Since 2022, TikTok has undertaken a massive and expensive effort to isolate its US operations (and US user data) from its Chinese parent company, ByteDance. TikTok described the corporate restructuring, which it called Project Texas, as “an unprecedented initiative dedicated to making all Americans on TikTok feel safe, confident that their data is secure and the platform is free from outside influences.” . Several former employees, however, said Fortune that Project Texas is instead “largely cosmetic” and that they and their colleagues continued to work closely with Beijing-based ByteDance executives after the plan was implemented.
An important aspect of Project Texas, so named because Oracle, TikTok's “technology partner,” is based in Austin, was the transfer of all US user data to Oracle's cloud infrastructure. (By Texas monthlynone of Oracle's cloud data servers are actually in the state). Under the terms of the Texas Project, Americans' data is not supposed to leave the US, nor can ByteDance employees in China access it.
In practice, the data was less defined than TikTok led users and politicians to believe. Fortune reports. Evan Turner, who worked at TikTok as a data scientist between April and September 2022, described a “stealth chain of command” in which he was reassigned, on paper, to a manager in Seattle but continued to report to executives in China. About every two weeks, Turner emailed spreadsheets containing data on hundreds of thousands of American users to ByteDance workers in Beijing, he said. Fortune. The spreadsheets included user names, email addresses, IP addresses, and geographic and demographic information and were used to determine how to develop TikTok's algorithm to encourage users to be more active on the app, he said.
Another former employee, Katie Puris, alleges that TikTok was never completely independent of ByteDance. Puris, TikTok's former head of business marketing, sued the company for discrimination in February, alleging that she was fired because her superiors in Beijing did not consider her modest enough. The Puris lawsuit, referred to in the Fortune report, claims ByteDance executives began exerting more control over TikTok's daily operations in 2020 and held bimonthly meetings led by ByteDance's president. “Despite its attempts to appear independent, TikTok's day-to-day management and business decisions came directly from ByteDance's senior management in China,” the lawsuit states.
These claims could add more fuel to Congress' ongoing effort to get ByteDance to sell TikTok. In March, the House voted overwhelmingly to ban TikTok unless it is separated from its parent company; The Senate has yet to approve the bill.
TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew, for his part, has repeatedly emphasized the company's independence from ByteDance. “The bottom line is that this US data is stored on US soil by a US company overseen by US personnel,” Chew said in a 2023 congressional appearance.
In interviews with Fortune, other former employees described concerns about TikTok's connections to ByteDance as exaggerated and rooted in xenophobia. (During Chew's most recent congressional hearing, for example, some members of Congress asked whether he was affiliated with the Chinese Communist Party. Chew is a Singaporean citizen.) A former manager said Project Texas and its European counterpart, Project Clover, made a “significant difference” by isolating data from Americans and Europeans. “I can't speak to leadership decisions, but in terms of technology, a lot has been done to outline them,” the former employee said. Jacob Wallach, who worked on TikTok's global business solutions team from 2020 to 2022, said TikTok's data collection practices are no less concerning than those of Meta, Google or amazon.
Still, this is not the first report to suggest that TikTok's descriptions of the Texas Project exaggerate the degree to which TikTok's U.S. operations are separate from those in China. The Texas Project informally began rolling back some of its data sharing rules in spring 2023. tech/tiktok-pledged-to-protect-u-s-data-1-5-billion-later-its-still-struggling-cbccf203″>He Wall Street Journal reported in January. According to the DiaryAccording to the report, managers have instructed US-based workers to share data with colleagues in other parts of the company, including ByteDance employees. And in 2022, BuzzFeed News reported that ByteDance employees in China had repeatedly accessed data from American users, although the report noted that most of these cases were actually in service of the Texas Project's goal of limiting the ability of ByteDance's Chinese employees to access the data. American data.
TikTok did not respond to The edgeRequest for comments. Instead, TikTok spokesperson Michael Hughes directed The edge to twitter.com/TikTokPolicy/status/1779970114252624018″>a post answering to FortuneThe report.
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