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WASHINGTON, March 23 (AP) – TikTok’s chief executive is set to make a high-profile appearance before a U.S. congressional committee on Thursday, where he will face grilling over data security and user safety as he discusses why he is so popular. The video makes its case – sharing apps shouldn’t be banned.
Shou Zizhou’s testimony comes at a critical time for the company, which has acquired 150 million U.S. users but is facing mounting pressure from U.S. officials.
TikTok and its parent company, ByteDance, have become embroiled in a broader geopolitical fight between Beijing and Washington over trade and technology.
Chew, a 40-year-old Singaporean, made a rare public appearance to refute the barrage of allegations TikTok has been facing.
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The company sent dozens of popular TikTokers to Capitol Hill on Wednesday to lobby lawmakers to protect the platform. It has also been posting ads across Washington touting its commitment to protecting user data and privacy and creating a safe platform for its young users.
Zhou planned to tell the U.S. House of Representatives Energy and Commerce Committee that TikTok puts the safety of its young users first and denied allegations that the app posed a national security risk, according to prepared remarks he released ahead of the hearing.
TikTok has been dogged by claims that its Chinese ownership means user data could end up in the hands of the Chinese government, or could be used to promote rhetoric favorable to the country’s Communist Party leader.
“We understand the popularity of TikTok, and we understand that,” White House press secretary Karin Jean-Pierre said at a news conference Wednesday afternoon. “But it’s the president’s job to make sure again that the national security of Americans is also protected.”
For its part, TikTok has tried to distance itself from its Chinese roots, saying its parent company, ByteDance, is 60% owned by global institutional investors such as The Carlyle Group. ByteDance was founded in Beijing in 2012 by Chinese entrepreneurs.
“Let me state clearly: ByteDance is not an agent of China or any other country,” Zhou said.
A U.S. ban on an app would be unprecedented, and it’s unclear how the government will enforce it.
Officials could try to force Apple and Google to remove TikTok from their app stores, preventing new users from downloading it and existing users from updating it, ultimately rendering it useless, experts said.
The U.S. could also block access to TikTok’s infrastructure and data, confiscate its domain names or force Internet service providers such as Comcast and Verizon to filter TikTok data traffic, said Ahmed Ghappour, an expert in criminal law and computer security who teaches at Boston University School of Law.
But he said tech-savvy users could still get around the restrictions by using a virtual private network to appear as if they were in another country that wasn’t blocked.
To avoid a ban, TikTok has been trying to sell officials a $1.5 billion plan called Project Texas that would route all U.S. user data to domestic servers owned and maintained by software giant Oracle.
Under the program, access to U.S. data is managed by U.S. employees through a separate entity called TikTok US Data Security, which has 1,500 employees, operates independently of ByteDance and is monitored by outside observers.
As of October, all new US user data is stored domestically. Chew said the company began deleting all historical U.S. user data from non-Oracle servers this month, a process expected to be completed later this year.
Some Western countries, including Denmark, Canada and New Zealand, and the European Union have banned TikTok from devices issued to government employees due to cybersecurity concerns.
In the U.S., the federal government, Congress, the armed forces and more than half of the states have banned the app from official devices.
David Kennedy, a former government intelligence official who ran cybersecurity firm TrustedSec, agreed to limit TikTok’s access to government-issued cellphones because they could contain sensitive military information or other classified material. However, a nationwide ban may be too extreme, he said. He also wondered where it would lead.
“We have Tesla in China, we have Microsoft in China, we have Apple in China. Are they going to start banning us now?” Kennedy said. “It could escalate very quickly.” (Associated Press)
(This is an unedited and auto-generated story from a Syndicated News feed, the content body may not have been modified or edited by LatestLY staff)
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