In the U.S., Project Texas is a $1.5 billion plan to build a wall between the U.S. The company has unveiled two separate plans to safeguard data. There's little hope to completely stop European data from going to China | Alex Plavevski/EPA ByteDance is owned 20 percent by its founders and Chinese investors, 60 percent by global investors, and 20 percent by employees. Strictly speaking, ByteDance is incorporated in the Cayman Islands, which TikTok argues would shield it from legal obligations to assist Chinese agencies. TikTok says it has never given data to the Chinese government and would decline if asked to do so.

American social media companies like Twitter have had their own problems preserving users’ data from the prying eyes of foreign governments, they note. Skeptics of the security argument say that the Chinese government could simply buy troves of user data from little-regulated brokers. An internal email sent to staff of the European Data Protection Supervisor, seen by POLITICO, said the move aimed “to reduce the exposure of the Commission from cyberattacks because this application is collecting so much data on mobile devices that could be used to stage an attack on the Commission.”Īnd the Irish Data Protection Commission, TikTok's lead privacy regulator in the EU, is set to decide in the next few months if the company unlawfully transferred European users’ data to China. targeted journalists at Western media outlets using the app (and were later fired).ĮU institutions banned their staff from having TikTok on their work phones last month. In December 2022, some ByteDance employees in China and the U.S. TikTok’s user data could also be accessed by the company’s hundreds of Chinese engineers and operations staff, any one of whom could be working for the state, Western officials say. Western security officials have warned that ByteDance could be subject to China’s national security legislation, particularly the 2017 National Security Law that requires Chinese companies to “support, assist and cooperate” with national intelligence efforts. This law is a blank check for Chinese spy agencies, they say.

Perhaps the most pressing concern is around the Chinese government’s potential access to troves of data from TikTok’s millions of users.

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