the protection of personal data by online platforms and the implementation of the E.U.’s Digital Services Act.
