Senators Seek Update on US Security Review of TikTok

A group of six Republican senators asked Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen on June 24th about the progress of the Biden administration’s ongoing national security review of social media platform TikTok.

 Last week TikTok said it had completed migrating the information of its U.S. users to Oracle Corp (ORCL.N) servers to address U.S. concerns about data integrity.

 Senators Tom Cotton, Ben Sasse, Mike Braun, Marco Rubio, Todd Young and Roger Wicker asked Yellen many questions saying the administration “has seemingly done nothing to enforce” the August 2020 divestiture order.” They pointed out that “the results of the security review, likewise, have not been publicly released after one year.”

 The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), which reviews deals by foreign acquirers for potential national security risks, ordered Chinese parent company ByteDance to divest TikTok in 2020 over concerns that U.S. user data could be passed on to the Communist China government.

 Senators want to know if TikTok will be managed locally in the United States and if the government has the ability to regularly access and inspect the source code of the algorithm. They also asked if TikTok will store American data and adopt privacy policies with adequate protections. 

 TikTok did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

 Former President Donald Trump has lost a series of court battles trying to prevent new users from downloading WeChat and TikTok and ban other transactions that would have effectively blocked the apps from being used in the US.

 After the Biden administration came to power in June 2021, Biden withdrew a series of Trump executive orders that sought to ban new downloads of the apps and ordered the Commerce Department to review the security concerns posed by those apps.

 The senators said the proposal to let TikTok store information on its U.S. users without ByteDance access “would do little to address the core security concerns.”