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The top attorney for TikTok and its Chinese parent company ByteDance said Friday the Biden administration hasn’t given any feedback to the company since TikTok’s CEO testified in Congress last week.
During a panel conversation at a conference in San Francisco that featured top government officials, tech executives and journalists, TikTok and ByteDance’s general counsel Erich Andersen also said TikTok has given user data to the U.S. government in response to requests related to law enforcement.
The comments come as the social media behemoth is under intense scrutiny over concerns it could hand user data to the Chinese government or push pro-Beijing propaganda and misinformation on its behalf.
Leaders at the FBI, CIA and officials at other government agencies have warned that ByteDance could be forced to give user data — such as browsing history, IP addresses and biometric identifiers — to Beijing under a 2017 law that compels companies to cooperate with the government for matters involving China’s national security. Another Chinese law, implemented in 2014, has similar mandates.
To assuage concerns from U.S. officials, TikTok has been emphasizing a $1.5 billion proposal, called Project Texas, to store all U.S. user data on servers owned and maintained by the software giant Oracle. Under the plan, access to U.S. data would be managed by U.S. employees through a separate entity called TikTok U.S. Data Security, which is run independently of ByteDance and monitored by outside observers.
Some lawmakers have said that’s not enough.
