TikTok: Our servers are separate from the Chinese company ByteDance

In the new court documents, TikTok’s chief security officer said that the US Department of Commerce had misunderstood how the app stores and secured user data, as the company renewed its proposal for a preliminary injunction against the impending ban on the Trump administration, says Roland Klotter, TikTok’s chief global security officer. In a new court file, ahead of an upcoming hearing in the US District Court, the Department of Commerce made several incorrect assertions about the company’s data security policies and practices.

According to the verge, Clotter says that the September note issued by the Ministry of Commerce outlining specific concerns about the application is inaccurate in declaring that TikTok is not separate from the Chinese version of the application called Douyin, or from the parent company’s ByteDance systems, and that the jobs Including internal storage and management, as well as algorithms are still partly shared across other ByteDance products. ”

He says the software suite that consists of TikTok is “completely separate” from the Douyin software suite, which means that each application’s source code and user data are kept separately.

The government also misrepresented how TikTok stores US user data, Klotter added. The trade memo states that TikTok rents servers from Alibaba Cloud in Singapore and China Unicom Americas (CUA) in the US, which poses significant risks.

Clotter explained that CUA provides space in the data center, building and electricity, for TikTok, but does not provide servers, saying, “ByteDance owns and manages all the servers stored in the CUA facility, and the servers are secured within the facility.”

When TikTok leases server space from other companies, Klotter emphasized, it doesn’t mean the company has access to TikTok’s private information.

He continued, that the user data is encrypted in the storage and divided, which means that it is divided into several parts across several servers, and in addition, the old source code with Chinese IP addresses has been discarded from the old versions of the TikTok application.