“Everything is visible in China,” a member of TikTok’s Trust and Security Division said at a meeting in September 2021, according to the latest BuzzFeed News report. This week, nine Republican senators, including Marsha Blackburn, wrote a letter to TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew asking for answers to nearly a dozen questions about user privacy. In addition, senators expressed concern about statements made by TikTok Vice President and Public Policy Officer Michael Beckermann at an October 2021 congressional hearing led by Blackburn, in which he said the company had not provided any information to the government. Beckerman told the panel at the time that TikTok user data in the US was stored in the US and backed up in Singapore. Beckerman, the letter says, “did not give honest or sincere answers.” When asked to comment Wednesday, TikTok spokeswoman Brooke Oberwetter told BuzzFeed News that the company planned to respond to the senators’ letter. Oberwetter added that the company’s response to senators would address Carr’s concerns. TikTok has quickly become one of the most popular applications used by young Americans in recent years. TikTok was the most downloaded app in both the US and the world in the first quarter of 2022, surpassing Instagram, according to a report released in April by app analytics firm Sensor Tower. However, the company’s privacy and data sharing practices have also been brought under control by policy makers and regulators thanks to its links with China. ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok, is headquartered in Beijing. In the past, former TikTok employees in the US have said that Chinese-based employees are actively involved in decision-making in the company. In 2019, the United States Commission on Foreign Investment launched an investigation into the national security implications of TikTok data collection practices. In 2020, then-President Donald Trump threatened to ban the application amid concerns that the Chinese Communist Party could use it to monitor millions of Americans. The United States is not the only country concerned about the Chinese government’s access to TikTok data. In 2020, India, a country with more than 700 million Internet users and one of TikTok’s largest markets at the time, banned the application citing Indian users’ privacy.
